As far as video games go, I’ve been a console player my whole life, starting out with classic Nintendo consoles before graduating to Xbox and PlayStation systems over time.
Currently I own nearly every retro gaming console under the sun as well as my Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch, with a Steam Deck for some portable play every now and then as I prefer my Switch in docked mode.
The Nintendo Switch will soon be traded in for a Nintendo Switch 2 though, which I can’t wait to try.
I’ve always been curious about PC gaming though, not just because of the more varied library of games but also that promise of better graphics, better framerates, and a better overall experience. I was sceptical, but I’ve since dipped my toe into the PC gaming pool and the water wasn’t half bad.
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NVIDIA hooked me up with a pre-built MSI MAG PANO M100R PC and a shiny MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16G GAMING TRIO Series graphics card to use with it, as well as an ASUS ROG Swift OLED monitor to play the games on, a gorgeous display that made every game pop. The GPU in particular is on the more affordable side of things, costing £429. As a casual, I can’t speak towards the PC’s specs as while I’m sure they make perfect sense to those who’ve been PC players for a while, most of the jargon soared straight over my head. That’s what I’d consider to be the biggest hurdle when it comes to PC gaming, and why so many of us are content with our Xbox and PlayStations, aside from the price, of course
I was lucky to have my PC prebuilt for me; all I had to do was unscrew some bits and plug in the graphics card. It was an easy enough process but it didn’t stop my hands from shaking as I went to plug the card in. I was very scared of damaging the connectors.
But once everything was set up, I dove into a few games, and I’m going to go through everything I noticed or observed about the PC gaming experience from my completely green point of view. My hope is if there’s anybody on the fence about giving PC gaming a go, this might help you make up your mind, as there are plenty of pros and cons based on my personal experience.
Let’s start with an easy one and talk about the games themselves. High-end PC gaming promises maximum performance on the latest games, making them both look and play better than their console counterparts. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice the difference, particularly in the framerate as gameplay felt smoother than anything I’d played before. It’s hard to put into words how it felt different; it just did and I can’t really explain it further. Resolution was also an improvement, and it made games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 even more striking, especially since I had already started my playthrough on Xbox. The difference was abundantly clear.
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For those who want to experience the latest games at their very best from a presentation standpoint, there really isn’t any competition with PCs, provided the game’s are optimised well.
Now for something a bit more trivial, I want to talk about the keyboard and mouse. I had a few cheeky games of Balatro while I was waiting for other things to install and I never want to play it in any other way. When it comes to actual exploration or combat gameplay though, like in Clair Obscur or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, I prefer controllers. There’s nothing inherently bad about mouse and keyboard for such games but at the end of the day, it comes down to preference and my preference is a nice little lump of plastic with buttons and triggers on it, enough said. Luckily most PC games support controller anyway and mine either connected via Bluetooth or wired depending on what I had handy at the time.
What PC offers that I really valued though was how flexible it was, and this ties back to the graphics and framerate boost I was talking about earlier. I ran most games through NVIDIA’s driver which gave me loads of options for how I wanted to play. Most of the time, I went with whatever the driver recommended but for scientific purposes, I’d occasionally fiddle around with the settings to see just how far I could push the hardware. There were, of course, some technical issues every now and then, but nothing more drastic than, say, the sound disappearing - and it turns out that was due to one of the PCs drivers not being updated properly, my bad.
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It was an interesting balance of more technical freedom and quality control, with the caveat of there being more maintenance involved. With an Xbox and PlayStation, you simply plug it in, log into your account, and play. Any issues you encounter both in-game and through the hardware itself can be patched out by the provider. While the same can be said for PC games, the responsibility of maintaining the hardware is on you, which means there are a lot of updates and diagnostic checks to be done to keep things running smoothly.
Overall though, the biggest issue I had was finding a place to put the thing, so my biggest advice to anyone getting a PC is to pick out a place for it to go first, as I had to completely reorganise my living space to accommodate the rig and monitor.
It was all a worthwhile endeavour though. My final verdict is that PC gaming isn’t for me right now, but is definitely something I’ll be diving back into in the future, and I’m glad to have come to that discovery. For the time being, I’m happy with my consoles but I wouldn’t mind a decent gaming laptop at some point soon to play some games that haven’t come to Xbox or PlayStation yet.
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PC gaming can be incredibly daunting at a glance, especially if you’ve been a console gamer your whole life as I have, but my experience has taught me that it’s really only as complicated as you make it. Longevity is still a concern as the hardware just keeps improving and improving, but I don’t think you should ever be scared of going for a more cost-effective option, like the RTX5090, for example, which is far cheaper than the previous model. It’s all about finding the right rig for you, and there are options to accommodate all types of players.