ALL HAIL THE PC

The response from PC

The fact that the latest gaming consoles today run on hardware that essentially makes them PCs should tell you all you need to know about the superiority of PC gaming. For sure, console gaming is simpler and more affordable, but PC gaming still comes with its own advantages.

Let’s begin with performance. If you want the utmost in performance and graphics quality, the PC is the way to go. Microsoft might have just announced the very powerful Xbox One X and Sony might have the very popular PlayStation 4 Pro, but these two über consoles are still no match for a fully specced-out PC gaming machine.

If we look at just pure compute power, the Xbox One X and the PlayStation 4 Pro are capable of about 6 tera ops and 4.2 tera ops of computing performance respectively. That’s way more than their respective predecessors, but in the PC world, that’s only the equivalent of a PC equipped with an AMD Radeon RX 580 or a souped up NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060. And these are only upper midrange GPUs. To give you an idea of just how much more powerful a PC gaming system can be, consider this: a top-ofthe-line GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card from NVIDIA can serve up nearly 12 tera ops of processing power or nearly double that of the new Xbox One X.

What this means is that if you are serious about graphics quality, PC gaming is the way to go. Yes, the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro can run games at 60FPS in 4K resolution, but what if you want more than that? Not only can a PC be vastly more powerful, gaming on a PC also allows you to play around with graphics settings, pushing it to higher graphical settings than what you get on a console, and letting you take advantage of advances in display technology like super-fast 144Hz and 240Hz monitors that can only be fully enjoyed on PC.

And if you like to be on the cuttingedge of technology, the PC is once again the only platform that can offer you that. If you are serious about VR, only PCs can provide the necessary graphics horsepower required for sophisticated VR games.

Finally, PC gaming will always have one huge advantage over console gaming: mods. There are entire communities dedicated to building mods just for a single game. Some games, like Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Grand Theft Auto 5, have mods that completely transform the gameplay and game world, essentially creating a completely new, community-developed game.

“To give you an idea of just how much more powerful a PC gaming system can be, consider this: a topof-the-line GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card from NVIDIA can serve up nearly 12 teraops of processing power or nearly double that of the new Xbox One X.”