The PC remains a big player in the games market but in recent years its cutting edge has been blunted.
The vast majority of games are still played on PCs rather than consoles; typically casual games played on cheap desktop machines or online games, such as World of Warcraft.
So how much more powerful are these high-end PCs than the latest generation of consoles?
"It's absolute nonsense to think that consoles are at the cutting edge," said Roy Taylor, vice president of content relations at Nvidia, the world's biggest manufacturer of graphics cards. "As good as consoles are, they are so far behind the PC gaming experience that there is no comparison. In terms of raw processing power, the high-end PCs are at least three times more powerful."
Mr Taylor points out that the latest graphics cards can draw twice as many pixels, twice the screen resolution, as a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360
