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Message: <blockquote data-quote="drothgery" data-source="post: 2815773" data-attributes="member: 360">Why not just go PIII-733, GeForce 3 Ti200, and 128 MB of RAM for a comprable? That's almost exactly an Xbox (the Xbox GPU being something of a "GeForce 2.5"), and avoids messy comparisons (the PS2's CPU/GPU were really strange, even more than the PS3's). It doesn't quite work, because PC games are always designed to at least be playable on midrange (or even low-end) hardware, but the Xbox doesn't destroy the PC.If the PS3 had been released last fall (with a DVD drive instead of a Blu-Ray drive, obviously), that would be true. But it's not being released last year, it's being released this fall. Last November, cheap CPUs were single-core 32-bit Celerons and Semprons. This year they'll be dual-core 64-bit Athlon 64 X2s and Pentium Ds (and possibly even E-series Core 2 Duos). Last fall, midrange GPUs were GeForce 6600s and Radeon X1600s; this fall, they'll be a half-generation beyond the GeForce 7600s and Radeon X1800s that are in that space now. By the time the PS3 has any kind of real availability (late spring of 2007, at the earliest), AMD's cheap CPUs will have clockspeed bumps and Intel will defitely have Core 2 Duos in the low-end/midrange space, GPUs will be a full generation beyond where we are now, and standard memory on PCs will be 2 GB.</blockquote>