Digital Foundry vs. the ultimate gaming PC • Articles • Eurogamer.net
The main body of the article is detailed and worth reading in itself, with it being difficult to quote information in context so I'll just quote the conclusion:
The main body of the article is detailed and worth reading in itself, with it being difficult to quote information in context so I'll just quote the conclusion:
The ultimate games PC: the Digital Foundry verdict
It's difficult to fully assess this remarkable array of PC componentry. On paper we may well have the computational might to offer a next generation leap over the PlayStation 4, but the reality is that we don't have the dedicated software to actually put that power to the best possible use.
We are taking current-gen games and scaling them up as much as we can via higher quality presets, and in many cases the sheer computational effort required isn't directly proportional to the increased quality in the overall experience. Take Sleeping Dogs for example: it's combining super-sampling anti-aliasing with post-process AA for an ultra-pristine presentation - at 4K no less - but we'll never see such an approach in a console game where cost is always measured against the quality of the result. If game coders were actually targeting 15TFLOPs, those resources will be deployed elsewhere - indeed, the horsepower is there to deploy entirely new rendering paradigms.
Overall, putting this kit through its paces has been a remarkable experiment, occasionally thrilling - particularly in the case of Crysis 3 where the experience is genuinely transformed - but ideally, what we'd really like to do is revisit this PC in a year or two year's time and see what this phenomenal piece of machinery can offer over and above the next-gen Xbox/PlayStation 4 console experience, once we have some idea of the standard set by these new pieces of hardware. But of course, by then, the set-up we have here will have been surpassed with even more powerful technology.
In the meantime, what best sums up our time in testing this hardware is the way in which it emphasises what we love about PC gaming - the ability to "roll your own" experience, leaving behind the confines of 1080p and 30FPS, exploring 4K, cranking up temporal resolution to 120FPS, or running gameplay across multiple screens - and in the case of this PC, doing any or all of that without having to compromise the quality of the experience. While this year we'll see initiatives designed to bring the PC into the living room and closer to the mainstream, this phenomenal machine is a love letter to the niche, to the hardcore, to the enthusiasts who demand something different, something unique.