by As long as I’m a gamer, I’ve always stuck with home consoles. From the NES to the PlayStation 5, consoles have always been my gaming home base and I loved the convenience of them. When it comes to PC gaming, though, I’ve always watched from a distance, envious of the buttery smooth frame rates and graphics, but intimidated by the parts, drivers, settings, and prices.
But the time had come. I needed a new PC anyway and I was ready to see if everything the folks at PC Master Race were preaching really lived up to the hype. As it turns out, I didn’t believe when I was told what PC gaming had to offer, but still feeling it did for myself.
Done Player 2
My first step into the wider world of PC gaming started with some research. Knowing my technical limits, I immediately skipped the custom or DIY models and looked at what prebuilt gaming PCs were available. In theory, these should be as intuitive to get started as a console and allow me to familiarize myself with the platform itself before deciding whether or not to dig deeper and tinker on my own.
After some research, but mostly relying on recommendations, I finally went for the Player 2 Prime from NZXT. This model, I was told, would easily match or surpass what my PS5 could do. The product page was partially indecipherable to me, which is what I expected, aside from the type of graphics card and amount of memory (which happens to be an Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti and 32GB of RAM).
The key specs section ended up being the most helpful to me as a newbie to PC gaming, especially the box that estimated how many frames per second (fps) I’d get with games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare And Fortnite at different resolutions. I had never experienced triple-digit fps before, so that alone got me excited to take this leap.
Technical setup issues were half of what kept me away from PC gaming all these years.
As advertised, the Player 2 Prime arrived and was as easy to set up as a console. All I had to do was take it out of the box and plug it in, my monitors, keyboard, and mouse, and I was good to go. At least, that’s where I was resold.
Immediately I was hit with a problem that felt like a bad omen. I’m not sure how or why, but the Bluetooth range on my particular device seemed comically short. I’m talking about not being able to use headphones more than a foot away from the tower levels of bad. Fortunately, I have wired options, but if I were someone who only used wireless accessories via Bluetooth, this would be a huge problem.
Setup issues like this were half of what kept me away from PC gaming all these years. But determined not to lose heart, I persevered. If this PC could live up to the promise of high fps and eye-popping graphics, I could forgive some technical glitches along the way.
Maximize
I didn’t feel confident enough to invest heavily in games for this new PC. After all, I wasn’t completely sold when I committed to the PC platform. Thankfully, there are plenty of free PC games out there that are more than capable of showing me what this new rig could do. Since I’ve played thousands of games Halo 2 And Halo 3 before going back to PlayStation, I thought Halo infinity would be an appropriate place to start as I knew what to expect. A download later I was in the settings menu.
My first assignment was to set everything to maximum. Graphics, shadows, texture quality – the whole nine yards – were set as high as possible. I also touched on the handy fps display option because, especially coming from a console, my eye for frame rates above 60 isn’t as sharp. Once that was done, I loaded into a match. All it took was that one game to make me doubt I’d ever go back to consoles.
Locked, and I mean locked, at 120fps, I’d never felt like I was in control of a first-person shooter. My aim was snappy, the controls were responsive and everything just felt better in a way I had always heard of but couldn’t understand until I experienced it. This despite my unfamiliarity with keyboard and mouse controls. Nevertheless, that one match was it – I was converted. If games could feel like this, how could I ever go back to the way I used to play? It would be like going back to standard definition TVs after experiencing 4K.
I know I’m on my honeymoon right now, but I’m going all in on PC gaming.
Still, Halo infinity is now a few years old and certainly doesn’t push the graphic boundaries. Of course, if my PC was as modern as advertised, it wouldn’t have a problem handling whatever that game had to throw at it. My next test would be something new, or better yet, upcoming. I chose the demo for the Resident Evil 4 redo.
When I fired up this demo, I found myself really excited to get into the settings menu to see what all I could crank, and I once again pushed everything to the limit – even adding ray tracing. However, instead of a max fps I left it on variable this time. According to the counter, this resulted in frame rates above 160 fps. Once again, that blissful responsiveness swept over me and, without really noticing it, I completely forgot to keep an eye on the frame counter. I’m sure I would have noticed if it dropped significantly, but here’s what I’d call the best case scenario: I was completely engrossed and immersed in the game. No technical hiccups or “PC problems” cropped up.
I know I’m in my honeymoon now. More technical issues are bound to arise, but there’s also a huge community of players with years (or decades) of experience I can turn to. Knowing that, I’m surprised to say this, but I’m much more comfortable going all in with PC gaming than I thought.
No, I haven’t sold my PS5 yet, but I do know which platform I’ll spend more of my gaming time on in the future.
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