(I'm going to regret touching this one
). I could write a book on the topic of PC vs Consoles for gaming and their corresponding experiences....but ultimately it's a matter of preference so I digress.
Some perspective though:
There was a time in the late 1990s/early 2000s where if you were a gamer it made absolutely sense to have a "high end" gaming PC. There were a number of "A-AAA" level games that were exclusive to PC or targeting PC as lead platform that warranted such a purchase. Being console only could result in you legitimately missing out on some killer games/franchises. Games like Doom, Quake, Unreal, Starcraft, Battlefiled, Call of Duty, Warcraft, Half Life, Elder Scrolls, Baldur's Gate and many others fall into this list. Not having a PC meant you would completely miss out on these franchises or have much diminished versions of those games on consoles of the time. Key point here is that these were full A-AAA tier games that often pushed the PC platform in a way that was far beyond what a console could deliver. However,
THAT IS NOT THE CASE WITH PCs TODAY. That era effectively ended with the release of the original Crysis (Crysis 2 was downgraded in many ways to be portable to consoles).
Frankly, A-AAA games that are PC exclusive or leads today are virtually non-existent. With all the constant talk about the technical superiority of the PC, the irony is that VAST majority of current PC exclusives do not push the technical envelop and do not require high specs to play. A quick browse on the steam store will display a ton of tiles made by small teams with simple or even retro graphical styles that can run fine on even a PS4 level spec nevermind PS5. The most played games on Steam remain games built on older engines that run exceedingly well on even a PC from 5 years ago (Counter Strike, Dota 2, PUBG, Apex, GTA V etc). For the games that are A-AAA, nearly all of them at this point are console lead developed, cross-gen engines with Xbox One/PS4 level spec (or older) in mind. That said, the quality delta between a PS5/Series X and a high end PC today is still much smaller than it was ~20 years ago. Other than accelerated performance in terms of frame rate and some slightly lower settings that are often not even noticeable aside from direct A/B comparisons, the console sku of games are virtually identical in design and content to PC skus and are perfectly intact renditions of the developers' original vision. Now compare that to what the delta would have looked like back in 2000: console skus would be missing content due to memory constraints (fewer levels, smaller worlds, fewer characters, less weapons/items, completely different UI due to input differences, often missing or limited online, and graphics that absolutely paled in comparison to high end PCs in every respect (we're talking what would now be called a generational gap). And not just pixel counts and framerates. We're talking lighting, textures, geometry, shading, and IQ all being in a completely different league. Case in point:
Unreal Tournament PC
Unreal Tournament PS2
And this is from one of the most praised PC ports on PS2 at the time