Comparing graphics between gaming consoles shouldn't be closed as opinion-based

Question

The following question was closed as opinion-based:

How do the Nintendo Switch graphics compare to the Playstation 3?

I agree that a question which asks if a console is 'better' in general would be opinion-based, but I don't believe answers to this question would be opinion-based. When specifically comparing graphics, it can be answered 'technically'. No one will argue that Switch games look better than PlayStation 4 games graphically (in general), because the GPU (in most cases) determines the quality of graphics. And do we compare GPUs? We do! And we compare GPUs technically: FLOPS, APIs, etc.

So I believe answers to the above question is not opinion-based. By the way, as a matter of fact there are many similar questions on the Internet and I already know the answer thanks to those questions. Still I wanted to ask here because I think Stackoverflow is a better place for Q&A (and I answered by myself by collecting the info from the Internet).

But I am not sure if the question should be active. Because even if the question can be answered technically with relative accuracy, many people don't like the result. Many many Nintendo fans would not like to accept the fact that PS4 is more powerful than Switch, for me that is understandable because I used to deny that PlayStation 2 is weaker than contemporary high-end PC! But that is simply untrue. By the way, I am a Switch owner.

So if the question is active, I'm afraid more and more Nintendo fans will down vote my question (I wanted to do something good for the Stackoverflow!).

I ask for reopen of the above question, but if there is no way to protect myself from being down voted (account reputation is very important to me!), I prefer the question to be in a status that no one can vote (down or up).

Edit

I would like to add links of some similar (almost exact) questions here to show that indeed many people care about the question

https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Nintendo-Switch-more-powerful-than-the-PS3-and-Xbox-360

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/189706-nintendo-switch/75832526

https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/5z7z30/is_the_nintendo_switch_graphically_better_than/

https://gbatemp.net/threads/graphically-how-well-does-the-nintendo-switch-par-up-to-the-ps3.470562/

https://www.gamespot.com/forums/system-wars-314159282/how-powerful-is-the-switch-compared-to-wiiu360ps3-33377498/

Answer 1

As a new user, I appreciate the effort you made in order to make this question on-topic by coming to the meta. It shows effort on your part to be a part of our community! With that said, we are Arqade, Stack Overflow is another Stack Exchange network that works with programming. While it is the biggest and I've often called Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow on accident, I just thought I'd throw that out there on how to name the Exchange networks.

But I am not sure if the question should be active. Because even if the question can be answered technically with relative accuracy, many people don't like the result.

This is irrelevant as far as Arqade is concerned. We aren't worried about the answer to a question making the question itself on-topic or not. Many questions that ask if something is possible have a simple answer of "No, it's not possible." Even though it's not the answer people may want to see, it's an acceptable answer and doesn't change the fact that the question that was asked was on-topic.

So if the question is active, I'm afraid more and more Nintendo fans will down vote my question.

Users on Arqade don't downvote based on if they are fans or not. Here is a great meta post about how people use downvotes. In your case, users downvoted the question because they thought a couple of things:

1. It wasn't highly researched. Your question asks a rather simple question comparing graphics between two consoles.

2. It's not useful. Questions here on Arqade that get a lot of attention are useful. See this question, that goes into the usefulness of spending your time actually killing monsters in a game. Your question doesn't solve an issue or is very valuable to anyone really. People are going to buy these consoles for totally different reasons and will never compare their graphic capabilities.

3. It's a broad question. If there is a specific question or specific hardware difference you want to know about, that would have made a better question. "Differences" between consoles, just like you said, is very readily available information.

I ask for reopen of the above question, but if there is no way to protect myself from being down voted (account reputation is very important to me!), I prefer the question to be in a status that no one can vote (down or up).

If you want the question to be re-opened, you'll have to edit it to be acceptable. Like I said previously, if you can narrow down a hardware specific difference you are looking for, it could be reopened. Your answer goes into more specifics about certain hardware, I'd try to go in that direction. If you take the "close reason" into consideration, you'll allow yourself to narrow it down to not fall into that close reason.

I wouldn't worry too much about your reputation. If you ask good questions and take the time and effort to answer other questions well, you'll see your reputation go up!

The ability for people to vote on your question won't go away, but you'll find if you edit your question to a better one, people may take away their downvote.

We don't really compare consoles or PC hardware, you'll want to go visit another site that does those types of things on the daily. The hardware tag questions is usually used for troubleshooting issues with gaming hardware or how to use certain gaming hardware correctly.

To your edit

I would like to add some similar (almost exact) questions here to show that if a question asked many times on other place, it can also be asked on StackExchange (depends on which community though)

Just because you find the exact question on another website, doesn't mean it's on-topic on Arqade. You'll want to read our rules and visit our FAQ before linking a bunch of other sources.

Answer 2

I agree overall with FoxMcCloud's answer but I wanted to expand on the closure reason as I see it.

I think the "primarily opinion-based" close reason comes from phrasing the question in terms of how "good" the graphics are. That's a fairly subjective measure that can mean different things to different people, and it's not simple to distill it down to technical measurements such as FLOPS, FPS/resolution specs, or many other things. Performance and appearance of individual games can be affected by a variety of factors, such as model complexity, texture compression, draw distance, shaders, available system graphics APIs, and others, and that can strongly affect peoples' perception of the system's graphics quality as a whole. If you are looking for specific technical specifications that you consider to be markers of overall graphics quality, such as the ones mentioned in your answer, that is what you should ask for in your question.

One suggestion I would make for understanding how other people would perceive your question is to look at the full technical specifications for the PS3 graphics card and think about what aspects of it you consider to be important to the graphics quality. Maybe the raw processor speed? Or the on-board memory size? The processor bus bandwidth? The supported texture compression format? Maybe that's not everything, and something in the overall PS3 technical specs is important here too? Whatever you think, would you generally expect other people to choose exactly the same aspects? Were you expecting a complete comparison of the full graphics card specs of the two systems as an answer to your question?