PC vs GFN?

[Igor Kadan]

I had an interesting argument with a friend recently.

Let's say you use Apple devices on a daily basis for your work and life routine, and you don't need a PC for that. The only thing you need a PC for is gaming (not console gaming, PC gaming exactly).

Would you rather spend a couple of thousand bucks to build your own gaming PC at home or pay $90 a year for GeForce Now (or any other similar platform) and play on your MacBook + external monitor?

 

[BeardyHat]

If these are my only two options, I would probably piece together a PC for gaming, but decide on my budget, my target games and performance desired (Am I looking to play say, Baldur's Gate 3 at 1440p 144hz for instance) and go from there.

I wouldn't choose streaming simply because I do not like it and don't find it reliable, but your mileage my vary.

But also: The best gaming device is the one you already have. In this case (and I should take my own advice here), I might start looking at games that look interesting or fun to me, but run natively on a Macbook. A quick Google search turns up a nice list of indies via Reddit. And if your flavor is more towards the AAA space, depending on the age and specs of your Macbook, it looks like there's a lot to play there, as well.

But also, you can play a surprising amount of stuff on older, less powerful hardware, especially at lower settings. My HTPC was taking everything I could throw, playing smoothly at 1080p/60fps with an old i7-7700k and GTX 1070. It runs Spider-Man Remastered great, Dead Space Remake great, RDR2, etc, etc. Buying an old Workstation on eBay (or locally for cheaper) for $200-$300 would get you similar specs, then throw in a video card for $100 (GTX 1070's are just about exactly $100 on eBay) and you've got yourself a very capable 1080p Gaming machine.

That HTPC I'm talking about, Benchmarks almost 2000-points (in 3dmark) higher overall than a newer laptop with a i7-11850H and a 3050 Ti in my own testing. That's hardware that's 5 years newer, performing worse (or in the case of the CPU, on par. Granted, a desktop CPU vs laptop) than significantly older architecture.

 

[DXCHASE]

Id get a PC and you dont need to spend "a couple thousand bucks" to do that. You might be used to using Apple stuff, but you can absolutely play a bunch of games with pcs ranging from 700-1300 bucks. Not to mention the thousands of tasks you can do on a PC over a console.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

My only real argument against Geforce Now if it worked perfectly is that I like playing around with hardware. From what I can see it will just let me buy Steam games as normal and run them through it.

Looking at the options here in Europe it costs €130 a year for the mid tier, which gets you 6 hour sessions and 'shorter queuing times'. To be fair thats less than I tend to spend in a year on hardware, though I'd still need a monitor and some sort of reliable system to stream through.

A lot of whether its worth anything to me would be based on how much the latency was a problem but also how long am I going to be waiting in a queue? Because sometimes I might want to play for 1/2 and hour while my wife has taken the kid to a park and I dont want to be waiting 10 minutes of that time to get logged in.

 

[Alm]

As gaming is my favourite hobby, I’d prefer having a dedicated PC. I think streaming services are OK though. I thought xcloud was good through quest 3.

 

[Pifanjr]

My main problem with streaming services like that are their availability. If I only have 30 minutes to play, I don't want to wait 5 minutes in a queue first, nor do I want to spend time messing around with my internet connection if it's unstable or be unable to play at all.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I had an interesting argument with a friend recently.

Let's say you use Apple devices on a daily basis for your work and life routine, and you don't need a PC for that. The only thing you need a PC for is gaming (not console gaming, PC gaming exactly).

Would you rather spend a couple of thousand bucks to build your own gaming PC at home or pay $90 a year for GeForce Now (or any other similar platform) and play on your MacBook + external monitor?

All of us have made this decision IRL just without the Apple. We could easily buy a $100 Chromebook and sign up to Geforce Now, but we don't. We use our own PCs.

 

[Zimbaly]

Well depending how the markets go I'd buy a pre built.

Back before covid started I was gonna build a pc, but all the parts prices went bonkers when covid hit. So I decided to buy a pre built when I saw it was the same price for a few parts and it had way better stuff in it then I was going to buy.

I've had it for a few years and when prices normalized I tossed in more ram and a 3060.

Runs good and does the job.

I know acer nitro's get ripped on, but honestly in all the years of pc building it so far has run the best with the least amount of issues..... and if ya turn it on it's side it looks like a old school game console from some bad 80's movie.
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