We’re an argumentative bunch at Pro. Finding two people who agree on anything, even the colour of the carpet, is something of a chore but put a new piece of hardware in front of us and it’s worth ducking for cover unless you’re a fan of vitriol showers. However, aside from the green issues (brilliantly covered in comrade Sparkes’ green gadgets feature this month), the one thing that’s brought us closest to laughably inept fisticuffs is the hideously expensive GeForce GTX 280.

Now, the pocket dynamo David Bayon holds it up as everything that’s wrong with PC gaming – an overpriced piece of silicon indicative of the rising technological barriers holding PC gaming back. His argument, best read on his blog, but paraphrased for your enjoyment here, is that times have changed, gaming’s changed and Nvidia can’t get away with this any more. He’s a socialist gamer, beating a flag and storming the pickets of niche gaming – demanding ease of use for all. Insert disc, play. No hassle.

Now, it’s not his fault he’s an idiot. He’s a lovable idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. I love the GTX 280, though more in idea than execution. It exists for those who want it. It’s a niche, certainly, but it doesn’t make PC gaming niche. The problem is that if you play a game on a console, all those juicy graphical options are hidden away. You’re probably playing games on -what the PC would consider- medium settings. It still looks good, you can’t see the word medium, and you’re happy to get on and play.

The PC, however, gets a bad rap for laying those options bare. People want the very best, even though they’d be perfectly happy with medium settings if they didn’t know better. The truth is, it isn’t difficult to play games on a PC. Most games play at brilliant frame rates and look great if you’re just willing to turn a few settings down – but we don’t want to do that and then complain when it runs like a two legged dog trying to cross a trampoline.

At the end of the day, PCs are all about the technology inside. We care about the processor, RAM, graphics card. Consoles, hide this away, console owners don’t care about this stuff, don’t want to.

To my mind, this technology focus bolsters PC developers more than it hinders them, by giving them scope rather than bars for their ambition. And occasionally it allows them to produce something truly ground breaking such as Crysis – which is then somehow used to beat the PC scene over the head, when it should be at the forefront of the celebration.

If all we had were consoles, there’d be no Quake 2 or Crysis, because they were built to test the technology, to show what could be achieved in the next generation. You can’t do that on consoles, because the next generation is at best five years away. With the PC, for better or worse, it’ll be here tomorrow. I find that brilliant, and for that reason the GTX 280 brilliant – but I’d never buy one, I’d just turn the settings on my game down.