I'm a console gamer currently trying to decide between a PS4 and a gaming PC and I have a few questions (actually quite a lot!) Hopefully this is the right thread for these questions, if not feel free to point me in the right direction. Apologies if a lot of these have been answered before.
For me personally, the negatives of switching to PC (missing console exclusive titles (especially Sony's 1st party studios), setting up graphics options etc) are only worth it if I can get graphics and performance much greater than the PS4. Are there any good, high quality (not heavily compressed Youtube videos) comparisons of PS4 vs max settings PC games (in 1080p and 60fps where appropriate) to see the difference? I found this comparison for Battlefield 4:
http://www.perfecthandproductions.com/battlefield-4-pc-and-ps4-graphics-comparison/ and the difference didn't seem that huge, but I'm only watching on a 1366x768 resolution laptop with a poor quality screen. I'll have access to a 1080p TV this weekend though, so any high quality videos I can play on my PS3 would be appreciated. Failing that, good screenshot comparisons are useful too.
In order to get these kinds of settings in 1080p (and preferably 60fps), do I need to be looking at the really high-end graphics cards/CPUs or are they overkill? So far I've looked at things like the i7-4790K processor and GTX 780 Ti GPU, are these about what I'd need, way more than required or not enough? If they are suitable, how long will they stay good enough (approximately)? The kinds of builds I've been looking at have been costing around £1200 (for example this:
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/billsmugs/saved/thmmP6 which I put together with little to no research as a very rough cost estimate more than anything. I don't really know how to pick fans, PSUs, motherboards etc). What would be the (again I'm just looking for a rough estimate) minimum spend to get a PC (in the UK) that would be able to outperform the PS4 on multiplatform titles by at least a small margin for the next 5 years, say?
In terms of the ease of building a PC from parts, is it something that's easy to get wrong and cause damage to the components? Do CPUs and GPUs come with fans and heatsinks etc, or do you always need to buy them separately? What sort of failure rates do parts have and if one component breaks will it take everything else with it? If I mess up the cooling will modern components turn themselves off before damage occurs or will they just fry? How do I know when to hold off on buying parts to wait for new models or designs?
Moving on to the actual games, how common is it that a "big" non-exclusive title skips the PC (like GTAV or Red Dead Redemption for example)? Are Japanese games still rare to find on PC, or are they becoming more common? How many games release without controller support (where it would work, obviously, so not including RTS games etc)? Will I be at a huge disadvantage in multiplayer if I use a controller? (I play Titanfall on my laptop with a controller (and at 25-40fps for a further disadvantage) and don't seem to do too badly, but is that just that Titanfall is designed to be controller friendly in ways that other PC games are not?)
When people talk about "bad ports" of console games, what does that mean? Would performance be worse than the console versions, the same or still better? How common are such bad ports and are they often known about in advance or is it just a nasty shock for day one buyers?
I'm aware that's a lot of questions in one post, sorry! If you can help with any single query, or provide a link to somewhere that can explain a certain section then please do so, I'm not expecting anyone to answer everything. I'm mostly looking into this as a preliminary weighing of options so I'm not looking for detailed advice on specific parts or configurations, but any general tips are much appreciated.
