console version?

Err... updating the computer is practically not necessary that much anymore thanks to the fact that consoles drag the requirements down. Also it is crazy expensive to make games that employ graphics that are good enough to overstrain current hardware. I've updated my hardware 1 year ago, spent 500€ back then, and played Crysis 3 a month ago at full details 1080p.
Hardware updates become less and less important with current games.

But I do understand what you are getting at, ofc it has certain advantages if all players use the same piece of hardware. However that advantage gets smaller and smaller because of the lower requirements of new games compared to the available hardware more and more people just played at maxed settings anyway.

I agree that of late performance gains are fewer on a per-core basis. However, I think games are on the cusp of true multi-threading support.

PA is a great example of this, it appears the engine is not hampered by multi-threading, and may in fact scale in a linear fashion, with more cores added.

At that point, we are off again on a hardware upgrade path, 8 cores tomorrow, 16 cores in 3 years, 32 cores in 5. Intel may pull out their chip that has 48 cores.

So, while it may be calm at the moment, I think it will change soon.

Also, I want to play this game, I will have to invest in new parts to play it, nothing I can do about it

Slim

I completely agree. From my experience the current bottlenecks are rather disk I/O and not CPU, RAM or GFX. A slow magnetic drive with high level of fragmentation that is being used for both system, games and swap can be a much bigger pain...

Agree on the spinning rust. Get yourself a SSD . My laptop is super fast with that one change. Shame my work insists on fully encrypted disks to slow it down again, but, still much faster than a HDD.

I do seem to have a lot of computers for a console user :lol:

Slim

Oh yeah, I do have SSDs in both my desktop and my laptop. Although on my desktop I still do use an old WD Green for documents and stuff that isn't performance critical. And WD Black for virtual machines and potential Fraps recordings.

Eventually I will replace even those disks with SSDs but since its running fine then I will wait with that investment for like a year or so.