I'm thinking about getting into it. I'm really a console gamer. I used to play PC games on an old pc but I figured that the games were hogging up my memory so I stopped. Just how expensive is it anyway? It would be a pain in the ass to upgrade new memory cards/ram/hdd/ every year just for PC gaming.
Contrary to what many die hard gamers would have you believe you don't need to upgrade all your components every six months to play the new games. The most important and frequently upgraded component is the video card. When I get a video card I usually pony up for a second tier card which is usually only marginally slower than the top of the line card and at least $100 (if not more) cheaper. The amount of life a fellow could get out of that card is up to him. As the games get more demanding all you have to do is knock back the quality settings when the games start to stutter from low frame rates. Most games still look damn good with the quality set lower. My Radeon 9800 Pro is three or four generations behind now but it still cranks out playable framerates at decent quality levels with Half Life 2 and Doom 3
I play a lot more PC games than I do console games. Some games are better on consoles, such as platformers or racing, but I think PCs are much better for First Person Shooters and RPGs. I am not a big FPS fan but I find it very hard to play one on a console with a joypad vs kb/mouse on the PC and the graphics are nowhere near as good as the resolution you can get off of a PC monitor. I much prefer the style of PC RPGs such as Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, and Diablo. The console RPGs such as FFX bored me. Too much movie and not enough gameplay and when you did play you just gave them orders and sit back and watched - I felt very detached from the gameplay and not involved like the PC RPGS. Strategy games are another genre you don't see much on consoles, at least not the quality of Warcraft or Starcraft. MMORPGs are also almost always on the PC. World of Warcraft has me hooked and is almost the only game I have played since it came out. As far as cost goes, Nephilim is right. As long as you have a decent processor and at least 512m of RAM, your video card is all that you need to sink any money into. I still use a Nvidia 4600 and can play all but the most demanding games, and even with those I just have to not have the setting maxed out.
PC GAMES RULE!!!! RTS's are hot...but there are some cool FPS's as well...don't do much adventure games. If you played Halo on the XBox, try it on the pc!
i find it pretty hard now to go back to console gaming after being 4 years mainly on pc gaming. there is stuff like gran turismo that i miss but any fps games i feel play really slow on a controler as opposed to a mouse. im also not much of a fan of low framerates and draw distances that seem to be a big console problem. then again if your serious about pc gamin it really is going to cost you quite a bit to stay upto date. i generally perform 2 major upgrades a year - a new video card and a new cpu. usually spaced around 6 months apart. the thing with pc's though is after a while if you want to upgrade one part you need to buy other compatible parts too, my latest upgrade was my cpu which cost around £500 for the chip. there was then the need for a new motherboard at a cost of around £100, which would not take my current speed of ram so i had to replace all the ram too for roughly £300. at the same time my old hard drive was getting pretty full so i needed a new sata drive which also didnt come cheap. well at least now i dont have to worry if the latest game i have bought is going to run slow or if i will have to lower any graphical settings. i expect this current setup to last me until the summer maybe then it starts over again. so really what im saying is you could spend £150 on a console and a few good games that will last you 3 or 4 years or you could spend £2000 on a kick ass pc that will provide you with the best graphics you have ever seen and a big hole in your pocket that only grows bigger every year. i still would never give up my pc for any console
also to Nephilim, while you may get hl2 running pretty good on that graphics card, you have to see it maxed out at 1280x1024 with 4xaa going at 90 fps and it will look a million times better. sort of like the difference between watching a movie of an 2 hour long 250mb cinema recorded mpeg on a black and white tv and watching that same movie on a 82 inch plasma screen tv with full surround sound with dvd quality. its the same game but so much different
I have and it doesn't look a million times better, only just a bit. I'm not sure why you believe that 90 fps is any better since your eyes can't tell the difference at anything beyond 30-35 fps.
i just bought halo1 for pc and when i install it it keeps giving me an error of cant extrcact cab2/blah blah. it always stops at 20%. i even disabled my virus blocker and it didnt work. this is wierd because i just bought it from best buy for $20.
nephilim your eyes can see a lot faster than that. here is a good article to explain http://www.amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html and trust me when it comes to games 90fps looks a whole lot better than 35fps
Interesting article but like I said before I've seen both and see no difference. I think articles like that mean the most to folks that just blew $500 on a top of the line graphics card.
Interesting article but like I said before I've seen both and see no difference. I think articles like that mean the most to folks that just blew $500 on a top of the line graphics card. that would be me
