Topic: Stutter struggle or console limitations? Which is the better compromise in your opinion?

Hello, so i've been trying to pick what platform to stay on. I currently have a budget pc (5600+rx6600) and a ps4, and i'm trying to decide what platform to upgrade and main since i don't see the point of maintaining both.

I don't really care for more than 60fps, and the ps5-ish image quality i get from the pc is fine. What i can't stand is stuttering, silent hill 2 and f drove me crazy.
On the console side, i see games like KCD1, Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen, RDR2, Bloodborne etc not getting a simple 60fps ps5 patch. I can play just fine at 30, but it's very frustrating due to how simple this would be to fix on pc. Also newer games like BMW, MGSD and Metaphor for example being setup horribly by the devs.

I'm really struggling to pick a side, any input is appreciated!

Not an easy decision. First things that come to mind are these:

Do you do anything else besides gaming that would benefit from an upgrade on the PC side? If so, that would be a good reason for going with that, since a new console is really only a benefit to gaming. The other thing would be how much of your time you spend playing new games as compared to playing older games. Older titles will benefit from an upgrade on PC in a way new consoles often don't, as you mentioned with KCD1, etc. The other thing I would be thinking about is that the 5600 in your PC is already faster than the CPU inside the PS5. Invest the money into a new GPU and you could be seeing performance (as well as ML upscaling, etc.) beyond what the PS5 can offer. That would give you a machine that is decently in excess of the PS5's performance in both CPU and GPU. Upgrade the PS4 to the PS5, and you now have a PC with a better CPU but weaker GPU than PS5, and a console with a weaker CPU but stronger GPU, to some extent, giving you the worst of both worlds.

However, as you mention, stutter on PC is essentially a given for many titles releasing in the past couple years and likely in the foreseeable future too. Perhaps the new cloud-based shader compilation that MS is looking to introduce could solve this? But also perhaps not. This is probably the biggest point against PC (considering you are already familiar with the platform and solving potential technical problems that can occur). As I say earlier, if you play a lot of older games, I would probably look to PC, but if you do want to play many new releases, then this is my recommendation. Look at roughly 20 new games that released in the past couple years. How many of these have stutter problems on PC that are not present on console? Is it a majority or minority? If it is a majority, then maybe PS5 is the way to go. A less jarring experience will mean you can enjoy the games more, so it makes sense to go that way. But of course, console can have problems with image quality in certain titles that push the limits of FSR 2/3 and TSR, lowering resolutions in excess of what these non-ML upscalers can handle; and perhaps in these cases a stronger GPU (with ML upscaling) could resolve this.

Hope I could help, and I'd be interested to hear any follow-up thoughts!

@LooneyMango
Thanks for the in depth response!

The pc is used exclusively for games, which is why i'm having a hard time justifying dealing with shader stutters and windows.

I've been doing a lot of catching up with the ps4 generation games since i was mostly playing live service stuff at the time. But no i don't tend to revisit older games and i'm mostly done with my backlog.

It's basically getting a decent gpu (5060ti 16gb i guess) or flipping the pc and the ps4 for a free ps5. However having played silent hill 2, silent hill f and ff7 rebirth this year on pc, i'm not so sure whether dlss is worth all the stuttering or dealing with windows in general for that matter. I would say it's more immersion breaking than fsr artifacts or 30fps especially at tv distance.

@Auron If you're purely using the PC for gaming, then maybe I'd be more inclined to go for the console. A 5060 Ti and R5 5600 will offer a better experience (in terms of average frame rate) than a PS5. But as far as I can tell that isn't a huge deal for you. I agree that stuttering most often is more jarring, and can ruin a game for me.

There is still something about a console that can't be beat by PC, in terms of the ease of use. I am fortunate enough to have both a high-end PC and a PS5, and to be honest, despite the PC offering better performance and image quality, there is something about the console that is more appealing when I just want to play a game. This is why, if you're just focused on gaming, and aren't opposed to some running at lower resolutions than perhaps is ideal, or having slightly lower average frame rates, I'd say PS5.

The only other factors I can think of here would be do you prefer to use KBM, and do you have more games on one platform (PS/PC) than the other?

@LooneyMango I used to care about KBM in competitive shooters, which i don't play at all anymore. I always use a controller in single player, it's just more comfy.

The library part hurts, my expensive recent games are on steam. They can always be streamed through geforce now though i guess.

If you already game on both (so you're fine with the particulars of either platform) and only want to move on with one, I would go PC. I went that route this gen (7800X3D+4080). My computer is in my living room, connected to my TV and I play all games with a controller. The games I play have better performance than the console versions and more features. A large part of why I bought the system was to be able to turn on the extra features. The console games I'm most interested in either come out day and date on PC or eventually come out. I'm fine with 60fps (console gamer all my life) so I can turn on all the pretty stuff and still get a nice 4k60 or Rich's 1800p60 experience. I can't see myself going back. The only time I'd consider it is when base consoles start smoking my setup.

@CashmereStSmith

Of course it performs better. Those parts came out 2 and 3 years after launch of a PS5 and a PC with that would cost you 4 X the price of one.

It's like saying a PS5 outperforms a PS4.

@Auron If you aren't very interested in modding and don't play a lot of little games on itch.io or anything like that, going for a console makes a lot more sense in my opinion. I haven't had a gaming PC in years and have hardly missed it. The biggest pain point was a lot of interesting indies that didn't have console releases, but then the Switch came out, and that's pretty much a non-issue now.

While I appreciate the dilemma, and fully agree that #stutterstruggle is clearly the defining issue of our time, I think it should be said that the majority of games still run fairly well overall. Especially if you're willing to apply some optimized settings and do a few things to mitigate certain issues.

I'm comfortable enough with computers and grew up playing enough PS2 and PS3 era games with absolutely horrific framerates that console gaming doesn't really draw me much from an ease-of-use point of view.

In fact, the main blocker for even dealing with console is having to pay extra on top of the price of my ISP to play online.

#stutterstruggle is annoying, and I'm surprised the industry isn't developing more solid solutions to it.

IMO stutter struggle is never super noticeable for me (long stutters aside), so I would pick the openness of PC over being limited and frustrated by console hardware every day of the week.

I'm a life long gamer and own(ed) pretty much every main stream platform out there with the exception of the Switch 2. If I had to start from absolute scratch today, I'd just get a PS5 Pro and be done with it. The quality isn't that of a high end PC but it's plenty sufficient and there's near zero headaches.

I get where you're coming from but these extra features aren't prevalent enough in the games I play, and they won't be until the PS6 I guess.

Same goes for a PS5, I already apply Alex's optimized settings on every game and carefully navigate around 8GB vram. But playing silent hill 2 drove me crazy enough to refund right after getting into the town, even though I really like the game. The stutter struggle is just too immersion breaking, I would prefer to play a 30fps console port of a game than a stuttery 60fps pc port.

I find that this and the previous generation have been mostly fine with framerates, probably due to the PS4 and PS5 being basically PC's with a custom OS. I fully agree with paid online multiplayer being extremely silly, however I don't play any game like that so it doesn't really impact my experience.

It varies in intensity, I don't mind when it's minimal, but some games tend to be horrible with huge frametime spikes. The openness of PC is the main thing I enjoy as well, key site deals and not having to pay 200euros for a controller with two rear buttons for example make me want to look past any stutter.

Sounds pretty close based on everything you've said so far!

A sub-£400 GPU (9060 XT, 5060 Ti) is going to put you ahead of a PS5 and alleviate VRAM issues. It won't help with shader compilation stutter but there aren't too many games with a huge problem there I don't think.

PC would be an easy win every time if it wasn't for the dreaded #StutterStruggle that seems to affect just about every game released these days, simply because every game is using Unreal Engine 5, which seems like a curse on the games industry.

At least on consoles, you only have to endure traversal stutter whereas on PC you are at the mercy of the dreaded shader compilation stutter if the developer hasn't coded the game properly (Borderlands 4 is a great example of good game, terrible optimisation in my opinion). And even shader compilation has its issues in that they add 2-20 minutes to the loading time every time you update your graphics drivers (which I unfortunately do a lot as I play a LOT of different games). Would be awesome if shader compilation was a one-time process that was required after installing and running the game then was never needed again unless you uninstalled and reinstalled it.

Things are improving with developers using newer builds of Unreal Engine 5 and actually having shader compilation in their games that are at least fairly brief (not the 20+ minutes of horros like Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us Part 1), which unbelieveably wasn't always a given. I remember how bad Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and EA Sports WRC were at launch on PC and how I had to wait MONTHS for patches that only partially addressed but never fully fixed the issue.

Saddens me though that superb games like the Dead Space Remake still run better on my PS5 Pro than they do on my i5-13600KF, 32 GB, RTX 4080, Windows 11 Pro 25H2 PC. Stuttering really has become the bane of PC gaming in the 2020s in my experience but maybe there's hope with the release of the next Xbox and Microsoft's push toward optimising Windows for gaming... finally? I will not be holding my breath though.