I think this is fine as long as its contextualized. The card might be $599, buy the whole PC will cost double that at the minimum. Prebuilt PCs with a 4070 Super will go for $1,500. 3x what the PS5 was going for this holiday season and over 4x the series x which was going for $350.
I bought a 3080 knowing full well that i wanted to run PS5 games at the same resolution but double the fps. Thats mostly what ive gotten so far. But the card cost $850 back in 2022 when the PS5 was $500. So 2x more performance for 1.85x the cash. unfortunately, I also had to upgrade my CPU which meant upgrading the mobo and adding an AIO because the standard cooler i had didnt do the trick. Thats $300 for the CPU, $200 for the mobo and $100 for the AIO.
Then recently hogwarts ran like shit until i upgraded my ram to 32 GB and because you cant mix and match ram i had to throw away my existing ram. thats another $100. Add in a $150 ssd and a new case to ensure proper cooling for these high wattage cards, and i ended up spending close to $2000 despite the fact that i was upgrading my previous $1,500 pc.
So 2x more performance for 4x more money. Im ok with it, and i love comparisons like this from Richard, but he needs to do a better job pointing out how you need way better CPUs nowadays to get the most out of these high end cards. So many people on gaf and youtube get worse performance than my 3080 because they either didnt upgrade their CPUs like i did or are still rocking 16Gb of ram.
eh 4x money also got you
- super responsive reflex-based experience
- much better ray tracing experience (if you're into that)
- much better upscaling (4k dlss quality will match native 4k taa and will often have better image stability. and then even 4k dlss performance is super usable if you really need it. it will still have better image quality over most of the console games and their respective quality modes WITH a much higher performance difference between them)
- much better native AA (DLAA is a huge improvement over TAA in almost all cases)
- niche path tracing experiments (half life, quake etc. all have value that u cant have on console)
- endless emulation possibilities (if you're into that like me)
- being able to tailor your own experience
- there's probably more but this is getting personal so it is just my perspective
see the game avatar pandora. nvidia gpus overperform amd gpus and probably console too, as the game has ray tracing as a baseline. you know that the amount of those titles will increase too. so may get to a point where your 3080 barely gets you 40 fps at 4K. but then you remember console is running the same at 1440p/30 FPS (a potential game, not giving a specific title name here).
I didn't pay 2000 bucks for my PC and I calculated it to amount to around 1100 bucks (most pieces of PC are super cheap). I personally cannot say I got "this much performance over" console due to DLSS and ray tracing being a thing. but I personally feel like I'm getting infinite value compared to the consoles. reflex alone ends that discussion for me. it is not something console will ever have and not something will ever focus. they will never give people responsive low latency gaming because that's not even something people ask as they never experienced it.
CPU side matters if you really aim higher framerates, yes. if your CPU is limiting your framerates, you can always shift focus towards resolution/graphical settings and get more out of your GPU. with reflex i find everything above 30+ fps with a gamepad HIGHLY enjoyable to play, and much better than consoles actually (at the similar low framerate targets). I've just tried gow ragnarok's 30 fps mode on PS5 and it is deplorable. tried the gow 2018 on PC with optimized reflex based 30 FPS limit and it is night and day difference. I also compared to 4k dkss balanced in gow 2018 against native 4K mode in gow ragnarok, I can safely say, they're almost equally as sharp and DLSS has better motion stability and less ghosting (and yes, gow ragnarok suffers a lot from ghosting on PS5:
can you put something like this into value calculations? it is impossible. but it is something that console is not giving me. how will I determine its value then? even if I want best possible 30-40 fps responsive gaming, the console simply doesn't deliver despite it being an optimized platform for low framerates. it is crazy how worse it is to play at 30 fps on PS5 compared to my own PC with rull reflex+vrr. it is almost like the exact reverse sentiment we used to have on PC about how 30 FPS on PC sucks and console is much better at that so it was never an argument that you can enjoy 30 FPS gaming on PC. but now you can, and in a much better state. I know some people see PCs as tools to double the FPS of consoles but in relation to having a bad CPU, I'm perfectly fine with 30-40 FPS I'm getting on PC. And of course targeting 30-40 FPS on PC gives you insane headroom to push graphics beyond your GPUs capabilities (capabilities in relation to being able to hit 60 FPS. even if you have the best CPU possible, you won't have a chance of hitting 60 fps with a 3070 in alan wake 2 with ray tracing at reasonable resolutions that give you reasonable image quality. you're just stranded to low framerate targets if u want that experience, but it is okay for me)