Keeping up with the "Next Gen" Consoles?

[theglover]

I know even a mid range pc build power wise will easily knock the PS4/X1 out.

The problem we are up against would seem to be where the money is.

Despite all the work NVIDIA did with UBIshaft we were still left with a game (watchdogs) that struggles to run on top end gaming PCs. I am guessing due to the fact that the companies behind the games are aware that the most of their sales will come from the console market and therefore neglect the PC gamer.

There have been some great announcements at E3 that look awesome....but....

My question is what as a PC gamers do we need to be doing to keep up with the "Next Gen" consoles?

It looks like VRAM is the next big thing to cope with the PC ports of games? So going for the power of a R290x or a 780ti may not be worth it. Maybe a GTX780 with 6gb of VRAM should be enough for some time?

 

[Rationale]

I know even a mid range pc build power wise will easily knock the PS4/X1 out.

The problem we are up against would seem to be where the money is.

Despite all the work NVIDIA did with UBIshaft we were still left with a game (watchdogs) that struggles to run on top end gaming PCs. I am guessing due to the fact that the companies behind the games are aware that the most of their sales will come from the console market and therefore neglect the PC gamer.


There have been some great announcements at E3 that look awesome....but....

My question is what as a PC gamers do we need to be doing to keep up with the "Next Gen" consoles?

It looks like VRAM is the next big thing to cope with the PC ports of games? So going for the power of a R290x or a 780ti may not be worth it. Maybe a GTX780 with 6gb of VRAM should be enough for some time?

Watchdogs is one game out of a hundred. Most run about as well on a mid range PC as a PS4. And besides, Watchdogs on the PS4 runs at 900p, 30 fps, on high settings not ultra. A mid-range gaming GPU can hold that without too much trouble.

So, in short, a GTX 760 will easily keep up with the next-gen consoles. But the next-gen consoles' settings may not be what you want, since they're all like 30 fps, 900p, high settings.

DX12 is going to hit soon, and from what I've been hearing lately it sounds like only some of the features are being patched in to DX11 cards. You may want to wait for a dedicated DX12 video card if you want to keep it for several years.

 

[eldapeeze]

So has VRAM always been in graphics cards? Or have GPU's just utilized basic SDRAM/DRAM?

 

[Rationale]

So has VRAM always been in graphics cards? Or have GPU's just utilized basic SDRAM/DRAM?

VRAM has been in graphics cards for at least 15 years... I didn't really play games before that so I don't know how far back it goes.

 

[eldapeeze]

So has VRAM always been in graphics cards? Or have GPU's just utilized basic SDRAM/DRAM?

VRAM has been in graphics cards for at least 15 years... I didn't really play games before that so I don't know how far back it goes.

Didn't know that.

 

[Rationale]

So has VRAM always been in graphics cards? Or have GPU's just utilized basic SDRAM/DRAM?

VRAM has been in graphics cards for at least 15 years... I didn't really play games before that so I don't know how far back it goes.

Didn't know that.

Turns out I was a bit off. SDRAM stopped being used around 2001, so that'd be more like 13 years. *shrug*
GDDR5 has been in use for about 4 years now, and DDR3 VRAM was in limited use as early as 10 years ago.