Nvidia may have passed on supplying hardware components to Sony for its upcoming Playstation 4 consoles, but that hasn’t stopped the company from commenting on the next-gen system.
According to Nvidia spokesperson Tony Tamasi, compared to gaming rigs, the PS4 specs are in the neighborhood of low-end CPU, with a low- to mid-range GPU side.
“If the PS4 ships in December as Sony indicated, it will only offer about half the performance of a GTX680 GPU (based on GFLOPS and texture), which launched in March 2012, more than a year and a half ago,” Tamasi told TechRadar.
“What you get today in terms of [console] performance is what you’re stuck with five – 10 years down the road.”
The Nvidia spokesperson was also quick to point out that consoles, by definition, were closed platforms and therefore not upgradeable.
“They are open and can be upgraded at any time to harness the power of newer GPUs for more performance and to take advantage of newer, modern graphics technologies.
“If history predicts the future, then these next-generation consoles, while being more powerful than the current ones, will very quickly end up more than an order of magnitude behind the PC,” Tamasi concluded.
As TG Daily previously reported, Tamasi recently confirmed that Nvidia had chosen not to provide components to Sony for the corporation’s next-gen Playstation 4 due to what Nvidia exec Tamasi described as “opportunity cost.”
“Sure there was a negotiation that went on, and we came to the conclusion that we didn’t want to do the business at the price those guys were willing to pay,” Tamasi told GameSpot.
“Having been through the original Xbox and PS3, we understand the economics of [console development] and the tradeoffs.”
According to Tamasi, Nvidia is currently building a “bunch of stuff,” forcing the company to take a long, hard look at the console business as an opportunity cost.
“If we say, did a console, what other piece of our business would we put on hold to chase after that? In the end, you only have so many engineers and so much capability,” he explained.
“[So] if you’re going to go off and do chips for Sony or Microsoft, then that’s probably a chip that you’re not doing for some other portion of your business. And at least in the case of Sony and Nvidia, in terms of PS4, AMD has the business and Nvidia doesn’t. We’ll see how that plays out from a business perspective I guess. It’s clearly not a technology thing.”
The PS4 is powered by an AMD CPU and GPU. According to reports, the console boasts 8 x86-64 CPU cores, while the GPU is based on the next-gen Radeon graphics engine, capable of 1.84 teraflops of performance power. Because it is an APU, both the CPU and GPU reside on the same physical die, sharing 8GB of GDDR5 memory.
The console is also packaged with a redesigned controller that features a touchpad on the front, a share button, a headphone jack, a light bar for player identification and tech to sense a player’s depth and 3D position.
