Now that every single cat is officially out of the bag except for RDNA2 PC cards, here is the gaming landscape as I see it at the moment, in price-descending order:

• Nvidia Ampere: $750 for a 30 teraflops RTX 3080. Requires an existing PC. Crème de la crème. Stratospheric rasterization and ray tracing performance. Play Microsoft's entire publishing sphere for $5 a month.


• Xbox Series X: $500 for 12 teraflops. Modern feature set with limited ray tracing performance. Fast hard disk I/O. Play Microsoft's entire publishing sphere for $5 a month.


• PlayStation 5: $500 for 9.5 teraflops. Modern feature set with limited ray tracing performance. Fast hard disk I/O.


• PlayStation 5 Disc-Less: $400 for 9.5 teraflops. Modern feature set with limited ray tracing performance. Fast hard disk I/O. No optical drive.


• Xbox Series S: $300 for 4 teraflops. 1080p box. Modern feature set with limited ray tracing performance. Play Microsoft's entire publishing sphere for $5 a month.


• Nintendo Switch: $300 for 0.15 - 0.3 teraflops. Portable with old tablet chipset. Outdated feature set. Excellent for sprite-based indie games, but 3d functionality limited. Needs a refresh to stay competitive.

I'm prepared to plunk down my cash on the very first one tomorrow morning the instant they are up: it's the best option by a mile for people who have the existing PC, and that little bit of extra cash.

This of course assuming I can beat everyone else to the mouse clicks, which I'm not taking for granted: it's going to be a mad rush once the "buy" buttons go live.