Why Videogames won't Look Much Better on PC because of Xbox One and PS4

Sony's and Microsoft's new consoles are about to launch this November just before the 2013 Holiday season. What does this mean for gamers? Well if you're a console gamer you'll get your much anticipated Next-Gen console at this time and it will be great. If you're on the PC on the other hand you won't see much of a difference and I'll tell you why.

-Chris Zele

Reason 1: The Next Gen Consoles have Low-End Hardware

The Xbox One and PS4 both run an AMD APU aka Advanced Processing Unit which combines the processor and graphics card onto a single chip. The problem with the APUs being used in the Next-Gen Consoles is that they are using AMD's Jaguar cores which aren't very high end as they are equivalent to Intel's Atom processors. Yeah does Atom ring a bell the processor that powered all of those shitty notebooks from yesteryear and yes it's that bad.

Reason 2: Games Cost a lot of Money to Make

Big budget games from developers like Square Enix, Ubisoft, and Rockstar need to sell millions of copies to break even as development costs can be 60+ million dollars. The result of extremely high development costs has made it so developers/publishers have been closing down left and right. THQ is the biggest company to close down in recent memory and it looks like Square Enix may be the next company to implode as its recent titles haven't sold very well. 

What does the last paragraph have to do with PC gaming? Our take is that PC gaming is not going to get better because developers are going to cut back on dev costs because they have been going into debt recently. Devs will most likely scale back costs and make lower fidelity games or games that look marginally better than they do now for PC users. Case in point, have you taken a look at the newest Battlefield 4 trailer? It looks the same as Battlefield 3, so visually it hasn't gone anywhere from the last game and this is likely the case for other upcoming games.

Reason 3: The New Consoles aren't Upgradeable

When PC gamer's want to upgrade their rigs they do so whenever they please. If you're an Xbox 360 or PS3 gamer your hardware is locked down and you can't add more RAM or upgrade the video card or CPU. The Next-Gen consoles will hold back PC gaming just as the previous consoles have done before. I just don't see the new consoles pushing gaming into the next generation with their lack of upgradeability. PCs can see a large boost in performance when their video cards are replaced but the consoles will see no such boost and will be left in the dust in no time. 

Video Card: Buyers Guide AMD VS. Nvidia

When it comes to GPUs there are a plethora of options to choose from scaling from $50 all the way up $1000. In this buyers guide we'll tackle all the price points to tell you where to spend your money from entry level cards all the way up to the ultra high-end enthusiast performance video cards.

Entry Level: $150 AMD Radeon 7790 VS Nvidia 650 Ti

Most people consider an entry level video card a $50-$100. Recently CPU graphics from both Intel and AMD have caught up to discrete video card performance and made it, so people don't need to buy a low end GPU anymore.

Anyways lets compare AMD's 7790 to the Nvidia's 650 Ti which are both around $140-$150 or so. When you look at the benchmarks the 7790 beats the 650 Ti in almost every benchmark that Ryan Smith from Anandtech ran on the two GPU's. The AMD GPU also came very close to the performance of the 650 Ti Boost which is currently a $170 video card. AMD's 7790 card won all of the compute tests beating out both Nvidia cards handily in synthetic benchmarks. What makes AMD's 7790 appealing is its $110 game bundle consisting of Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider, and Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon.

Winner: AMD

Mid Range: $250-$300 AMD Radeon 7950 
VS Nvidia GTX 760

There are many options at this price point ranging from Super-clocked GTX 660's to stock clocked Radeon 7950's. The two card facing off here are the AMD 7950 at $260 VS Nvidia's GTX 760 at $250. The GTX 760 wins almost all of the gaming benchmarks run by Anandtech and when it does lose to the 7950 its not by much. Games where the GTX 760 killed AMD's second tier card were BF3, Portal 2, and Skyrim which the Nvidia card won beat the 7950 by around 10FPS or more in each of these games.

Winner: Nvidia

High End: 7970 GHz Edition VS GTX 770 $350-$400

The battle at the high end is insane as AMD and Nvidia as both companies are very close to each other in this price bracket. AMD offers their 7970 GHZ Edition here while Nvidia has their newly launched GTX 770 here. Both video cards are very close to one another when it comes to performance and power consumption. If you're at this price point and want the card that is the faster of the two right out of the box choose the 7970. However, if you're an overclocker you'll want to go with the GTX 770 as the video card overclocks well and pushes past AMD's flagship card handily after it's overclocked to 1200MHz.

Winner: Tie

Ultra: $1000 7990, VS GTX 690, VS GTX Titan 

When it comes to the Ultra category three cards stand out at the premium price of $1000 which include Nvidia's GTX 690 and GTX Titan along with AMD's Radeon 7990. Nvidia's GTX Titan beats the GTX 690, and 7990 single handily in this category. The Titan is a single GPU card where as the 690 and 7990 are both dual-GPU video cards and it performs the same if not better them in some cases. In Anandtech's review of the card the GTX Titan matched the 690 and 7990 in many of the website's benchmarks. However, the Titan did lose to both the 690 and 7990 many times in benchmarks, but the card's advantage is that you don't need to wait for Crossfire or SLI profiles to come out like you do for the 7990 or GTX 690.

Winner: Nvidia's GTX Titan