Topic: The PlayStation Fan Thread

@NEStalgia Even my current 8GB of RAM works fine for my rig. You certainly wouldn't need more than 16GB for gaming applications, or especially general use purposes.

An equivalent SSD to what's in the Series X might be more costly, yeah. But it's also unnecessary. I've compared the speeds on SATA vs NVME drives, and, for gaming purposes, it's not worth the extra expense.

I feel like you're comparing the new consoles to enthusiast PC builds, which... yeah, enthusiast builds will cost more. But you can always snag cheaper components that will lower the total build price by quite a bit.

Of course, pound for pound, you'll be getting more bang for your buck with consoles when it comes to pure hardware. Which is why consoles are perfect if you just want to buy a few new games each year and not have to mess with anything.

As a platform, though, with access to a massive number of games, that's upgradeable, that's "future-proof," etc.? PC can't be beat.

Hardware-wise, I find PS5's super fast SSD to be a more interesting investment than what's in the Series X, even if it won't end up mattering for the majority of games. Sony, like Nintendo, will probably develop a number of games to flex its hardware gimmicks.

The winner in each gaming generation, no matter the scenario will always be PC.

Especially now that Microsoft is leveraging it as part of its Xbox ecosystem in addition to PlayStation beginning to release first party games on PC, in addition to PS third party exclusives like Nioh and Danganronpa showing up as well, it really is the ultimate all rounder platform and the cost for the most decent cards for most AAA titles is going down each day, especially for the 10 series GPUs, not to mention how cost-effective AMD's CPUs and GPUs are for the performance you get out of them.

@Ralizah Well, I mean to me, the only point of PC is "enthusiast" PC. Unless you're going "budget PC" and targeting a stock commodity desktop and throwing in a low-mid gfx card. But I never did "budget PC" because as you say, pound for pound, you're getting more hardware for the money with consoles, or less money for similar hardware with consoles. If I set up a PC and I drop below 30fps with maxed sliders, the PC isn't good enough. Call it OCD. Or CDO. Which is more alphabetically correct. With consoles I plug it in and get the game as intended for the machine. One and done.

I agree about the X SSD not being worth the extra expense, but the point of this exercise was still to compare a build similar to the consoles, not to compare the best value build versus consoles.

So far I'm liking what I'm seeing with XB asd a middle ground. It's basically a PC, locked to one store. Some of the "PC enthusiast" things like mods are missing, but even on PC I never really delved into that. I find the PS5 SSD "interesting" as a concept model. I just don't find it practical or interesting. I do think Sony will experiment with the gimmick over time, and it might create some memorable moments. But I don't think it will do anything nearly as radical as the R&D cost would require to justify. I think it was a misstep letting Cerny go all the way down whatever rabbit hole he thought was intellectually curious. R&C uses it well, but I don't think that would have been impossible without it, either. Sony, like Nintendo is for the unique games and, yes, the gimmicks, while XB is a cheap PC with tons of convenience (and better for anything third party.) Though I wonder how far into the gimmicks even Sony will go since they're targeting PC now, too. DualSense.....ugh. So much gimmick. I love the form factor and see it as a happy upgrade from DS4, but.....why the gimmicks?

@BruceCM I can't imagine not upgrading a PC for 5 years. Maybe it's evened out (but with the new nvme stuff and all I can't imagine it.) Back then in 8 months it felt dated. In 2 years it felt obsolete, and in 3 years it can barely run anything decently above 20fps with any decent settings. And upgrading just the video card always meant the whole machine because the graphics bus or memory bus was changing every year and a half or so. Even if it's better now, I can't imagine it being that much better.

Well, I'll have to see how mine goes but I think you covered why you'd be spending a lot more if you got one, @NEStalgia....

@BruceCM LOL, yeah. It's a rabbit hole I can't foresee going back down. Heck, now that Streaming is becoming a thing, subscription seems like a cheap way to always have "best specs" without even bothering with hardware for games that don't need twitch action.

@NEStalgia Well, I did say a system as or more powerful than Series X, not one that's identical to it. If anything, that's impossible, given the custom components in the home consoles. A slightly slower SSD is going to make next to no difference. The performance difference between a cheap SATA SSD and what's in in the SeX will be less than the difference between what's in the PS5 vs the SeX.

Honestly, I only accept 60fps and above on PC games. Anything lower looks terrible on PC, and mouse aiming just isn't smooth enough. I rarely max out sliders, and I only mess with settings until I get to the point where my frames aren't dropping under 60. After that... shrugs medium/ultra settings in a lot of modern games is barely distinguishable outside of screenshots anyway. With that said, I think it's usually best to get a reasonably powerful GPU if only to future proof your system. It's why my rig has run circles around the consoles all gen, and, even now when it's pretty weak, it can still run games well.

But if your mindset is: "I'm going to only buy the most expensive components possible, because anything else triggers my OCD," then I can see why you think PC gaming is inordinately expensive.

I was thinking about a Series S, but the RAM limitations might be an issue going forward, and I'm still stuck playing something like Cyberpunk 2077 at the Xbox One S performance targets until it gets patched. And even then, devs can choose to limit the framerate and optimize for whatever they think looks best on the system. PC allows me to put the sliders wherever I like if I want a smoother gaming experience. And that sort of user control will just never be a thing on consoles. Also, both next gen consoles have bulky Xbox controllers (except Sony at least is still putting the analog sticks where they belong), and I can continue to play next-gen games on my PC with the DS4.

The biggest thing, though, is that it would involve transitioning to a new ecosystem. Which is probably the biggest thing keeping people from jumping between platforms, I think: once you buy in on Xbox, Playstation, Steam, etc. there's a sunk cost there, and a competing platform has to offer something really compelling in order to override that default preference.

Yeah, that's becoming a more realistic option for more people, @NEStalgia.... As long as you have reliable good internet access, of course
I think you'll find it's Xbox who puts the analogue sticks in the right places, @Ralizah

@BruceCM Mmmmno. The analog sticks are easy to reach regardless. D-Pads protrude less, so you want them to have priority placement on the controller for ease of access.

Xbox placement is still better than whatever the hell is going on with the Wii U Pro Controller, though.

Fired up Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise for the first time. I may be a little bias since FotNS '86 OVA was the first anime I ever watched. So I have heaps of nostalgia for the series. But...what a game. 'chef's kiss'

If you like the Yakuza series and/or Hakuto no Ken, give Lost Paradise a try.

What I wouldn't give for a Switch port.

Dunno about Wii U Pro, @Ralizah .... I'm very happy with my XB1 style controller for PC, though! & the actual XB1 one for the console

@BruceCM

Placing the right analog stick above the face buttons makes no sense and looks terrible.

Anyway, I'll say this: Xbox controllers have only improved over time. The OG Xbox "Duke" controller is pretty much a bloated tumor with buttons. Possibly the most hideous controller design ever. Xbox 360's controller was functional, but it has a horrendous D-Pad, and, in general, felt terrible in the hands. Xbox One's controller... look, I don't like the button placement, but the controller itself feels very nice.

Yeah, that one looks bad, @Ralizah .... I never had an OG XBox or 360 to really talk about those controllers but their current one is great to use! I haven't had cause to try a Dual-Shock, tbf, so I can't say what that's actually like in that sense, just it doesn't look so good to me & it'd take some adjusting for the analogue sticks, particularly

I'm really hoping CD Projekt are thoughtful enough to put an uncapped framerate option into the current gen version of the game, so that the PS5 and SeriesS/X versions get a 60fps from day 1. They might not though. They might just want us to wait for the proper patch.

I think it says everything about PS5 when the conversation in the PS thread is primarily an argument about if PC or XSeX is the best value all around gaming platform.

@Ralizah I agree BOTH companies went absurd with the nvme drives. I've been saying that and keep getting shouted down about how its soooo much faster, blah blah blah. There was no reason for that, especially if what they're upgrading from is a 5200RPM 2.5" laptop spinner. No idea why they did that. But it is what it is, and it's possible the way they've set up the I/O there's a tangible difference (the memory speed is quite a bit faster than PC ram that's commonly used etc.)

I'm torn on fps. Fundamentally I agree 60fps minimum should be the standard....and yet I tend to end up turning up the settings/resolution mode, whatever, because it always looks wrong without it and I end up thinking of what it should like. More OCD I guess. Oblivion on PC years ago, I was not going to play without all my trees. Many other games I pushed resolution....I can't stand aliasing....at all....and I can't stand the smearing of most AA either...so it had to be resolution. I played a lot of games with fps that tanked 15-20fps. That's not to say I don't love smooth 60fps motion, notice it, or prefer it, but when given a choice I always end up chosing res, even if I don't want to on a fundamental level. That's for both PC and consoles. I wish they'd just find a happy medium and stick with it. I thought this gen meant 4k/60 most of the time....so it looks like I'll be mostly playing the backlog that is, and waiting for the next next gen for the new games.

When PC games give me tons of sliders, I spend the first week of play doing A-B comparisons of all the settings.....takes 2 weeks to start playing.

You're right about transitioning, though. My Steam library consists of exactly 3 games. 1 of them is on XBox. The other 2 are so woefully dated I wouldn't play them. I got of out PC right when Steam and digital started gaining traction partially because they did. When I built my last PC, 100% of my games were still DVD-ROM and I had zero intention of ever going digital, or ability to go digital, on dialup at the time, which was a problem on PC as Steam was rising. So I'd be giving up, a PS4 library of exclusives + PS+PC J-games and a 300+ strong XBox library just to force myself into a $1500 box "because it's cheaper." When I chose 2.5 years ago to go XBox or PC and was asking around here, I ended up chosing XBox as "my PC" instead of getting back into PC. looking at how the next 7 years appear to be shaping up, I don't regret that. Otherwise, this year, I'd probably be buying a new $500 video card, which would probably require a new mobo that accepts faster ram, and buying faster RAM, and probably having to upgrade the SSD to keep up with the new consoles.... I don't know how fast 2018's $500 video cards obsoleted next to this year's $500 video cards, but just to keep up with where I expect to be compared to the incoming consoles, that's still coming out to $500 every other year in video cards alone just to keep up in my head. Maybe for 7 years that one would be adequate now depending on mid gen bumps. But that still would have been another "2 years, time for another upgrade" cycle. I would still be behind in money up to this point.

@Ralizah Also, @BruceCM is objectively correct, factually speaking. The control sticks are in the wrong place as we all know on the DualSense.

I honestly like the DualShock/Sense analog stick placement. The D-pad being on top of both analogue sticks is better for stuff like menu navigation or fighting game inputs for me personally.

Well, it's quite awhile since PC games stopped being on discs, @NEStalgia .... Nobody is really arguing with you, though?

@NEStalgia One thing I've noticed, and I alluded to this in my last post, is that the visual 'range' of PC games has shrunk considerably in the last decade or so. Playing on low vs ultra settings used to make a lot of difference in the games I played, but since high/ultra settings primarily just apply or strengthen more subtle visual effects now, you're often looking at a massive performance gain with a minimum of sacrifice to visual fidelity. If I have to compare settings side-by-side and squint to be able to see the difference, then it's not worth a loss in smoothness.

RTX on vs off can be a LOT more noticeable, though, so I do expect the presence or absence of raytracing effects to be the new thing that demands powerful video cards. I mentioned the RTX 2060, which is technically capable of driving those effects, but it's... it's a better non-raytracing card, to be frank.

As to fps, while 60+ just feels massively better on any platform, it's a lot more important on PC thanks to frametime issues, display issues, and issues, as I said, with mouse response smoothness. 30fps console games are typically optimized to look a lot smoother at that framerate than they would on a PC, and a controller is never going to be as dependent on high frames as mouse movement.

Yeah, in terms of library, I'm exactly the opposite. I own... maybe two or three Xbox games? Nearly all of my 360 games (about 20 of them) are physical. And I have a few physical OGBox games as well. On Steam, I have... looks 200+ games. And that's not counting my games from GOG and other storefronts as well. Online bundles and amazing deals make it easy to develop a truly intimidating library on PC.

This new generation of cards is looking like a pretty massive jump in both performance and value. The RTX 3070, for example, is doing for $500 what the previous gen 2080 Ti was doing for anywhere between $1400 - $1900. The $700 3080 massively laps both. And the new $1499 3090 is basically a mass-market version of a Titan-class card.

That's all way too much power for me, so I'm hoping for a nice $349.99 price point for a 3060. Nvidia will want a cheaper card for 1080p plebs. We don't know what recommended specs will be like on most next-gen games, obviously, but the next-gen exclusive The Medium is only demanding a 1660 Super at 1080p, which will be vastly weaker than even the weakest of Nvidia's new line of cards, so I feel like I'll probably be OK if I just wait a bit to upgrade my GPU.

Only 200, @Ralizah ....? I've got about 1500! Do I win anything?