Playstation, Xbox, Switch or PC: The Deepest of Dives on Gaming (2023)

This article wasn’t meant to be likened to a dissertation, but as I gather more data in the hopes of presenting an honest and unbiased evaluation of our dearest computational companions, this heading feels more and more appropriate.

Anywho - which console is best? It’s not a question you haven’t heard before. It’s not a question you won’t hear again - you may even read those exact words later in this article. The question may never receive a definitive answer that the rampant game-loving mobs are happy to settle with. However, I do hope that by the end of this article, it is a question that you will feel you have read a compelling, convincing and comprehensive attempt at an answer.

Let us begin by setting up the agenda for the event. Firstly, I am going to introduce the main players. I am then going to analyse the big ticket attributes that help these players game better-er than each other, such as their official price, the price you can probably get if you shop around, the argument over game exclusivity, their computational performance, and also their general-purpose utility.

If you are looking for some simple answers, then my dry answer to you is that the fastest platform for gaming is like the fastest car - you buy what you get - and you can buy parts of PCs that have a recommended retail price of £1,579 (enough to buy an Xbox Series X, PS5, and Switch while still having around £400 to spare). So, yep, PC is the best. I can hear the cheers from “r/pcmasterrace” already. I’m glad we made a website that focuses on PCs.

However, if you are looking for the more complicated and nuanced answers to “What is the best box I can buy and know that my money was well spent”, then please, follow me into the world of charts and statistics!

The first contender is the Xbox. Owned by technology giant Microsoft, the green and black cuboid named after MS’s “DirectX” multimedia software, waded into the gaming market with the direct intention of facing the Playstation 2 in battle - Sony’s second generation console was seen as a threat to the PC market. Microsoft sold the original Xbox at a loss, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming an important player in the gaming market; its following consoles have been more of a success, Xbox Live was a hit, and the Microsoft studios produced some fan favourites such as Forza and Halo. More recently they’re making moves with the Xbox Game Pass, which allows Xbox account owners to have subscription-based access to hundreds of big-ticket games, for as cheap as £1 for a month, on both Xbox and PC. The consoles from Xbox used in their evaluation will be the new, clumsily named “Series X” and “Series S” consoles.

The second competitor is the mighty PlayStation. Born from a fractious relationship between Japanese game company Nintendo and also-Japanese mega-conglomerate Sony, the original PlayStation “PS1” battled with the N64 to appeal to gaming youth. The PS1 was in production for 11 years, well past the release of the PS2, selling almost 100 million consoles and almost a billion games, outdoing all consoles before it. The PlayStation has continued its dominance - although its PS3 met close competition with the Xbox 360, the PS4 is largely considered to have beaten the Xbox One, 18 years after the PS1’s resounding victory. Boasting a huge R&D department, Sony has the capability of integrating novel features into their consoles - starting with the PS3, PlayStation’s consoles have been endowed with Blu-Ray players, giving them compatibility with higher storage disks with the potential for higher quality movies and games, or less disks needed to play large games. PlayStation also has the ability to play VR games, with their PSVR console releases. Their only console in this evaluation will be the PS5.

Our penultimate fighter is the Nintendo Switch. Unlike Xbox and PlayStation, Nintendo uses a blue ocean strategy of making novel, difficult-to-emulate consoles. For example, while the Nintendo Wii was a seventh-generation console, putting it in direct competition with the Xbox 360 and the PS3, it's easy to see that they were competing for customers in very different ballparks, with the latter two consoles focusing on performance when the Wii was focusing on unique gaming experiences. Their most recent venture, the Switch, builds on the same approach. Being labelled as a hybrid console, it can be used both at home, in the form of a docked system that can connect to a TV and speakers, and on the move, with its two controls placed on either side of the screen, allowing gamers to play games whilst travelling and spending time away from home. With the Switch being the 3rd best-selling console of all time, it’s understandable why Nintendo hasn’t appeared to have made the creation of a follow-up a top priority as of yet, making it the only contender for Nintendo in this battle.

And finally, the oldest competitor of them all; so often overlooked by the average consumer, the ubiquitous Personal Computer. Consisting of a general agreement of computer parts, the PC has flourished in the recent history of tech, clawing back market share from the console-favouring gaming industry of the early 2000s. Unlike the previous contenders, PCs don’t have central ownership - “PC” is not a company - and is therefore an “open platform”. There is no licence fee to be paid by game developers and there is no overarching control over what you can and can’t do on the computer. One of the most arguably important factors of this attribute is the lack of “PC Generations”. While the enthusiast market may wait excitedly for NVIDIA or Intel to release their next-generation graphics card or processor, there are no gamers excitedly waiting for PC2; because there won’t be one. There is no next console you have to buy because games aren’t being released for the one you have anymore. Your computer will happily splutter on, trying its very best to play games made 10 years after the computer was manufactured.
For this evaluation, we will be considering three different tiers of Gaming PC in the form of “High-End PC”, the best money can buy, “Mid-Range PC”, the value option that gives a bit of both, and “Low-End PC”, the machine you are getting because… you maybe want a PC? We’ll talk about their potential specs later in the article.

Now that we have met our challengers, read into their backstories, and chosen our favourites, the battles can commence. One of the main attributes consumers care about when buying their fancy new gaming console is the price, but they rarely consider the long-term implications of this. For example, parents, browsing the web with Christmas on the horizon, may see our competitors in an online shop. And they may say “£250 for an Xbox Series S? That sounds good!” - and yes it does, especially when it's planted right next to the PS5 that is £480 (and potentially out of stock).

But what these consumers don’t consider is the long-term cost of these machines in the same way they might consider the price of, for example, years of tuition when considering buying their child a new musical instrument. And since each new console takes around 5 years to release, you can see how it could quite quickly become a long-term investment. Games and platform membership are important price points to consider when buying a console.

To help evaluate the difference between our contenders, the graph below has been prepared, placing these factors side by side for each console.

Here we can see the differences in the overall price for each console when taking into consideration the consoles' initial cost, 5 years' worth of membership, and the purchase of 10 games. For each console, we used the 10 best-selling games over the year 2022 for that console in particular.

Now, initially, we can make a few assumptions. Firstly, lots of yellow, which in this case represents the cost of games; it's quite easy to see how for most of our consoles, by far the largest expenditure consumers will likely encounter will be actually acquiring games for these consoles to run. This is only with 10 games as well, which in the context of a 5-year membership would equate to 2 games a year, so the realistic number will likely be larger.

For every single console within our data, the price of games outweighs the initial cost of the console. For the Switch, the games are double the price of the console - for the Xbox Series S, they’re almost triple. Whilst this may surprise some consumers, it makes sense in the context of companies sometimes selling their consoles at a loss, with the hopes of making more profit with the games and subscription to the platform.

Secondly, subscriptions are expensive. All online games on Playstation and Xbox require players to be part of their respective online membership plans - that is, if you buy a game that is entirely meant to be played online and you don’t have a subscription, you will be unable to play it. There’s good news if you’re looking to buy a PC however; as mentioned in the section above, PC has no central control and therefore has nobody to charge a membership fee. All gamers can access online games such as Fortnite completely free on PC, whereas on consoles you will have to also buy an online pass, despite the game being “free to play”.

It’s important to note that these are all “official prices”, or the price that each company has given for their consoles, games, and memberships straight from their websites. So looking at our chart we can see that, were you to wander into any of these companies' official stores, the Switch would probably leave you with the least emptied wallet after your 5 years of gaming. The high-end gaming PC comes out at the most expensive; with no central company to subsidise the price of the machine, purchasing the computer alone eclipses all other expenses attributed to its console competitors.

Now, as mentioned above, these are official prices. There are plenty of reputable companies that will give you a better price for your purchase, which we’ll dive into below.

In any country, there will exist a 3rd party market willing to provide you with a better price for your games, subscriptions, and also consoles. For this section, we’ll only be looking at the former two since the prices given for consoles can vary greatly, and often come pre-packaged with games to make the price look nicer.

The stores we’ll be looking at today are CEX, a reputable second-hand retailer that sells games and sometimes subscriptions, and G2A, an online store that sends discounted codes to activate digital versions of said games on your consoles. CEX, a UK outlet, has equivalents in other countries for our international readers, such as CashConvertors and GameStop that may provide similar prices.

The data we show below is by no means a guarantee of the prices you’ll be able to acquire. You could get better, you could get worse - but it’s still important to consider the realistic price you can get for games if you shop around.

Below are the prices online for games only.

As we can see, the cost to buy games on all platforms takes a reasonable hit when using second-hand retailers. Here we’ve combined the best prices we found on CEX with the prices we found on G2A to give an idea of the final price if you were to shop around for the 10 best-selling games for each console.

Playstation games take a huge hit with a 60% reduction from their listed price on the official store. PC, whose games were already cheaper than all other opponents, still manages a great discount of a similar amount to Playstation, becoming the cheapest on the graph bar Xbox. We’re hesitant to promote the results of Xbox here; with an absolutely huge discount of 74%, we’re scratching our heads over why it's so cheap to buy second-hand Series X games, so take these particular findings with a grain of salt. If they turn out to have held when we check back in about a month or so, then great news for Xbox gamers, they’ll have the cheapest prices in the industry.

In an unsurprising last place is the Switch. Much to the ire of their own staunch fans, Nintendo rarely has large sales like its competitors do, meaning Switch games retain their high price tags even on the second-hand market. However, it's important to remember that out of our competitors, Switch had the second cheapest price overall for games to begin with, so a 37% discount is certainly nothing to sniff at.

Like games, many subscriptions can be activated or redeemed with a unique code. These can be traded into stores by people who didn’t want them, for example, gamers who already have a yearly subscription but had a code bundled with a game or received it as a gift.

Here are the potential discounts available when buying membership plans from a second-hand retailer:

With reductions, the PC disappointedly stays free, sporting an underwhelming 0% discount. What we can be pleased about, is every other console manages to provide a reduction of some level. The Switch, already having a very cheap subscription compared to its more powerful counterparts, still managed to deliver with a 60% discount, but most of this can be attributed to their incredibly accessible yearly plan, offered on the store at an official price of £17.99.

Continuing to hotly battle it out in their own corner, Xbox and PlayStation are in fierce competition for the cheapest subscription-based service. Xbox no longer offers a yearly billed option of Xbox Live, opting for a quarterly model, resulting in far higher official prices; however, on G2A there are still legacy codes for 12-month plans floating around, meaning you can still beat Playstation’s superior official price of £49.99 for a whole year of online play.

Like consoles, there’s a bit of money to be saved with PCs as well. There are often sales on components and the price of each individual part of a gaming computer can vary wildly over time. For the graph below, we have gathered our proposed PC builds, and calculated the difference between their “typical price” and current price. Typical price here means each part's recommended retail price, or if we couldn’t find that, the “average price” the part has on CamelCamelCamel, a website that allows you to track the price of items on Amazon over a long-term time period.

Here we can see that each tier of PC benefits from its own level of discount, with the low, mid and high-end PCs getting a 32%, 18%, and 12% discount respectively. The especially large discount on the low-end PC brings it much more comfortably into the budget range of most buyers, which goes to show that a gaming PC doesn’t have to completely break the bank. The much more powerful mid-tier PC is also brought to a more affordable level, dipping below the £1000 mark for a very capable machine.

Now that we’ve shopped around and found some slightly more realistic prices, we can take a look at the graph we presented initially and add our new data to it.

With our new chart, we can see a decent drop in the overall costs of these gaming packages. The PS5, originally listed at almost £1500 for 5 years of use, has managed to reach a 32% discounted price of £986. The Xbox Series X faces an even more drastic drop, though due to potentially whacky results for Xbox overall in the discounted game section, we’re still erring on the side of caution when promoting this price.

The Switch, thanks to its great value yearly plan and not-awful game reductions has an overall discount of 33%, making it less than the cost of a mid-range PC.

One might think from looking at this graph, that the pompous PC is finally out for the count. After all these discounts, it's quite clear to see that the prices of these consoles have all dipped below that of the mid-range PC, the option that is most likely to play the best with the budgets of the average consumer.

But all is not yet lost for the PCMasterRace. In the following sections, we will hopefully demonstrate why each of our contenders should be judged on more than just their price tag and their respective marketing.

Exclusives are often touted as a reason to buy one console over another, however, such games can sometimes be made available over time to other consoles. Let’s analyse the availability of games from console to console.

Above we have visualised how different consoles share their “exclusives”. In this context, exclusives can mean a few things, for example:

1. Games that have only ever been released on one platform, for example, all of Playstation’s “Gran Turismo” games.
2. Games that have historically been tied to a certain console that in recent times have started being released on multiple different consoles, for example, “Stray” was originally exclusively playable on PlayStation.
3. Games that had a purposeful “early release” on a certain console before releasing on other consoles with the aim of increasing the standing of the given console, for example, Switch’s “No More Heroes III”.
4. Games that were released as “early access” titles on PC before releasing on other consoles.

That is to say, an “exclusive” in this sense does not carry the same meaning as what console warriors feel in their hearts when they angrily type it in tumultuous debates on Twitter; it rather means “a game that is hosted on a certain console that, for whatever reason, is impractical or impossible to play on any console-based competition, or alternatively had a period of unavailability making other consoles less desirable to the game’s potential buyers.”

We can take a few things from this graph. Firstly, looking at Xbox, we can see that it not only possesses the smallest proportion of perceived exclusives from other platforms but that Xbox-affiliated titles also take up the lowest share of all other platforms - including Xbox itself. This is to be expected as, compared to its most similar competitor Playstation, Xbox has historically held fewer native titles, many of which have run into difficulty recently. Halo is a good example.

Playstation has the third highest number of platform-affiliated games, with a hefty chunk of these being native to PlayStation themselves, courtesy of popular titles such as “God of War” and “The Last of Us”. Although it possesses a slightly larger amount of apparent PC ports from the pool of games we created than Xbox does, this is still not enough to trump the roster of homegrown titles PlayStation brings to the table.

Represented primarily by a huge slab of on-brand red, the Switch’s entry on this chart demonstrates Nintendo’s continued affinity for creating consoles that are often defined by their games, rather than the performance of the machine itself. Out of the 36 platform-affiliated games within our pool that are playable on Switch, 94% of these are Switch exclusives - which isn’t to say that the platform is limiting itself - the Switch still has access to 10% more exclusives than the Playstation consoles do.

Our final entry is the towering column representing the Personal Computer. Whilst this will come as no surprise to avid PC gamers, more casual hobbyists may be surprised to know that the general-purpose computer has far more games available to it than purpose-built gaming consoles. Unhindered by development costs, console-to-console bureaucracy and restrictive hardware specifications, the PC gaming market has been able to foster a very large ecosystem of games that would be difficult to play without a mouse and keyboard, and impossible to run on some of the more “lacklustre” components common in consoles.

This creates an entry in our data that truly dominates the competition. For example, the Switch, whose combined platform affiliated games from Nintendo, Playstation, and, yes, the PC market, equals 31. The yellow section of the PC column, relating to games runnable on PC that are also exclusive to it, is also 31. So even without considering the other 29 “exclusive” games that PC can run from other consoles, such as the Xbox-based Forza, or the Playstation-based “God of War”, the PC beats all other competition with its domestic games alone.

Personally, I believe that the exclusives argument has always been a little silly. Sure, for some people, if their console can play “Halo” or not is a make or break, in the same way, that some gamers will absolutely need to be able to play “Gran Turismo 7”. But this argument is rarely brought up in the scope of all the gaming platforms - it’s typically fought out in online forums between Xbox and Playstation die-hards who both know they are not going to convince each other and only care about being correct. It’s really obvious to see from this not difficult to gather, reasonably unbiased dataset, that when it comes to exclusives, neither Xbox nor Playstation is a top contender in the exclusives bracket.

To show even further how this argument doesn’t really hold water, we can now look at how many non-exclusive games can be played on each console - that is, any game that didn’t have an exclusive or priority release, any game that can be played on both Xbox and PlayStation and any game that has never had any particular affiliation. Please turn your eyes to the data below.

It’s immediately obvious how little of a share these exclusive games take up. For the PC, which still holds the pole position for games playable, its combined exclusive games only make up 12% of the total games playable on it. For the Xbox, it’s even less at just under a tenth. Would you refuse to eat a pizza because one-tenth of it was missing? Perhaps not the most intellectual of analogies, but I hope you find it thought-provoking nonetheless.

The point is, the vast majority of the games available to gamers are playable on most consoles. The outlier in this data of course is the Switch, but those who are familiar with Nintendo’s hybrid console will already be aware that its focus on “novel concepts”, rather than raw computing power, makes it fairly underpowered compared to its competition. Even so, out of the 278 games that we gathered for this section, the Switch can still play almost 80% of them, reiterating that, as far as game availability goes, developers don’t seem to be keen on cutting their audience by dying on the console exclusivity hill.

Performance is a reasonably contentious matter in the gaming community. Most arguments happen around it when it often isn’t even applicable, for example, “Xbox 360 vs Playstation 3”; the 360’s CPU was a modified version of the PS3’s CPU, and it was modified by the same people, and their graphics cards at worst had a 5% difference in performance. While there were some areas in which each console beat the other, they were often very small gains that would likely not impede the gamer on the underperforming console.

There is reasonable analysis to be made, however, when comparing the performance between consoles such as the Xbox Series and Playstation, with lower-power consoles such as the Switch, and generally higher-power machines such as Gaming PCs.

Firstly, we’ll discuss how “performance” manifests in games. Feel free to read ahead if you already know this stuff. There are generally 4 factors where a bad performance machine can drastically affect the experience of someone playing a video game:

1. Frames Per Second - This is how fast a new pane of data is sent to the screen the user is playing on. The higher the number, the better the experience. Numbers can range between 0 and 500, both of which are extremes. Games running at 30FPS are playable, and 244FPS is a fast enough refresh rate to engage in eSports. 60 frames per second is usually the aim for most games as it presents a smooth and fluid experience for the gamer.
2. Resolution - This is how many pixels the game intends to take up on the screen, and is usually denoted with a width number multiplied by a height number, i.e 1920 x 1080 would be a screen that is 1920 pixels wide, and 1080 pixels high. The higher the resolution, the better the experience, assuming that the screen being played on has enough pixels. Whilst resolution can be given in the previous form, it is most commonly denoted by the height value alone, for example, “1080p” Common values you may find are 480p, 720p, 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p. Out of these resolutions, 1080p, or “Full HD”, is the most common, with the majority of TVs and monitors being able to support it.
3. Loading Times - This is how little time the game takes to load up after putting in the disk or launching the game from the console's stored library. The lower this is, the better. Some games can be incredibly fast to load up, taking less than 5 seconds, and some can take longer than 2 minutes.
4. “Quality Settings” - Whilst this is not inherently a factor in performance, the game’s settings are a common set of variables that consoles use to bring games' performance in factors such as FPS and resolution to a playable level. A game can often provide settings in preset modes such as “Low, Medium, High, Very High”, each denoting the quality which the game will attempt to display. This is typically locked on consoles so that the developers can stop users from adjusting any values that might make the experience deviate from what they felt performed best. On PC, it's generally left open for the players to decide what settings they want to play with.

Figuring out which platform performs best is tricky. Firstly, consoles say that a game will perform at a certain level, but then they often have to turn down the quality settings of the game to actually achieve that. Secondly, consoles don’t say how they adjusted the quality settings of games to achieve certain results. Thirdly, PCs perform vastly differently from each other depending on the components used. And finally, finding reliable data on PC's performance compared to each other is difficult.

Also, some performance metrics are more important than others. For the sake of clarity, a higher resolution isn’t inherently better - some games won’t benefit massively from higher resolutions, and it needs an appropriate TV or monitor to support it. Attempting to play in 4K on a 1080p screen will only output in 1080p. Higher frames per second aren’t always necessary either, however, the range of values we have found for this dataset typically reside within the range of frequencies still noticeable to humans, so are not-too-fast-enough to care about. The point is, the inability to play in a higher resolution shouldn’t stop you from buying a console, as 720p is bearable and 4K and even 1440p will be overkill for many situations.

Anywho, we are going to attempt in the best way we can to at least provide some level of analysis at the current level of gaming performance. Due to the issues outlined above, we are going to look at the FPS of games in certain resolutions, whilst keeping PC settings locked to “High” or “Ultra” to emulate the game settings of the consoles.

Now, referring to the above explanations of performance, the graph above shows each console's real-world framerate at the resolutions in the data available. For example, the Xbox Series X manages to run its top 10 games at 1440p at an average of 63.3 frames per second. Or, the Switch, when playing its top 10 games at 720p, averages a refresh rate of 44.2Hz.

I believe there are two main groups present in this data, provided we ignore the High-End PC entry for now. The first group consists of the Nintendo Switch, the Low-End PC and the Xbox Series S, in ascending order of relative computational power. The Switch, sticking to its aim of providing novel content for gamers instead of compute-heavy experiences, has by far the worst performance on the chart. Only 50% of its 10 best-selling games run at 60FPS, and that’s in 720p, the smallest resolution games are typically designed for.

The Low-End PC is next, achieving near 60FPS in 5 out of its top 10 games, but at a much more favourable 1080p. For reference, this result was achieved by running games at either high or maximum settings, something gamers typically would not do on this PC. By turning down the quality of textures and shadows, it's likely that more games would run at a reasonable framerate.

The Series S comes in first in the lower tier group, boasting a near-average 60FPS across all of its top 10 games. This is to be expected considering 3 of Xbox’s top 10 games are Call of Duty titles, which are generally very well optimised compared to other games. Even the Low-End PC manages to run Modern Warfare 2, the most recent Call of Duty title, at 50 frames per second on high graphical settings. In more demanding, open-world games such as Elden Ring or Saints Row, the Series S struggles to maintain this framerate, dropping below what the Low-End PC is capable of, but its performance in big-ticket games such as the CoD franchise and FIFA will be a good sign to much of the Xbox clientele.

Moving on to our higher tier group, it's not surprising to see the PS5 and Series X at each other's throats, joined by the similarly performing mid-tier PC. Starting with the PS5, we can see strong performance across the board for 1080p and 1440p gaming. Data being less readily available for the 1080p resolutions of the PS5’s top 10 games creates a strange trend in the data where the PS5 seemingly performs better at 1440p than the easier-to-run 1080p, however, the average trend in the data shows that this console is a capable machine for running its top 10 games at high resolutions and good frame rates. Unlike the previous entries, the PS5 also has some 4K data, managing to maintain upwards of 30FPS on average, and 60FPS on some titles such as CoD MW2 (another testament to the franchise's optimisation) and Gran Turismo 7.

The Xbox Series X produces similar results, achieving much better 1080p and slightly better 4K performance, whilst taking a decent loss in the 1440p arena. Like the PS5, it’s able to produce an average of 60FPS for both 1080p and 1440p making it a capable machine for playing modern titles.

What’s important to note is the methods the Xbox Series consoles and the PS5 use to achieve this level of performance. Both consoles use a mixture of techniques, but the two main technologies used to achieve high performance, high-resolution gaming are dynamic resolution and AI upscaling.
Dynamic resolution is when a game uses a resolution as a target, rather than actually running at it, and reduces the resolution on the fly to make sure games hit their framerate targets. That is to say, most games running at 4K on the console are actually not running at 4K - they are trying their best to run at 4K, but if the framerate drops below 60FPS, the resolution will shrink to make sure the frames stay high. For example, when the Xbox Series S runs Elden Ring at 1440p, this can generally be achieved when looking at the sky, however, once combat is entered, the Series S will then scale down the resolution to 1080p to cope with the drop in frames that the action causes.

AI upscaling is when the image of the game is run at a low resolution, and then scaled up to the target resolution by an AI system that fills in the pixels it thinks should be present. For example, when CoD MW2 is played on both the Series X and PS5 consoles, they render the game in 1920x2160, then scale up the horizontal axis with AI to 3840x2160 (full 4K). This means that the consoles do not typically run games in native 4K, instead using an AI that produces artefacts that can smudge the edges of objects or make darkness and smoke effects seem lower quality than the rest of the screen. It can usually pull off the effect, however, enhancing the image for screens that can support it.

With the above in mind, we can now move on to the mid-tier PC, which doesn’t usually use these fancy techniques to achieve the performance it manages to demonstrate on our chart. Although some of our results use DLSS, Nvidia’s AI upscaling and frame-generation technology, most results are AI trickery free. This generally means that the mid-tier PC gains comparable performance to the consoles in all resolutions whilst skipping AI-generated artefacts. Once again, the roster of games the PC runs can be a little more intense than what the consoles have to run, potentially causing a drop in frame averages, which we’ll address later.

The high-end PC is our final contender and absolutely destroys the competition. Proving that with PCs, you get what you pay for, the high-end PC can natively run its top 10 games at 4K at an average of 70 frames per second. This trumps what all other contenders can manage at 1440p, never mind 4K.

For context, the chart above is meant to present the FPS data in a way where we can get a general idea of each console's performance, and the results generally follow what we’d expect. Taking into consideration our previous points about what makes a console better than another, we can now map this performance based on the cost of ownership for each platform; the cost of ownership being the figures we discussed above, taking into consideration the price of membership and games, rather than just the console price itself.

To achieve this we can divide the price of the console by the FPS it achieves in each resolution, similar to how you’d find the price per gram of food. After doing this, we found that the Xbox Series X generally performed quite well, so we displayed our results using percentage differences in performance compared to that console. The results are below.

It’s important to remember that these results come from testing these consoles on different games. What is being compared here is each console's ability to run the 10 most popular games specifically for that platform. This may not be the best way to compare performance, but when we are looking at comparing the consoles side by side, it is a good way to create a dataset that will follow the trends of most consumers, and therefore provide the most likely performance buyers are going to expect.

With that in mind, it's quite clear to see that if you are buying a machine purely for gaming, and you are a consumer who is likely to buy some of the most popular games for the console, which you probably are, the Xbox Series X is without a doubt the best machine to purchase. This graph shows that, when the price is taken into consideration, the Series X is the best investment to make when looking at performance in its most popular titles.

We can also see how cost-inefficient the Switch is for this purpose, which brings up another important point. This is based on performance, not experience. Not all gamers want or need a fast frame rate to enjoy their games, and that is a fact that Nintendo’s executives were aware of, and took advantage of. However, since this section is about performance, it can rightly be declared a total loser, providing very little relative value compared to the other consoles at only 1080p.

Writing off the Switch’s performance in the above section allows us to take a more representative approach when comparing performance between the consoles - as shown when looking at the source data for “Differences in Exclusives”, the Switch is often the weakest link when it comes to games shared between platforms. Now that we no longer have to consider it, we can start to build quite a good dataset of shared games and their performance. This removes Xbox’s boon of its most popular games being generally very well-optimised titles and allows us to make a decision based on raw, wide-reaching performance, rather than performance relative to popular titles.

We created our dataset by expanding on what was already gathered for each title, and then also adding Wikipedia's list of best-selling games into the mix. While this amounted to 172 games in total, 128 of these games weren’t available on all of the consoles, and 14 of them had too little data available online to gather a conclusion. This left us with 30 best-selling games shared between all consoles to draw conclusions from. The resulting data can be found below.

As we can see, compared to the data gathered previously, this chart appears a lot less volatile, with expected decrements displayed as the resolution of the played games increases. The Series X and PS5 have closer performance metrics, achieving almost identical performance at 1080p and 2160p. The Series S also faces more renewed competition from the Low-End PC, whilst the Mid-Range PC speeds away from its previously close battle with the high-end consoles, beating them roundly in all resolutions.

As previously mentioned, it is once again useful to peg these performances against the prices of the console, providing us with a reference of how much money you need to spend to get more performance. For the sake of making an easy comparison, we’ll present this data in the form of variance against the Xbox Series X, since it appears to once again be the best value console for performance.

Here we can see the relative performance differences between the Xbox Series X and its competing consoles become a little bit closer, with big gains across all the platforms, especially the mid-range PC, the Series X’s main competitor from the desktop group. What’s also important to consider is that, since this graph is taking into consideration the lifetime costs of these consoles, the Series X heavily benefits from its potentially unrealistic second-hand game prices.

To help see what this graph might look like if these prices did turn out to be an outlier, we can present it in the same format, but simply replace the game prices with their retail values. This is the result.

When we adjust all platforms to use their “official game pricing”, we can see the gap close on all consoles except the Series S. It’s clear to see why the Series S is one of the biggest losers in this scenario - as previously mentioned, the consoles are subsidised so that games and subscriptions can make up the profit for the manufacturers. Bearing in mind the Series X and Series S games are priced identically, both consoles are subsidised, and the Series X is the more powerful console (aka more expensive to produce), we can assume that the purchase of a Series S console essentially means that you are helping to subsidise Series X consoles whilst not receiving any of its higher spec benefits.

We can see that these adjustments present big wins for the PC clan, mainly the mid-tier PC. Whilst the low-tier PC shortens the value gap between 1080p and 1440p performance compared to the Series X, the high-end PC makes ridiculous gains from its negative 41% performance differential to becoming almost on par with the Series X at 1080p performance and surpassing it at both other resolutions, the mid-tier PC becomes the best value platform you can invest in for most resolutions. Being only slightly bested by the PS5 at 4K resolutions, the mid-tier PC destroys the competition in both 1080p and 1440p gaming experiences, likely owed to the uncapped frame rates that are widely available on PC platforms.

At this point, we’ve probably looked over enough data to create a fairly reasonable general comparison between our competing platforms. To get an idea of how each console has been performing over the course of this investigation, we’ll now present a table showing who we best felt won each round and assign points as appropriate.

For the sake of keeping things fair and transparent, we’ll explain these results before we get into the winner thus far.

Round 1 goes to the Switch. Although this round might seem like it should be invalidated by the “analysed money” round, we do think there should be points awarded for the upfront market price of these consoles, as this is what a very large number of consumers look for, especially ones who don’t like shopping around. And, being the best-selling console on this list, it's clear to see why when the Switch, on the surface, presents such a good deal, coming in cheapest compared to all other platforms in terms of lifetime cost. The following positions are awarded based on who was the next cheapest, so not much explanation is needed.

Round 2, in a similar fashion, goes to the Series S, thanks to its low console price and incredibly cheap second-hand game market. As mentioned in this section, the discount on these games was so good that it almost seems dubious, and therefore we treat it somewhat as an outlier - but it can’t be denied that at the time of writing, these prices are available, and the price of its total ownership as a result of our data gathering is fair, so we can’t completely discredit its rankings. Like the above section, the following positions are based on rank.

Round 3 goes to the PC troop. Due to a combination of our lack of enthusiasm for the “exclusives” argument, and the nature of the team-like dynamic brought about by the multiple Xbox and PC competitors in this matchup, this section includes fewer points. The points were handed out based on which platform possessed the most exclusives that other consoles haven’t, or have previously not had access to.

Finally, Round 4 goes to the Mid-Tier PC. For this decision, we used the “accurate differences in relative performance” metric that also is based on the “official price” of games, since the Xbox second-hand game prices might not be entirely reliable. We felt this was the best way to achieve a fair result that would stand the test of time. The following positions were awarded based on the best average performance between resolutions for each console.

Based on the above table, please find the current overall rankings below.

Here we can find our somewhat surprising results. For context, we didn’t have any particular aim when assigning points to each console, or when deciding which stages should be considered as judged, and how points should be weighted for each section, we just assigned what we thought was fair. What we can see here is that the cheapest consoles with the most novel games have been ranked the highest, namely the Low-End PC, followed by the Nintendo Switch. Although this is not the answer I was expecting when setting out to make this article, it certainly isn’t one I’m disappointed by.

As an enjoyer of indie games, I am of the opinion that if you want to enjoy some casual gaming, one of the best investments you can make is a cheap PC (which you can use for quite utilitarian purposes) that can handle cheap and easy-to-run games made by small studios. Hours of fun can be had on such a machine for a fraction of the cost of playing triple-A games on powerful consoles. And whilst the majority of games developed for the Switch can hardly be considered “indie titles”, it’s clear to see the similarity between the mindset of buying a low-end PC and a Switch. So, if you are a consumer out to invest in a new gaming experience, the data we’ve analysed so far would have it that you purchase one of the above consoles - and I can’t say I’d disagree.

The most important part of these rankings is rarely the winners, however. Neck and neck for joint 3rd place is not the Xbox Series X and the PS5 - rather, it is the Xbox Series S versus the Mid-Range PC. It’s interesting to see these two platforms so evenly matched by the rankings produced by our statistical analysis - they are quite different platforms, with very different aims, but it does make sense to see them pitted against each other. The main question raised by this tied matchup is not “Which is better”, but “What are you looking for”. The Xbox Series S provides a cheap and accessible way to get into casual gaming that can quickly become serious when playing games like Rainbow Six Siege - however, if it is serious gaming you are looking for, then the Mid-Range PC can do it a lot better. The tiebreaker for this matchup is simply price. For the mid-range PC, you are paying more for a better experience, and vice versa. Our above graphs have demonstrated that the £500 gulf that rests between these two consoles is mitigated if performance is what you are looking for, with the mid-range PC coming 1st in Round 4, and the Series S coming second to last.
If you’re looking for a definitive answer on this particular matchup, I’d recommend the Series S if gaming is anything less than a hobby. But if you’re on this website, it’s probably a little more than a hobby, isn’t it - so I’d fork out and get the PC.

Sitting in its own little sweet spot is the Series X. Some readers might be angered that neither of the “high-powered consoles” made an appearance in the top 3, but I’d say it’s to be expected. Firstly, if one of these consoles was to appear there, then both of them would have to - they are so evenly matched that they’re practically identical. But secondly, and most importantly, it should be obvious that neither the PS5 nor Series X consoles were heavyweights, especially by this point in the article. The Series X offers marginally more cost-efficient performance in comparison to the PS5, even when official game prices are used - but this is whilst also possessing the by far smallest pool of exclusive games, the type of game which makes up a very large amount of PlayStation top 10 games.

Looking at the PS5, which PlayStation fans will be very upset to see scoring less than the Series X, I feel equally happy with its position as I do the Series X. Despite having the second-fewest exclusives in this contest, it is still an exclusive machine for those who purchase it. Half of its top 10 best-selling games are PlayStation exclusives, but this is a machine that costs £300 more than the best-selling console in this matchup, which coincidentally has a third more top 10 exclusives (The Switch, for those who haven’t caught on). And yes, it plays its exclusives at double, sometimes 8 times better quality (in pixel count) at double the framerate, but if its performance you’re looking for, why not pay £150 more to get the Mid-Range PC, which plays games often at better quality, higher frame rates, and has the most exclusives in the matchup. Get the picture?

Staying on these consoles for a little longer, it’s a good time to consider their purpose. The Series X and PS5 are both undoubtedly high-performance consoles, both in their hardware relative to other consoles, their real-world performance in comparison to similarly priced computers, and also in the strategy of the companies that manufacture them, and the opinion of those who buy them. But they are also marketed at casual machines - nobody claims you can play or compete in eSports on these consoles. They are, by definition, not competitive machines. The vast majority of large competitive tournaments for gaming are on PC, as a computer’s unbeatable performance and far more precise peripherals (very high-quality mice and keyboards) make for a combination that consoles can’t compete with. To add insult to injury, the Switch undoubtedly beats the PS5 and Series X for serious competitive play too - since many of the Switch’s competitive games aren’t available on PC, the Switch is the only platform you can play said games on, making it a viable ESports machine for said titles.
With this in mind, it's important to consider this simple fact - when you buy either a PS5 or a Series X, you are buying a high-performance casual gaming console. A more contradictory statement in this sphere would be difficult to come by. If you’re looking for an answer on the viability of these consoles, here is my response. Buy the Series X if the £302 budget increase necessitated buying the Mid-Range PC is too much. Buy the PS5 if you can’t live without the exclusives - because let’s be honest - if you’re able to afford a PlayStation 5, then a 13% increase in price shouldn’t stop you from buying the far superior Mid-Range PC.

Bringing up the tail end of the rankings is the High-End PC. Even as a heavy PC enthusiast, this makes sense to me. In this article, we’re talking about what is best for gaming, and to discuss that, money is involved. And while the performance graphs show that the High-End PC undeniably wipes the competition clean off the board in raw performance, it falls short in the value-adjusted performance stage and destroys itself in the money-only rounds. Pretending that an RTX 4070 Ti-powered PC would be the best option in this matchup helps nobody - it’s just not. Yes, it can push an extra 100 frames per second out than the high-performance consoles, but is this necessary? With figures exceeding 300 FPS for titles like Overwatch and Rainbow Six Siege, probably not. That would likely not provide much benefit to a full-time, professional ESports player, never mind the general consumer. As an owner of a High-End PC, I must say it's a fantastic investment, and I wouldn’t buy any of the other platforms in this matchup in its place. But it's only a fantastic investment if you love PCs, you enjoy building them, and you generally encounter quite heavy-compute tasks outside of gaming, as developers like myself often do. If that is the case, then the extra 100 frames you might see in games is generally a bonus you receive for investing in a top-end piece of machinery, rather than the absolute aim.

Now, you’ve got your answer. That’s a lot more than most blogs give, eh? “What is the best console you can buy for your buck - it depends on your preference!!” - other blogs, probably. I’ve tried my best to present this data in a fair and transparent way, and I hope that the above ranking helps educate your choice somewhat - but I’m not quite finished yet.

You see, I embarked on creating this article to answer my long-held suspicion, and hope, that PC gaming is the best value experience you can buy. And while I wouldn’t say that hasn't happened in this article, with PC entries taking up 1st place and joint 3rd, it certainly wasn’t the clean sweep I was expecting. The Switch and Series S’s fantastic performance to overall value ratio have allowed them to trade blows with the most appropriate builds I could devise, making this a much closer competition and result than I predicted.

But, you see - the PC has some silver bullets. Some final tricks up the sleeve that the consoles can’t hope to best. If you’ll stick around for these last two sections, or maybe even just skip to the bottom where I’ll provide another quick ranking from these devised results, I might just be able to convince you that the PC not only remains strong but stands impervious from all potential competition, to the point where any slight deviations or incorrect calculations in my mathematics or methods will pale in comparison to the chasm I am about to create.

Now both the “console” and the “PC” suffer from slightly inept naming, born from society's ability to be incredibly lazy when it comes to thinking of interesting words to call things. PC here, obviously standing for personal computer, is easy enough to infer. But “console”, is less so - the Cambridge dictionary defines a console as “a surface or device with controls for electronic equipment”. And this is true - “console” is merely a word that now describes the fact that a machine such as an Xbox or PlayStation is not a personal computer. The ironic fact of the matter is, while both of these words indicate general-purpose capabilities, only one of these types of machines can achieve such functionality.

Have you ever tried to install Microsoft Word on an Xbox 360? File your taxes on a PlayStation 4? Perchance, complete a work presentation on your Nintendo Wii? I believe we all know the answer, but what we tend to take for granted is the fact that one machine can do all of those tasks. But the real kicker is, that very machine if it can game, can do all of those tasks superbly well. I’m sure many readers will relate to the difference in loading times when launching a Microsoft Office tool on a fast work computer compared to the same task on a home laptop. The change in the quality of experience is stark. An Excel task that can take 20 minutes on a well-equipped desktop can take hours on less appropriate hardware.

Now we know that whilst it may not be a fun experience doing work of any kind on a cheap HP laptop, it is undoubtedly possible. So in the pursuit of fairness, that is going to be our reference for our next demonstrations. But we do know that some of you have Macbooks, and we also know you use them far less than you should, considering how much you paid for them. Shame on you. Know that if we used you as an example, we could skip the section “Silver Bullet Number 2”.

The point is, at some point in any given week, you are likely to have a task that facilitates the use of a general-purpose computer, whether that be a desktop or a laptop. A task that could not be easily completed on a console, but could be easily completed on a gaming PC - even a low-end gaming PC can fulfil tasks better than many office desktops. With this in mind, please cast your eyes on the familiar chart below.

It's easy to see how buying more tech to fix the mistake of buying a console can make the PC options appear a lot more appealing. To be clear, this laptop is probably one of the cheapest laptops that might last 5 years. We ignored sub-par tech like Chromebooks and Streaming laptops, but that isn’t to say we cashed out - this is a £319 laptop. That buys you an i3 processor that is now 2 years old, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. We stress this is a very low-end laptop. But, even were you to buy this very underwhelming machine to make up for the general-purpose abilities your console lacks, it would still mean you spent more money than buying the £1142 mid-tier PC. Both the Series X and PS5 now cost in excess of £1150 over their lifetime when buying a laptop alongside the console is considered.

The Switch and Series S aren’t spared either. Their originally low prices actually exacerbate the effect of adding on a laptop, with the once bargain price of the Series S increasing from £594 to a nauseating £912. The Switch costs £100 more than the Series S, making it only £30 cheaper than investing in the Mid-Range PC.

So, to clarify; when you purchase a Switch, thinking only of its gaming ability, and neglecting to acknowledge that its only purpose is to play specific games that you also have to buy, the price difference compared to buying an incredibly capable Mid-Tier Gaming PC amounts to a single Uber Eat’s meal. If you buy a Series X or PS5, you are actually losing money according to our data.

Let’s revisit our chart that shows the value-to-performance ratio relative to the Xbox Series X, and see how much more cost-effective buying a PC is when we consider that a general-purpose machine is still a necessary part of modern life, regardless of whether you purchased one.

As expected, we can see the gap between the consoles and computers increase dramatically. For 1080p performance, the Mid-Tier PC provides 27% more frames per £ than the Xbox Series X. The difference is even more stark when we compare the Low-End PC, so far our winning platform, with the Series S, its computationally closest console competitor - a 35% value difference when it comes to 1080p gaming.

We’re aware that you might already have a laptop, making this section irrelevant. Sell it! Sell it now! You take it outside like twice a month, and half the time it doesn’t leave the laptop bag! Is having that convenience worth a 35% value per frame deficit?!

In all seriousness, as our analysis has been rather price-focused, these changes necessitate a recalculation of our rankings. This is not the final ranking, but an intermediary one in the same vein as our previous ranking, for those who want to see how this section, in particular, affects our results.

The greyed-out rows, namely the “Raw Money” and “Exclusives” rows, have remained unaltered as a result of this ranking. This is because it felt unfair to include the laptop price in the “Raw Money” section, as this is technically another bout of analysis. The exclusives were left unchanged for obvious reasons. It did cross my mind that technically the other consoles should gain access to other games since the laptop would technically be able to play them, however, this laptop is so low specced that it would likely struggle to run them, and evaluating whether or not it could is out of the scope of this section.

This adjusted table gives the below ranking.

As expected, the PC clan climb to new heights when considering the added cost of purchasing a separate multi-purpose system. The Low-End PC asserts its dominance over the Switch due to the latter console's higher price of purchase. All consoles face a drop in points due to their value per frame metrics decreasing, allowing the Mid-Range PC to surge to 2nd place, and the High-End PC to clamber out of last place to beat the PS5 and face off directly against the Series X.

Whilst the 2 cheapest PC builds have claimed their rightful place at the top of the board, the High-End PC is still struggling to join them - hopefully, our second silver bullet will be able to secure its place at the top of this ranking.

If you haven’t explored the other areas of this site as of yet, you might not know we enthusiastically sing the song of praise of the second-hand component market. But we do. Sites like eBay are great places to get second-hand PC parts at a bargain price. Many people always like to have modern components; cards and boards and chips that were made in the last year or two. But cards such as the GTX 1080, which is now almost 7 years old, can still routinely beat modern consoles when it comes to rendering power. Bearing this in mind, we’re going to adjust our proposed builds to use components that are equivalent in power, but use the second-hand market.

For our prices, we’re going to use the lowest “BuyItNow” price of the component we look for. This will be within reason. This is really for demonstration purposes, as it's unlikely you’re going to build a PC exactly the same as us - we already have drawn pretty solid conclusions in the earlier parts of this article, and this section, as is any section that relies on second-hand market fluctuations, is intended to be taken with a grain of salt.

The above graph now takes into consideration the updated price of the PC packages with their new components. Notice this graph does not include laptop pricing as the above section did - this will be included in our final section.

The Low-End PC took the heaviest discount when second-hand parts were considered for purchase, with a 31% reduction in price. It is well known the GTX 1650 graphics card is a bit of a fad. Currently costing around £160 whilst being almost 4 years old, it is quite an expensive card for performance that was underwhelming at launch and is even less appealing now. We actually managed to upgrade this build to a superior card whilst saving money by replacing it with the GTX 980. The upgraded Ti variants were also available for this card at a similar price, but since we aren’t going to gather any more data for real-world gaming benchmarks, you’ll just have to imagine the nice boost in frames received.

We also managed to find an identical SSD for a 64% discount on the price we found, and a PSU at a 43% discount, alongside other great second-hand deals that helped drive down the cost of this machine.

Our Mid-Tier PC also received a favourable discount of 28%, owing to steep discounts on the RAM and storage, and a switch from the RTX 3060 GPU to the GTX 1080 Ti, a more powerful card. We also switched out the motherboard for a different B660 which was available on eBay, resulting in a 50% discount for the motherboard.

Sadly and expectedly, we could only manage a 5% discount on our High-End PC. Since it’s already using cutting-edge parts, there aren't really any parts available that would be cheaper but outperform them - nobody wants to sell their parts yet since they’re only about a year old. We managed to get a 33% discount on the case and power supply, and a 26% discount on the RAM, but since these were some of the cheapest parts of the PC, the discount didn’t end up being life-changing.

The time has come to combine the results of our two silver bullets, to see if any meaningful gains can be made for the PC team against the consoles.

Firstly, we’ll take a quick look at the cost graph - not a huge amount has changed here, though it is important to note that the mid-range PC is now cheaper than all of the consoles, including the Series S. Once again, to gain a true understanding of how much these price changes have affected the overall rankings, we must return to the price per frame chart.

Once again, we see huge gains for the PC team, with the low, mid and high-tier PCs each gaining a value-weighted performance boost of around 15%. As a reminder, this is just from taking into consideration second-hand parts, and the need for a multipurpose machine alongside a games console - these aren’t unreasonable things to consider, and it just goes to show the insane value of a gaming PC when you take advantage of what makes it so useful - its multipurpose nature, and lack of a central governing body.

Let’s take one final look at the scores for this lengthy endeavour.

Here we are, at the final rankings for this deep dive. As a result of the combined silver bullets, we can see that surprisingly, the High-End PC fails to claw itself to a higher position - but, perhaps expectedly, the Low-End and Mid-Range PCs further cement themselves as the absolute best value picks.

This ranking has reached a place I really am happy with, and believe reflects what many people feel about gaming. Firstly, I believe, deep down, people want a good deal. While unsavvy buyers and consumers buying gifts for others might get swayed by the pervasive marketing of the Xbox and PlayStation brands, those who are actually looking for a gaming experience will often find that they are not the answer. Put it this way; if this wasn’t the case, the Series S wouldn’t exist, because every gaming fan interested in Xbox would already have a Series X.

A Low-End PC, as demeaning as the name might be, is an absolutely fantastic investment for the consumer who is cautious with money, but doesn’t want their spending habits to deny them a good time. The vast majority of indie games are within reach of the capabilities of the build we have created, with many high-end games also being more than playable - as mentioned earlier in this article, PC users, unlike console enthusiasts, have the ability to tone down their game settings incredibly precisely to achieve the best balance between performance and graphical quality. Call of Duty titles may have only run at 50FPS on this PC, but that was on “Ultra” settings - in all of the benchmarks we examined, “Medium” settings provided a very graphically pleasing experience whilst maintaining a stable 60FPS during intense gameplay. Only the most visually demanding and/or simulation-heavy games are out of the reach of this PC, and that’s a great thing considering that you’ll only pay around £500 for the whole 5 years.

If you want to play the whole, vast catalogue available to the PC platform though, then look no further than our runner-up, the Mid-Range PC. With performance that on average beats all other consoles over all 30 best-selling games tested, you’ll be spoilt for choice. As most PC gamers will tell you, 10 games over 5 years won’t happen - it'll be far more. And a good thing you’re on PC, considering that (if we ignore dubious data for Xbox) their games are the cheapest among all consoles in both the official and 3rd party market. What’s best of all after all these books is that, after these last two sections, we can see that it’s also cheaper than all other consoles when you take into consideration its large range of utility features. If you’re looking for something with a little more punch than the Low-End PC, look no further, as we have an absolute no-brainer with the 1080 Ti middling build.

The Switch is the highest-performing console in our matchup, showing that performance doesn’t have to be the make or break of a good gaming experience. A true exclusive machine, Nintendo’s latest console has a plethora of critically acclaimed titles guaranteed to entertain, whether you’re playing on the TV in console mode, or on the go in transport mode. With its lack of multitasking capabilities though, it must be noted that it is an expensive package to buy if you are not interested in the games available on the Nintendo platform - if you’re looking to play casual indie games for a budget price, it’s hard to recommend the Switch over the Low-End PC unless you specifically intend on playing games found within Nintendo’s circle.

Following on from the Switch are the two Xbox consoles, with the Series S pulling in front of its performance-oriented big brother. The value proposition of the Series S is hard to ignore - one could purchase this console, 10 games, 5 years of subscription and a laptop for less than £1k. Its performance on large titles typically matches the Series X which most people will notice, but if you are wanting to play in 4K in a couple of cases that are allowed, or want to engage an ultra-competitive FPS mode on a console that is not aimed at a truly competitive audience, then look to the Series X. Being the cheapest high-performance console (where the PS5 is its only competition), it undeniably has good performance value, especially if we take its incredibly low 3rd party games prices at 3rd value. Even if we don’t, the Series X still routinely beats the PS5 when considering price per frame.

We would now normally talk about the PS5, since it is usually so identical in matchups with the X that it needs to be talked about first, but in our rankings, the High-End PC has actually managed to maintain its position dividing these two consoles, which I must say is somewhat fitting. What we are seeing at the bottom of this ranking is the three “competitive” consoles, machines that push out high performance for either stunning visual quality, or insanely responsive play. Whilst all these consoles can play games in 4K and routinely push games past the 120FPS mark (change routinely to “sometimes” if you’re on a console), only the High-End PC truly appeals to the competitive gaming clique. If you are one of those people who wants to have the most intense, unbeatably responsive and breath-taking experiences, then always pick the High-End PC over the consoles - assuming your pockets are deep enough. And if they are not deep enough, buy a mid-range PC.

Finally, we reach the PS5, sat all the way at the bottom. Not competitive in exclusives, expensive performance per frame, annoying subscription costs, games priced higher due to high console-based development costs - these are all things we can say about both the Series X and the PS5. Only, the main difference between the Series X and PS5, is that the lifetime cost of the PS5 is more than an additional £150. Yes, the PS5 has more exclusives, but marginally, as demonstrated by our exclusives section, especially in comparison to the PC and Switch. Let’s say you are one of those people though; you desperately want to play “God of War Ragnarök”, “Gran Turismo 7”, and “Horizon Forbidden West” - the total combined official prices of these games is £210. Factor in the price difference between Series X, and you’ve got £360. If paying an extra £360, which could buy you a laptop, or even our build for the Low-End PC, is worthwhile not playing on Xbox, then the PS5 is for you.

So there we have it. Although the PC does reign supreme, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that its competition is starting to fight a little harder. Like other articles love to remind you, it is of course your choice to choose which platform is best for you. You do possess free will, and whatever console is for you will be down to your preferences. But I believe the only preference that would draw you towards PlayStation and Xbox is your preference for alluring marketing and deceivingly low console purchase costs. I believe that the only platforms the general consumer should be considering are the Low and Mid-Range PCs and the Switch. They provide great gaming experiences, whether that be through blistering performance or novel game design, and they all do so at a reasonable price.