Quote:
Originally Posted by Russic
Legitimate question for the master race: has there ever been a time when a console or consoles were more powerful than a PC? I've never been a true PC gamer, so I don't know the history very well.
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To add to the above, if you're talking dollar for dollar, in the first 4-5 years of every console gen, consoles typically deliver more performance than a PC because the console manufacturers run at a loss. A $400-$500 PC would be pretty awful as a gaming platform.
As far as the last 5 console gens have gone though, PCs are generally about 2-4x more powerful at the top end ($2000-$3000 PCs mind you) than the consoles at release.
For example, the PS4 uses a modified 7870, which is about equal to a GTX 660, which is a ~$200 video card at the moment. Of course, consoles are generally (not always) optimized to run better with worse hardware (as PCs don't have the same APIs, minimal OS, etc.) so you could probably extrapolate performance closer to a GTX 670/760, or more near the $300 card range.
That said, a $300 card worth of performance doesn't stack up much when you have devices like 780 Ti, Titan Black, Titan Z, 290X, 295X2, the upcoming 880, etc on the market. Especially when you can SLI/Crossfire (in combinations of up to 4 cards/GPUs in some instances) all of the above.
A PS4 is ~1/8 as powerful as a Crossfire 295X2 setup (which would cost ~$4200 for a full PC).
For a more rational level of contrast, I built a friend a PC for ~$1200 with a GTX 780 (ocd) back in May, and it would be about 2x-3x faster depending on the game than a PS4.