This isn’t a term or phrase we’ve come up with, but one that PC gamers/users have adopted and use to support each other and those wanting to get into PC ownership, made largely popular by the sub-reddit titled /r/pcmasterrace – from which this very page borrows heavily from. We hope the redditors don’t mind.
Evatech custom built computers can satisfy your gaming needs.
Why choose PC instead of console?
PCs enable you to achieve a great number of things that console either cannot do at all, or cannot do all at once. It’s likely that you will have at least one PC in the house, so why not spend a little extra in making it appropriate for gaming as well?
- PC gaming can be cheaper than console gaming
Yes, it’s true, you can easily spend multiple-thousands of dollars on a gaming PC, but to achieve similar performance to what consoles give you, then PC gaming certainly can be cheaper, especially when you consider the cost of games. Spending more upfront, however, does usually mean that the PC will out-last current-gen consoles, and in the meantime, you will be enjoying better quality gaming at higher frame rates. - PC hardware gives you the freedom to upgrade whenever you decide, not when Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo decide
- PCs give you control over the graphical fidelity triangle – consoles offer nothing like this
- Can be used with TVs and monitors, and multiple of each
- Using a PC, you can play nearly every old console game ever made (through emulators) at higher graphical details/frame rate, with any controller you wish – for free
- PCs can utilise nearly every console controller ever made. Modern ones (PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One) work without needing a USB adapter
- Gaming services and social services are completely free, even with online play (Steam, Galaxy, Desura, Mumble, etc.)
- Gaming services offer more functionality than what you pay for on console
- PCs have better multiplayer support (often more players per match)
- Using a modern budget graphics card achieves 60 frames per second during gameplay with recent game releases, consoles barely reach 30FPS a lot of the time
- PCs can be multi-purposed for education, entertainment, content-creation, and gaming – consoles predominantly do a sub-par job of two of these things
- More exclusive titles than all the current-gen consoles combined
- More highly-rated exclusives
- Free game modifications and enhancements
- More games, much larger library
- Healthy independent developer scene
- Lots of free games
- Free abandonware titles
- Easier to repair (when/if out of warranty) and highly modular/upgradeable in general
- Higher graphical details: lighting, draw distance, textures, weather, shading/shadows, particles, foliage)
Freedom and benefits of PC
The PC scene is a continually evolving one. Every year it sees hardware advances in power, speed, capability and value. It’s free from the control of a single organisation, and there is a lot of competing brands, which serve as a reason for the constant evolution, it helps to keep the prices low, too. Although you are a consumer of hardware and software, you can use these two to create and/or sell your own software, hardware, and games.
You won’t be limited to how good the game can look, unless you manage to max out all the graphics settings on a 4K display! Even then, you have the ability to add in multiple displays…
Note that the exact above setup does require some forethought and planning, we highly advise you to contact our staff if you have specific high-expectations or wants, so that we can tailor a solution for you.
Modify your PC games (be aware of playing online though) to unlock even higher levels of graphics, detail, or add in more models of players, vehicles, etc. Consoles might offer this in the form of paid DLC, but rest assured that all this money is going to the developers, for content that could/should have been included in the game at time of release, or made freely available through an update/patch. Console gaming is all about milking you.
Virtual Reality gaming is (at the time of writing and for the foreseeable future at least) PC only – why? Because high resolution and high non-dipping frame rates are essential to emulate reality, where the resolution and frame rate is constantly high, also. High resolution and frame rate are a necessity to fool your brain and immerse you in the game, giving you the virtual reality feel.
A PC can be a tax write-off, legally, while a gaming console cannot. Even if it has a graphics card in it, and you also use it for gaming: a graphics card doesn’t necessarily mean it’s for playing games. Productivity software is becoming increasingly supportive of OpenGL and other GPU compute features if your work software can utilise it. And if your work or study requires you to do image or video processing/editing, it’s a cinch.
You can customise the way your PC looks. As simple as the case that all the hardware fits into which often comes in different colours once you’ve decided on a specific model from a certain brand (of which there are about 10 different reputable and high-quality case manufacturers). Then you get into internal LED lighting, LED fans, LED RAM, LED lights on certain motherboard/graphics card models, the list goes on.
Just like owning a new car, as the years go by, you start to feel like your PC is lacking a bit in some games. Once some of your components are out of warranty, you can (if you feel inclined) have a try at overclocking your hardware, similar to modifying or “tuning” a car. Performance gains will vary, and be sure to do some research beforehand. Overclocking often results in shortening the lifespan of the components concerned, but it will help tide you over until you are ready to purchase an upgrade.
PCs can be opened up without voiding warranty (when purchased through Evatech at least), so if you have a feeling that a build up of dust is causing performance/heat issues, you can open it up, confirm your theory and clean it out yourself without effecting warranty or worry about being banned.
PC parts have longer warranties, in addition to our system warranty, there are per-part warranties ranging from a minimum of 1 year, to anywhere between 2 and 5 years, and in certain instances even a lifetime warranty.
Gaming online has made voice chat more common, and effective when strategic team-play is on the agenda. With PC, you can experience studio-quality voice communication for free during gaming. No more being compressed by the game-engine’s audio decoder so that you come out sounding like some intergalactic 13 year old using a broken microphone…
As a concerned parent, wanting to allow your child the enjoyment of playing games like all the other kids in school/their age, PCs are almost undeniably the only platform that can be used for gaming, but also vital in schooling years and in every workplace environment. Help your child be better prepared by introducing them to PCs at a young age, and they could build their profession on it. I, for example, went from PC gaming to a keen interest in website creation, completed a course in website development and landed jobs because of those skills. I’m also still a gamer in my spare time!
Another thing for worried parents is exposure online. There are a number of ways to combat this, a simple search online will put your mind at ease, or the simplest method is to talk to your kids and have the PC in a family room, so you can monitor what’s going on, just the same as when your child plays outside.
The human eye can see more than 30, or even 60FPS!
People tend to think one of two incorrect things when it comes to the eye and FPS.
- Humans can only see at 24FPS – wrong. People might think this, however, because the film/movie/TV industry records the majority of their content in 24FPS, a standard that started because back in the 1930s, where physical film was used for storing recorded video, a higher frame rate took up more physical film, and a lower frame rate would be difficult to synchronise with the audio.
- Humans can’t tell the difference between 60FPS and anything above 60FPS – wrong. This popular belief is likely the cause of the display you are viewing content on – unless you have a display that supports higher than 60Hz, you will not be able to see higher than 60FPS. So, to experience higher than 60FPS, get a higher quality display! 120Hz screens are becoming more popular with the introduction of 4K and the likes, so prices are not as bad as they used to be.
Academic studies by the University of Massachusetts have determined through observation that not only is the difference noticeable, but player performance increases logarithmically (meaning largest increases happen early and begin to taper off) up to 60FPS. The study did not test with frame rates over 60, but we can assume that the tapering would continue past 60FPS. More importantly, however, they also concluded that frame rates lower than 30FPS get almost exponentially worse, which is embarrassing as almost every “next-gen” demonstration so far has dips as low as 10-20FPS while rendering heavy scenes.
Drawbacks of consoles
Game developers use PCs to create games, and test them too – developing for console means that they have to restrict the game’s full potential because of the weak hardware in the console. Every time you see “in-game footage” of an upcoming game that is released on PC and console, you can pretty much assume that it’s footage recorded from a fairly high-end PC, capable of maxing out every setting the game has on PC; and it’s not a PS4 or Xbox One.
Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo either own or heavily fund, as a way of ‘convincing’, game developers to make their game exclusive to their platform, enticing more sales of their own platform so gaming fans can play the title. Console manufacturers aren’t necessarily concerned with giving us good hardware, good games, or good experiences. They simply do the least they can, in the most cost effective ways, to keep things a little more exciting with every yearly game release or every console generation release – and of course, spend a metric tonne of money on advertising to convince us all that it’s going to be fantastic, when the reality is far from that.
Here’s a YouTube clip, showcasing the popular game Grand Theft Auto V (5), which was first released on PS3 and Xbox 360, re-made for PS4 and Xbox One, and then optimised even further for PC – this alone telling you that PC is ahead of the rest, but the video shows how a PC with a high-end graphics card released in 2006 runs the game, almost exactly like how it runs on PS3 and Xbox 360.
Advances in the last 9 years of computer hardware would enable you a much better experience than visualised in the video above, even better than PS4 and Xbox One can aspire to.
Back when SNES/N64/PSX came out, things were different. Now, it seems like consoles are to thank for graphical fidelity making leaps every 8 years, but they’re not. The reason gaming is able to move forward with each new generation of consoles is because consoles is what was holding it back all that time in the first place. Games have to be made playable on the ever-aging console hardware. This means the developers must ensure the game will run on the hardware, often meaning it gets released without features they planned on implementing (GTA:V first-person mode, anyone?). These features are forgotten because the console hardware cannot handle it. As a result, developers are forced to sell a stripped-down product. PC will often get a better product of the same title, but still not as intended due to lack of resources as it’s deemed unimportant if consoles cannot experience it as well. In some cases, the PC port is terrible (at launch at least) because developers weren’t given the time or resources needed before the launch date. The more people that buy games on PC, the better games we will begin seeing as developers are given more resources and time to polish games and create unique content rather than just re-naming the same game year after year. Hello, Call of Duty.
Hardware and game companies make more money from PC sales than console sales. How can this be? Developing for PC has no per-sale royalty fees, development kit fees, submission fees, cost of physically manufacturing/shipping/stocking their finished products. Buy a PC game and your money goes directly to the developer’s bank account, and in return you get the game straight to your PC. Hardware makers earn much healthier margins on PC as well, since they aren’t relying on eventual-profit-by-volume under some tremendously long-term supply contract for Microsoft or Sony. If you care about saving money for yourself, go with the PC. If you care about funding developers and keeping your favorite games flowing, go with the PC. If you care about the hardware companies like AMD and nVidia that make modern gaming possible, go with the PC. Once again, consoles exist only to suck money out of developers, hardware companies, and gamers. It’s plain as day: Sony and Microsoft don’t care about anything but money. If they really cared about improving the state of gaming, why are they sucking every possible entity dry at every possible stage of the process? Literally, for the love of gaming, go with a PC.
Buying pre-owned games is largely popular among console gamers, partially due to the inflated prices of buying new games, so you may as well sell an old one that you’ve completed or are tired of, right? Sure, but you sell it and get a small portion of the money back for it, and in return, EB Games or whatever retail store you sell it to will more than likely re-sell it for a healthy margin on top of what they paid you for it. So, now they’ve sold you the game initially for say $100, then bought it back off you some time later for say $30 (if you’re lucky), then they re-sell it for about $50-$60 depending on how popular the game still is. By this stage, they’ve already covered the cost of the physical game in the first sale, plus their huge margin, then probably gave away some of their margin when they bought it back off you, then comfortably re-sold it, recouped their margin and then some. The only person winning here is the retail store owners.
In conclusion…
If you’ve got to this point and read everything above, you’re probably convinced that PC is the way to go. If you’ve read the above and strongly disagree, nothing can save you. You might be on the fence, reluctant to believe everything you read online. Go out there and do your own research if you please. I am not biased though. Being a gamer myself, I have owned multiple consoles. I have a Commodore 64, owned a Super Nintendo, have a Nintendo 64, owned a Nintendo Wii, owned a PlayStation 2, owned a PlayStation 3, owned an Xbox 360 (purely for Forza/Forza Horizon) and own a PlayStation 4 – all while owning a gaming PC of some sort. If every game was made for PC, PC is where I would play all my games.
You’re convinced? Great! You’re ready to ascend to the PC Master Race! Where to from here?
If you’re keen to get into PC ownership, Evatech can help you out. You can try your hand at building your own after picking our parts and ensuring compatibility and that it will achieve your goals, but this can seem daunting to many, rightly so. If you have the inclination, and don’t mess things up while part picking/compatibility checking, or putting it together, it’s a great experience and you can save some money. Some of our customers have tried putting parts together themselves and ended up voiding their warranty on $500 motherboards because they tried forcing something in the wrong way. Or getting everything right and one component is DOA (dead on arrival) and you’re unsure how to troubleshoot yourself… It can be a headache.
For this exact reason, all of the tech-heads at Evatech, along with our developers (myself included), worked for a month or two to build a custom PC builder into our website so that customers could piece together their desired PC components without worrying about compatibility issues, and live price-updating and a guide to help you make sure the PC you’re building can handle the games you want to play. It’s the least complicated process imaginable when you consider how many possible components there are in the PC industry. All of the products we use are new and un-used, not refurbished or pre-owned. To find out more and get started on your way to being part of the #pcmasterrace – check out our PC builder.
For any questions or clarification, please contact our staff at sales@evatech.com.au