Nvidia lost the PlayStation 4 contract to AMD recently and Nvidia says it is a relief not to have to do business with Sony any more. Nvidia's senior vice president of content and development, Tony Tamasi, feels the next-generation PlayStation console is only as good as a low-to- mid-range gaming PC and says the new console is far from a true next-gen device.
"Compared to gaming PCs, the PS4 specs are in the neighborhood of a low-end CPU, and a low- to mid-range GPU side," Tamasi tells TechRadar. "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."
Terming the PS4 specs as outdated, he lauds the upgradability of PCs versus the closed platforms of gaming consoles. People will still be stuck with these 'today's super-performance consoles' 5-10 years down the road. "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," he says.
Talking of the reasons behind its decision to sever ties with Sony, Tamsi acknowledged that there were negotiation that did not work out. "We came to the conclusion that we didn't want to do the business at the price those guys were willing to pay," he tells GameSpot.
Tamasi said losing the console business from Sony was intentional as it enabled the company to direct its focus on developing high-end graphics cards like the Geforce GTX Titan for the PC and work on delivering next-generation graphics processors to Apple. The company is also looking to strengthen its foothold in mobile processing market with its Tegra 4i system on a chip for smartphones and tablets in addition to launching its own handheld gaming platform, Nvidia Project Shield.
