“Make your PC better than a console”

My first inclination was to laugh, because I think that is a given for any serious PC gamer. Even buying a mediocre PC these days will set you up with a better equiped gaming machine than any existing gamebox.
But I do realize that there are many beginners who could use a few tips.

A pc is a game system without good games and a good way to buy games

” unlike consoles such as the PS3 and Xbox 360 that are based on six-year-old hardware”

Yes dude the 360 launched in 2005 with tech from 2006. Could you really be that clueless? Even the Cell was made in 2004. I’m not sure what makes you think these companies wait til launch day go out and buy the best current parts, then suddenly make millions of consoles in a day or two and ship them all over the world.

Fact is the tech in consoles comes out years before they are released.

It is true that a PC has far more potential for gaming than a console.

However, that potential isn’t all about higher resolution textures (after all a badly designed high res texture is still badly designed).

PC games are routinely littered with overhead because developers make the assumption that everyone with a PC has resources to spare, overhead that consoles wont tolerate, which means you are far more likely to see Z-fighting, seemingly random fps drops, stuttering and other annoyances on PCs than you will on the same game on a console.

Then of course you get the PC elitists who regularly give me cause to facepalm with their “Where’s the Dx11?” and “The textures are too low res” whines about every second game that gets released.

Yes PCs have more power and more potential and when games use that they can be special, but developers need to stop using that as an excuse for sloppy optimizations (or a total lack of them) and PC gamers need to stop using it as an excuse to berate developers who do make an effort (anyone remember Crysis 2 with it’s high performance extremely optimized engine which simply garnered Crytek a bunch of angry hatemail about a lack of Dx11 even though they made Dx9 do things no-one else had before and faster to boot) and celebrate the ones who just add special effects for the sake of it (what I like to call shiny brick syndrome, because a brick isn’t a reflective surface yet plenty of games seem to think it is).

“Then of course you get the PC elitists who regularly give me cause to facepalm with their “Where’s the Dx11?” and “The textures are too low res” whines about every second game that gets released.”
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I could not agree more. Most of the time I wonder if those ‘elitists’, as you call them, would actually be able to see the difference between a game that uses Dx9 and one that uses Dx11.

Personally I do not care at all about whether a game uses Dx9 or 11. What I do care about is being able to run for example GTA IV with maximum view distance and maximum traffic in the streets, because that actually makes a huge difference in how the game feels, in how you experience it.

You also mention Crysis 2. I loved that game and was very, very surprised about the incessant whining that arose from certain gaming forums. I thought it looked beautiful as is and I believe it is the best solid and spectacular shooter I have played in 2011/2012, even though I deplored its less open level structure.
And even though it looked spectacular it ran smooth as butter even during the most spectacular actions and explosions. I think the whiners do not even realize what Crytek did there.

“A pc is a game system without good games and a good way to buy games”
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@tanto

I do not get that at all.
It is simple: The reality proves you wrong. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.
Never has gaming on PC been so good as in these years. We have soooooo many good games that it is impossible to play them all.
Plus we are virtually buried in superb user made content in the form of mods and expansions.

I keep lists of the future PC games that I want to play and if I look at all the AAA titles that are supposed to get released for PC in the next three months alone I will need an extra life to get around to it. And that is only the AAA titles.

So, really, you are talking crap.
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And saying the PC has no good system to buy games is ludicrous. Never heard of Steam, or Origin. And the normal retail system works fine also (I prefer retail), especially since we can buy incredibly cheap over the internet.

Multiplatform games are much cheaper in general for PC than what consoles have to offer and we get incredible discounts via Steam for example.

Plus we have a gaming system that is on average 10 times as powerful as any console to date. And when your next gen consoles will get released they will guaranteed be inferior to even my 3 year old gaming PC I have now.

So, tanto…
You might want to think about it a bit more….