Gadgetory

pc vs consoles an ancient debate it dates back to the 70s or something like that and it's been long discussed by the wisest and most scholarly commentaries on the youtubes as we know it today so it's time to visit PC versus console I hesitate to use the word vs. because both have completely legitimate use cases in the real world there are valid reasons to buy both of them unfortunately anyone who's already paused this video and started typing a comment doesn't agree with me and they hate all of you regardless so I can't do anything to stop that I'm sorry I asked you not to engage however we can look at some basic benchmarks of console vs. PC in the confines of relatively equalized settings for the two games we tested this is all kind of still in the research phase but it's kind of fun and it gives us a baseline for analysis of what does an equivalently price PC do if we match the settings between just Assassin's Creed origins and destiny - this video is brought to you by the gamers Nexus anti-static mod mat our mod mat uses a high quality anti-static surface with a rubberized finish we also have a custom paint job on it which includes reference points and cheat sheets for PCIe eps 12 volt and other power cables along with quick reference throw paste application guides a screw sorter for your video card tear downs and it includes a common ground point and a grounding strap to help protect the products you are working on from electrostatic discharge preorder your mat now at the link in the description below given the recent insane Toland surge in prices for DRAM and GPUs the argument is more poignant than ever because now you're looking at pcs that are pretty hard to build for affordable prices it's unfortunate we don't like it either and it kills a lot of the budget build videos but it is what it is and we can't do anything about it so DIY PC is stands to potentially lose some market share or at least stop growing in their existing high growth capacity while we recover from the high DRAM prices see previous video and high GPU prices see previous video so we thought we'd use our new in-house software to benchmark a low npc and an xbox one axe roughly priced the same and see how they do together this is something where you're gonna have to work with us on the pricing of the components because they change and I don't know what they're gonna be when this video goes live but they were about five hundred to five hundred fifty dollars for the PC when we filmed the video let's get a specs table on the screen this is an experiment that we started back before the pricing surgeon everything on the market at the time we were able to price out a $531 PC after rebates with a $157 gtx 750ti a $90 B 250 motherboard a G 4560 and some other parts we'll put the components up on the screen but again all of this is sort of killed by the pricing and again the point of this video isn't to say PC is better than console or vice versa because those are stupid short-sighted arguments and anyone arguing otherwise in the comments section is blinded by an unhealthy fervor for whatever they're arguing for so let's just kind of establish something here there's a good reason to attempt to analyze the performance of each device there's a good reason to look at just a small sample size of two games we're still researching our testing tools and it allows us to see what's a baseline performance for each of these given the current price market pcs of course are fully customizable of course you can use them for work you can use them for development video editing really whatever you want for the most part and tonsils have expanded their horizons but they're still largely driven on media consumption rather than creation or work the console has a perfectly valid use case in its target audience you set it up you plug it into the TV you sit down and you play your game pretty straightforward not everyone wants to build a computer not everyone really has even the idea that you can build a computer it's just there's something you go to the store and you buy for $300 and use it for Chrome for some people so yeah valid reasons for both there are many ways to build a PC you can build a cheaper one than we did here however the prices are crazy and they changed everyday you could you go used and get a 980ti or something like that you could get a cheaper motherboard it's kind of irrelevant when $200 GPS don't exist but you could still do it but anyway let's get through some testing methods here and then get to the benchmarks so we did capture footage of 60fps meaning each frame is on the screen for roughly sixteen point six seven milliseconds that's that's about how long it takes for the GPU to spit out the next frame if it's going to be output at 60fps the games we tested are v synched and they're capped at 30fps that's a thirty three point three millisecond frame time and on the Xbox one that means our footage should always see one unique frame followed by one duplicate frame as long as nothing goes wrong assuming a 30fps output versus a 60fps capture speed so if you follow it's really pretty simple it's if we're putting out 30 FPS because that's what the developers locked it to and we're capturing at 60 then when tapping through the footage you're gonna see unique duplicate unique duplicate unique duplicate and anytime you see unique duplicate duplicate that means we've dropped the frame and from there we can start investigating and see how frequently does the Xbox drop frames in this scenario is it a problem does the user ever realize it so that's kind of what we're looking at from the Xbox's perspective now this means that if we see three identical frames in a row it means the Xbox took roughly 50 milliseconds to render a frame rather than what it should have taken so that's kind of the basics here if we see four in a row which is fairly uncommon it means it took sixty six point six seven milliseconds to render frame and so on and this can be translated back into a more relatable FPS value an average one percent in point one percent lows as we've been doing forever with GPUs so really quickly let's talk about some of the challenges of this type of testing number one graphics Equalization pcs have variable settings consoles generally speaking do not they are fixed setting the first step that we had to do for each game which is why we only have two right now is go through the settings one by one find things in the game and compare them and see what settings look about equal between each that takes a good amount of time because there's a lot of settings you have to go through each individually and then we need to set them so that the PC looks the same as the Xbox so that we are testing apples to apples in terms of graphics quality dynamic resolution scaling is another major challenge with the Xbox the PC unless you tella - does not do this very few games supported the ones that do don't really work properly or require a lot more vram than we have on this card so dynamic resolution scaling is the way the xbox is able to depend on how you look at it sort of cheat its way to run in 4k because sometimes it'll run 4k and then you hit a really rough frame for it to render maybe there's a lot more geometric complexity unusual and suddenly it'll drop down to some odd resolution between 4k and 1080p or somewhere in there and so your rendering for your pixels you're sampling fewer pixels and you're able to render at a higher framerate and meet the target of 30fps or whatever it may be so that is a huge challenge because if we're testing a fixed 4k on the PC because we can't do dynamic resolution scaling or it's not functional or disabled for the card then you're testing that against dynamic resolution on the Xbox potentially it's not really fair so the best thing we can do is 4k on the PC maybe 1440 if it's available we try dynamic resolution and that's what we have for our comparison you really just have to kind of mentally look at it and make an analysis on your own and not just look at the chart and then repeat those numbers on Reddit as if they are absolute fact 100% of the time so hopefully people who need to see that have seen that another couple of small things pcs can always adapt by lowering graphics quality so yes if you see a bad framerate obviously you would drop the resolution to 1080 on a 1050 TI at 4k but we're primarily testing that because it's a it's a direct comparison we do have other numbers though debate over 60fps potential with lower settings versus lower FPS with equal settings there's another thing to consider where on a PC you can go up to 60 plus FPS by lowering resolution do you prefer that or do you prefer the higher visual quality with a lower frame rate potentially granted by a console that's up to you and that's subjective so ultimately it comes down to what you want this is a subjective thing at the end of the day we can test it but yourself to decide do I want to sit on a couch with an xbox or do I want to build an HT PC or something instead that's up to you we'll detail more of the testing methods in the article below but let's roll through destiny - for now we've done a lot of destiny - testing even during the beta and it's proven itself to be a surprisingly undemanding title on higher graphics settings the first challenge of testing each game was trying to roughly emulate the Xbox ones of visuals on PC to make FPS comparisons fairer digital foundry reported that destiny - on the Xbox one X runs at native 4k without dynamic resolution changes and we haven't seen anything in our testing that contradicts that the fov on the Xbox version from what we saw does however appear to be about 10 degrees of less than the PCs default 85 for which we have comparison screenshots the difference appears to be an overall F of V reduction of about 10 degrees as opposed a strictly horizontal or vertical FOV reduction here are some side-by-side comparisons of our Xbox and PC settings the final PC settings we settled on aren't perfect and PC does have a slightly higher environment detailed distance and perhaps slightly lower quality shadows but they're close enough for a fair contest it's difficult to perfectly match settings as the console and PC versions do ultimately have some development differences for which we cannot account and we found that destiny - on Xbox one x roughly equates 4k resolution 75 fov fxaa and disabled or low ambient occlusion settings texture quality appeared to be set to the highest setting on the Xbox which makes sense given that this is entirely a VRAM dependent setting and the Xbox has plenty of that to go around shadow quality appeared to be about low or one level up and most of the other settings appeared to be around medium our first comparison was in the part of destiny - we've used in the past for CPU benchmarking at a different resolution though with different settings and the very first part of the first level with all the fire and the burning to contribute to lighting and shadows is where we start it's not an overly demanding area and we don't enter combat during this particular benchmark but there are some flames and lighting effects to deal with so here's that first chart the Xbox handled this admirably never dropping any frames during logging and maintaining a rock-solid 30fps which is the best it's allowed to do regardless of resolution the budget PC with no frame rate cap or vsync managed a nearly identical average of 29 point 6 FPS call it the same but with 0.1% drops down to 21 point 1 FPS 4k is a huge demand make of a 1050 Ti and in a way of surprising to see a PC that cost less than most 4k monitors even managing to roughly keep up at all keep in mind that at 1080p we easily double this fps it just comes down to how much you value 4k it's unlikely that any PC player on a 1050 Ti would reasonably be attempting to play the game at 4k but the destiny 2 version of the game on Xbox is genuinely 4k and we wanted these tests to be about equal so it doesn't seem to be leveraging dynamic resolution in this case at least not according to our counterparts at digital foundry and again we didn't see anything to counter that either the second test was running back and forth on the farms soccer field without any other players present there's more foliage and distant level detail to handle than the first test and results were recorded during the winter event with some snow falling but there still are no NPCs or players on screen again the Xbox had absolutely no trouble with this not a single frame was dropped in any of the test passes and there were many and the hub level would be more performance intensive if we benchmarked with other players around but that adds too many uncontrolled variables for a reliable test we'll have combat tests in a moment to make up for this on PC average FPS was almost the same as in the first test it handles the grass and trees pretty well and the 1% in point 1% lows aren't dramatically lower than the average performance isn't too distant in this particular test the neon-lit alley filled with enemies at the start of the campaign is the first really demanding segment of the game rain is everywhere explosions go off their flamethrowers multiple enemies spawn it's representative of the demands a destiny to set peace can place on a system the Xbox is still averaged 30 FPS here but for the first time some frames were actually dropped you can see this if we tab through the video file one frame at a time where a few dips emerge as we repeat a couple of extra frames the previous frame is displayed during a frame drop and the GPU gives up and moves on to the next immediate frame trying to catch up there were only a couple of dips during the run but it is possible to force the frame rate to drop under 30 fps just by playing in an area like this one to be fair the dips were basically imperceptible during gameplay you don't necessarily see them but they are still present the PC also had a harder time than in the first two benchmarks and the framerate began to get in the way of gameplay again the 1% in point 1% lows were fairly close to the average and there weren't any individual big hitches it just slowed down a lot in general so one note here destiny - and most other FPS games does genuinely have a noticeable sort of ingress and visual quality as you increase framerate the PC isn't capable of a high frame rate at 4k here so doesn't really matter but if you go down to 1080p there is genuinely a noticeable difference at 60fps versus 30fps and if you can't see it then I don't know what to tell you but there is a noticeable difference unfortunately you have to drop the settings so the Xbox is doing very well here the PC is pretty much keeping up but it does kind of lose that home-field advantage that an Xbox has where you have developers develop for a single piece of hardware or very close to it they're all Xboxes with the same architecture develop for that one piece of hardware optimize shaders for that one piece of hardware it's obviously going to be a bit ahead than an equally priced PC for the most part notwithstanding settings optimizations and things like that we're overclocking or anything else of that nature so they both do pretty well here the Xbox is definitely admirable for its 4k ability in this particular title the PC would do much better if you dropped resolution and increased frame rate that's where it shines more than with the sort of cinematic style that the Xbox is going for Assassin's Creed origins is now it's a trickier title for the Xbox to mimic on the PC since the Xbox version takes advantage of dynamic resolution changes frequently it uses them generously in fact lowering resolution on-the-fly will increase frame rate and the PC version can technically also use dynamic resolution but it's a feature that requires more vram than we have on the card a 1050 Ti only has 4 gigabytes in this instance the Xbox 1x has 12 gigabytes of shared memory we ended up leaving most settings at the high preset but with medium character texture detail low anti-aliasing and medium shadows we then did a test at the 4k resolution with dynamic resolution on and a frame rate target of 30 FPS we also did a final test with no dynamic resolution at 1440p to see what the PC could do at a more reasonable resolution but still higher than what probably most 1050 TI users would be playing at you'd probably be at 1080 this game is also known to like higher core count CPUs so it's potentially unfair to show with the G 45 60 that said we're still trying out our tools here so this is the one we wanted to test the first test is during an in-game rendered cutscene the cutscene in question is at the start of the game the cutscene is rendered in game and features some intense depth of field effects detailed character models and lighting through a doorway and from candles we were assuming that this would prove it stressful to the Xbox based on the framerate dips we'd observed earlier in smaller cutscenes but for the most part it's tucked to 30 FPS every time the camera switches position on the Xbox however it would freeze for a couple of frames which is why the point 1 percent low is so far below 30 it does have an actual freeze just before the camera angle change you don't generally notice that but if you're hypersensitive maybe you would on PC it was like watching a slideshow the average FPS was below the Xbox's 0.1% low dynamic resolution didn't help at all again we didn't have the recommended vram but lower in the resolution to 1440p doubled the average FPS even more at 1080p we were correct and thinking that this was a demanding scene but the PC had a much harder time with it combat is where we experienced framerate drops in Assassin's Creed origins during our last batch of tests previously when we did the first Xbox testing we've refined our testing since then but there are still definitely quite a few drop trains detected we chose the first fight against multiple NBC's immediately before gaining the ability to summon amount it's not an extreme example but there are four to five characters including the player on screen at all times the Xbox did fairly well considering its framerate cap but the 0.1% and 1% lows indicate some slight hitches during the fight just like we saw in our initial round of tests although it was a different scene with different characters on the screen the 1% and point one percent lows are close together here and that's because more than a couple frames took too long to render at 4k the PC struggled with dynamic resolution on or off and comparing frame rates below 30fps is fighting for scraps even so the pcs average is again below the Xbox's point 1 percent low at 1440p the frame rate doubles as it did previously but this time that boosts the average to 41 point 4 FPS more than what the Xbox is capable of even when it's performing at peak performance which is 30 FPS this test is a brief clip of running down a crowded Street in the first town introduced in the game there are NPCs everywhere and plenty of environmental details like buildings and plants to deal with these are the frame rates that can be expected when wandering around in the open world which is quite frequent the Xbox results are basically identical to those from the combat test this could be due to dynamic resolution kicking in to equalize the frame rates though we do see drops in resolution as we play so you're never really gonna dip that far below 30 even though typically it would be doing so average PC frame rate within without dynamic resolution is slightly lower than in the combat test lowering resolution of 1440 P again boost the pcs average FPS above the 30 FPS console kaif this half step between standard 1080p and 4k uhd is a strong point for the PC since assassin's creed origins just doesn't go above 30 FPS on the Xbox even at 1080p and this scene is one we discovered by accident at one point early in the game the player is required to smash down a wall to proceed if a mace is used in this area clouds of dust shake down from the ceiling and the camera shakes violently as the framerate visibly drops it doesn't appear to be the intentional pause on hit effect that some games you since the effects aren't nearly as pronounced when fighting enemies on the Xbox average framerate was twenty eight point seven fps and that's while going wild with the mace and the average is still high because nothing stressful is happening between each hit that said the point one percent lows are when the particle clouds appear and that averages out to twelve fps and that is visibly noticeable to the player even without a framerate counter on PC the average was also higher than it was in walking or in cutscene benchmarks thanks to the mostly empty backdrop the one percent point one percent lows hit that slideshow level that the cutscene did 1440p again is much more tolerable but the low is still bottomed out as dramatically as they did on the Xbox from the perspective of a PC hardware site obviously we do tend to favor pcs for most things that said we can still appreciate where the Xbox does well for this particular test we would never expect a user to actually play 4k on a 10 50 TI the cost of the monitor would exceed the cost of your computer that's crazy someone could certainly try it but it's not recommended where the PC shines because they both have things are good at is higher frame rates by just matching the settings to get the FPS you want that's the beauty of it you can tweak it to do whatever you want it to do for the most part given the hardware that you have so you can hit 60fps you can go down to 1080p you can get above 60fps you can drop settings you don't care about but have a huge impact on performance all kinds of stuff that you can do with a PC you can't do with the Xbox that said with the Xbox you set it up you click Play and you start hitting things with the button on the joypad and that's about the end of it so there is value to both of those things the Xbox certainly does do a bit better at 4k a lot better in Assassin's Creed but we only have a sample size of two games here destiny - they keep up pretty well with each other point 1 percent and 1 percent lows are a bit lower on the PC but the average does more or less keep up Assassin's Creed origin the PC Falls quite a bit behind until you go down to 1440p at which point it begins exceeding the consoles even capable framerate when it's performing that maximum performance so that's kind of the takeaway here the straight of a cheap PC isn't that it's the best at running games is that the settings can be adjusted to the point where it's capable of running the games the $500 available for either a PC or an Xbox right now because the prices with PC is yes an Xbox will probably get you potentially slightly higher graphics settings may be probably a bit higher graphics settings but you're not going to hit the frame rate higher than whatever the game is capped at your 30 or 60 fps that's it probably 30 so yes you get higher graphics quality but you get lower frame rates with a PC they're expensive right now yes you could down spec to $500 kind of sucks to do but because you can adjust the resolution and graphics you can go above 60fps the question to ask yourself of course is what do you want do you want the experience of building a computer and doing it all yourself all the DIY stuff tuning settings all I mean we think that's fun obviously not everyone does buy a console if you don't that's kind of what it comes down to there's plenty of other arguments either way click the link in the description below for the full article written by Patrick Lathan we worked a decent amount on figuring out the software for this one so it's gotten a lot more refined over the initial tests we'll probably do more of these in the future as always you can subscribe for more if you want to support our content you should subscribe because we'll probably do more of this type of stuff but if you're here for PC stuff don't worry still more of that and support us directly on patreon.com slash gamers nexus or you can pick up a shirt like this one at store doc gamers nexus net thank you for watching I'll see you all next time