This may come as some surprise to you, but we here at PCWorld are pretty big fans of PC gaming. Shocking, I know. And so please, all ye console believers, factor in whatever amount of bias you’d like to the following statement:
PC gaming is the most affordable it’s ever been—and for a lot of people it’s also the best value for a multitude of reasons. Yes, Microsoft’s powerful Xbox One X console delivers a surprising amount of bang for your buck. Hardware costs are just part of the equation, though.
Here’s a handful of reasons why PC gaming is a better value than consoles.
Price
First let’s talk about the elephant in the room: raw initial dollars. That’s normally where the PC’s fallen behind in the past, compared to consoles. “Yeah, I could spend thousands of dollars on a PC or $300 to $400 on a console.”
PC gaming is still more expensive, at least up front. That hasn’t changed. If you can build a gaming desktop for $400, you’re either a wizard or extremely good at snagging discount parts and waiting for sales. More power to you.
But the PC isn’t that much more expensive at this point. You’ll can build a console-beating Ryzen gaming PC for under $550, or a much more powerful gaming rig for $850. Brad Chacos
Prices have come down a lot—graphics card prices especially. A 3GB GeForce GTX 1060 will only run you $200 on Amazon, which is incredible. Max out graphics at 1080p resolution and you’ll still hit 60-plus frames per second in basically every modern game. For only $200. And a more future-proof version with 6GB of on-board RAM only costs $260, and that’ll let you game at higher 1440p resolutions without problem.
Now, finding graphics cards at their recommended list price can be hard these days, but the point is that companies want PC gaming to be accessible. They want enthusiasts buying GPUs. Competition has made the PC more affordable than ever before.
And that $200 graphics card is better than what’s inside the PlayStation 4 Pro. Here’s a comparison of raw TFLOPS power, courtesy of PCWord’s graphics guru Brad Chacos. Nvidia’s 3GB GTX 1060 offers roughly equivalent gaming performance as AMD’s RX 570, while the 6GB GeForce card performs like AMD’s RX 580:
Brad Chacos
Brad Chacos
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