The war between “console peasants” and the “PC Master Race” is often heated. But there have been many similar conflicts in the past “PC vs. PlayStation”, “Commodore vs Atari”, “Amiga vs PC” and any more. Maybe it will be different this time – because the new consoles are very close to PCs.
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The newest “eight and half” generation of consoles (Sony PlayStation 4 Pro and the Microsoft Xbox One X) is quite unusual. They are providing higher processing power yet they are supposed to be completely backwards comparable with their original models. So the new consoles are different models and some PCs can’t be upgraded – just look at Macs.
Some people may see making consoles variants, each with different power, a coming together of PCs and consoles. I honestly think it’s more of an attempt of trying to make the current generation consoles relevant to 4K TVs and for VR. To a degree we could just look at the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X as a new generation of consoles where it was made so that developers have to keep backwards compatibility in mind.
I see this as evidence that console manufacturers underestimated the power needed for these technologies and the “half-generation” just their hot-fix for this issue, because they don’t have a completely new generation of consoles ready. At least not for the price masses would buy them. TVs have just massively overtaken consoles technologically. And VR is just out of there and the original consoles can’t even touch it for the most part.
Adding backwards compatibility to consoles may seem to bring consoles philosophically closer to PCs, but it’s not really the case. It’s just a “quick and dirty fix” that is a reaction to the really fast development in the TV and VR scene of things. PC are improving more “steadily” - even though a revolution here would be nice as well, as we could certainly use optimization for 6 and more core CPUs. And the AMD's Ryzen processors might bring us towards that path.
So no. No end to the flame-wars is coming soon. What is coming is a test whether the new console half generations will be successful and whether VR will be a the next big thing. Just business as usual.