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My PC is about 5 or 6 years old. It can just about handle FEAR with the odd stutter.
Crysis is a BIG no no for me.

Then go and play Crysis on your… hang on, you can’t. The hardware isn’t there. Crysis, for better or worse, was designed as a technical statement as much as a gaming one, and this was made abundantly clear in the marketing hype. It exists only because the PC exists – and, dare we say it, expensive video cards.

There’s a game like this every generation, one that stubbornly refuses to work on current hardware – Quake 2 was a prime example. They’re a development ego trip, a technological bitch slap to the rest of the industry but picking it out as representative of the state of the platform is silly.

Most games work perfectly well on one or two year old rigs. If a PC game’s framerate is too low, you can turn down some settings, or you have the OPTION to upgrade, whether that’s with a £100 graphics card or £400 one. If a game judders on your PS3 you’re buggered, and they do – Mass Effect was a faintly horrible experience on consoles because the ambition of the developer was limited by the hardware available. Slowdown and crashes are amusingly picked out as the rod across PC gaming’s back, but they’re increasingly creeping into consoles as hardware progresses. Hell, my SNES used to slowdown.

To suggest PC gaming is killing itself is just daft. While boxed sales may be struggling, sales through Steam aren’t counted in official figures – and they’re through the roof. Simple fact is, like the music industry, most games developers haven’t worked out how to sell games in the digital age and piracy is rife as a result. That’ll change as more switch on to digital distribution and global release dates – it has, I suspect, very little to do with hardware.

That’s funny, because it looks like one very reasonable side of an interesting debate to me.

Obviously I’m slightly dramatising for effect – we can always get Crysis running, but I’m talking about getting it running at 30fps or more. My point is that the whole selling point of Crysis is its incredible graphics, with even Microsoft holding it up as the main reason for buying a DX10 card back when they first arrived.

Yet 95% (most likely higher) of people can’t play the game at Very High and a decent desktop resolution – the settings all of the gorgeous promotional material used to lure us in. You’re left running it in High or, more likely, Medium, which looks good but certainly not ground-breaking.

If I buy a console game I know that I’m getting a) the same graphical quality as everyone else; and b) the graphical quality at which the makers intended the game to be played. And I don’t have to buy a new top-end graphics card every year to keep up.

What a pointless article. Yet another trip to the PC vs Console debate with all the same old arguments trolled out – and they are as unconvincing now as always. The Sony advertising is rather tasteless too. The last upgrade I made to my pc was over 2 years ago, it didn’t cost as much as a playstation and I have still yet to encounter a game I can’t play at higher resolution than that offered by the latest consoles.

David, you seem to be suggesting that unless you can run a game at the highest possible detail settings, it’s not worth playing. Graphics are not everything, and I would argue that the highest detail settings are there so that those who *do* have the shiniest of hardware can take full advantage of it – not that those who don’t are forced to upgrade.

To put this in perspective, I have a PC and a PS2, both bought around the same time. The PC is still able to play the latest PC games (yes, including Crysis, that I had absolutely no problem getting to work) at graphics settings the PS2 could only dream of. How did I achieve this earth-shattering feat? Yes – I upgraded my graphics card. Not for £430, but for £110, to a run-of-the-mill 8800GT.

To play the latest console games, I need a new console, which will cost me about three times the amount that it’s cost me to keep my PC ‘current’. OK, you could argue that moving to a PS3 would be the equivalent of upgrading my motherboard and processor as well, but that could be achieved for about the same cost as getting a PS3 – probably less for equivalent computing power.

I’m not anti-console or pro-PC – like I said, I have both – but to suggest that you need to upgrade your graphics card frequently to get the same enjoyment as out of your (non-upgradable) PS3, isn’t an argument that appears to hold much water for the majority of gamers.

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