[iMore Question]

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[Tartarus]

I think it all comes down to what hardware you (have to) purchase for your computer to play the most computing power-demanding games, whereas on a game console the only thing you have to do is buy an extra controller and the game itself.

A computer needs a high end CPU, graphics card, cooling system and so on and so on. The costs can go as high as thousands of dollars.

[alexscarpinato]

It CAN that doesn't mean it has to. You can build a $400 pc and still run modern games perfectly fine. That $400 pc can already be better than a console

[cuttheredwire]

My friend works for Sony. He had a fancy gaming laptop with an extern video card / CD drive (special pre-usb 3.0 port). This is going back 5-8 years ago. The details that machine could do, at full HD, was crazy. He showed me JIT (just in time) loading artifacting, that I would have never noticed, as it loaded and cleared RAM. The basic specs of the game would never run on my machine, and would have been horrible if it did.

Fast forward to today, and Alienware now has a box for ~$500 that will run things great for you (and makes the Mac Mini look a bit silly.) Upgrade to an SSD and you can speed up your load times like crazy. You can even get a Linux version (I love Mac/Linux, so that is a dream come true for me).

tl;dr - Previous advances made beautiful differences at an ugly price.