Comments on: If you’re buying a PC this Christmas, buy a Mac

By: mupwangle

mupwangle — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:34:17 +0000

That’s exactly what they said about Doom 3. Really.

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:10:57 +0000

Oh, I dunno. Crysis is the exception surely?

By: mupwangle

mupwangle — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:53:46 +0000

Yeah, but the point is – how many games do you have to buy to make it worth spending more on a single graphics card as opposed to a console? You can get a 360 for less than £200. At a push you could get a machine to *load* crysis for that. It would suck mightily. If Doom 3 is any example, it will be a matter of months before the Recommended Specification for Crysis is the minimum spec for all new PC games.

When I worked for Gateway, the happiest sound you could ever hear was someone asking for a computer to play 3d games. Instantly double the unit price. That certainly hasn’t changed in the last 8 years.

I think we’ve reached the point where graphics are starting to become a little irrelevant. I think that (for most games) they’ve become good enough. Someone pointed out something in a Plasma TV review the other day that is equally true of games as it is on movies. The reviewer noticed a slight green tinge to a certain shade of black in a particularly dark scene during a film. If you notice that then you’re obviously not enjoying the film.

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:51:16 +0000

Fair enough. It’s still a tenner difference in most retailers, though: eg amazon does COD4 for £30 PC and £40 Xbox.

By: mupwangle

mupwangle — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:19:03 +0000

>>PC games are typically £20 cheaper for the same titles

A top-tier PC game will retail at £30 and a 360 game (despite the RRP of £50) will always retail at £44 max, but even that is unusual. The last 3 360 games I bought were £32 (Mass Effect, Assassins Creed and Devil May Cry 4) and £30 for Super Mario Galaxy, all within days of release.

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 09:01:43 +0000

Then again, PC games are typically £20 cheaper for the same titles, and there’s the whole modding scene…

By: mupwangle

mupwangle — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 08:58:46 +0000

>>But for gamming I would suggest PC rather than Xbox nor PS3, the first release always on PC. I think you guys will agree with that

Not really. Other than Crysis and WOW, there are very, very few notable PC exclusives. There are definitely more games launched on the PC, but not necessarily good ones. The biggest selling game of last year was a simultaneous release on 360, PS3 and PC (COD4) and they reckon that the biggest selling game of 2008 won’t even be released on the PC (GTA4). Also you don’t need a new graphics card to play them.

By: wyane

wyane — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 03:58:18 +0000

Yea, I agree with that. If guys are doing creative, the first choice is Mac, for video or music, PC or Mac both suitablt. But for gamming I would suggest PC rather than Xbox nor PS3, the first release always on PC. I think you guys will agree with that :D

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 19:10:28 +0000

That’s pretty typical of the mac/pc user – it either works or is a totally pain the in the floppy drive.

Does Picasa [http://picasa.google.co.uk] on Windows not support RAW?

By: david

david — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 10:08:22 +0000

OK, so mibbe I’m starting to side with some of the mac fanboys. Took some pictures on the way home from work last night (only a couple online) and decided to faff about with NEF format (Nikon’s proprietary RAW format). Plugged the camera into the mac and edited the photos and uploaded them to flickr. Took some more later on and tried to do the same on the PC. So far it’s taken me about 2 hours. Photoshop 6 and PaintShopPro 7 can’t deal with NEF. (There is a plugin for PS7 and above) The Nikon (trial) software that I downloaded worked but ran like a pig (this is a new P4 3.2Ghz with 512Mb memory) and another trial app worked for a few minutes then completely locked up. These progs were hopeless – the Nikon one couldn’t batch convert and due to the speed were unusable for editing and the other one batch converted but couldn’t edit.

iPhoto just worked. I hate to admit it though. ;-)

By: david

david — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 08:44:07 +0000

All I tend to do at the moment is change brightness/contrast and cropping so iPhoto is ideal. Photos from the weekend are up on http://www.flickr.com/photos/mupwangle as usual.

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 08:03:36 +0000

Yeah, I love iPhoto. Although it runs like a pig when you’ve got a stupidly large digital photo collection.