A recent rumor about Ubisoft’s upcoming “Tom Clancy’s The Division” game has stated that the developer is deliberately keeping its visuals “dumbed down” to match those on today’s leading game consoles. While the claim was denied by the developer, players are still in doubt. Is the PC still a superior gaming platform compared to consoles?
Consoles are slowly becoming outdated
Sony’s amazing PlayStation 4 console has been released in late 2013, along with Xbox One. Both of them have state of the art hardware. Both of them are gaming powerhouses, offering photorealistic images, lifelike movement and physics, and a gaming experience that’s unmatched by anything else. Or is it?
Gaming consoles are limited by their very nature. They have a hardware configuration that can’t be customized. All new game releases need to be built to run on these pre-existing hardware, which naturally limits their possibilities.
PC is about flexibility
But things are different when it comes to PC.
“Committed PC gamers are generally not interested in pure content consumption platforms,” Ted Pollak, Senior Gaming Analyst at JPR told Forbes Magazine in 2014. “They are power users and pay thousands for the ability to play games at very high settings and then do business, video/photo editing, content creation and other tasks with maximum horsepower at their disposal in a desktop ergonomic environment.”
A high-end gaming PC can run anything from the games at http://casinogamescity.com/ to Tom Clancy’s The Division (to stick with the above example). And if not, their owners can invest in an upgrade: buy a stronger CPU, a higher performance GPU, add some more RAM, and so on.
The initial cost of a gaming PC is higher compared to a console, and it also takes more investment to keep it up to date over time. But the same gaming PC can be used for much more than just gaming: it can double as a tool for work, as a media center, as several other things. It’s much more flexible than the console, which can be used for nothing much besides playing games.
Tobii and Ubisoft team up to bring entirely new eye tracking features to Tom Clancy’s The Division for PC:
Consoles are less powerful
While they might have been insanely powerful when they were released, both Xbox One and PS4 pack power equivalent to the entry-level gaming PC today. High-end gaming PCs, in turn, are capable of something no console can do at this point: playing games in 4K using their fast CPUs and GPUs, fast memory and SSDs.
Today’s consoles try to be the “one size fits all” solution for home gaming. But PCs are still superior when it comes to flexibility, ability to adapt to the needs of the player (and the game). And this has assured the PC gaming segment’s continuous growth over the years.