CheckMag | Consoles might be stagnating, but the gap to PC gaming is only growing wider

Okay, sure, the price of the PS5 Pro has been relentlessly mocked online - and rightfully so. Sure, the Xbox Series X have stubbornly stuck close to its launch MSRP, leaving Microsoft's refresh of its console (which offers little more than a die shrink and more stock storage) looking like lipstick put on an overpriced, four-year-old pig. But just as big of an issue is the fact that the main alternative for those dissatisfied with this status quo is growing more and more inaccessible.

It's true that the PC building process has always been more complex than a plug-and-play games console, but both AMD and Intel's most recent CPU launches have highlighted how the barrier to entry in technical know-how (or free time and effort to study it) has shot up. Zen 5's launch had inconsistencies in performance between workloads and operating systems, leading to reviews quickly rendered obsolete as a frantic patch cycle went on; now, Arrow Lake's launch seems to be the same mess turned up to eleven. Yet worries about making sure you're not set up in a buggy or underperforming configuration are just another item, added to the bottom of a very long checklist of things that a first-time PC builder is going to have to grapple with.

What on earth is upscaling, what's the difference between DLSS, FSR, and XeSS? What about frame generation, do those different technologies work with each other? Everyone says vRAM capacity on GPUs matters, except that it doesn't, until it does? Or for monitors - how come HDMI 2.1 can mean totally different framerate and resolution support between different models? What's all this about real or fake HDR, and what do different kinds of dimming have to do with it? How come there's XMP and EXPO memory to choose between now, doesn't RAM work the same for both Intel and AMD processors?

Just like with the near-extinction of low-power and low-profile GPUs, it's the entry-level total-newbie market that'll be the ones struggling the most with these dilemmas - but it's not just them. Someone who built a PC, say, six years ago, only really had to worry about choosing the i5-8400 or Ryzen 5 2600, whether they wanted more gaming or productivity performance; after all, DDR4 XMP speeds and timings were consistent between sticks, and the GTX 1060 and RX 580 were a coin-toss apart from each other. And yet these gamers - a cohort that learned terminology and read reviews enough to build a Console Killer in a simpler time, but didn't spend the next half-decade keeping up with hardware deep-dives - are a group that will be just as lost and frustrated as someone fresh off the boat from the land of TV-and-controller.

Look, I can pretty comfortably answer each of the questions I posed above. I'm sure many readers here - certainly on a site with thorough review coverage like Notebookcheck, even if a little distanced from the desktop PC space - probably can too. But not everyone is an enthusiast, and to those in that "squeezed middle" of the hobby, a heavily discounted standard PS5 is probably looking more attractive by the day.

Just don't tell them the base resolution it's upsampling from.