With the age of next generation consoles soon arriving in the form of Xbox One and PlayStation 4, there is a huge on-going debate as to whether this marks the end of the age of PC, as the new consoles will produce far better graphics than any other platform.
However, not everyone thinks the same and there is a feeling that not everything is lost for dedicated and loyal PC players. One company speaking such feelings is one of the biggest names in the industry – NVIDIA.
NVIDIA’s Senior Vice President of Content and Technology, Tony Tamasi, was recently in an interview with PC PowerPlay, where he confirmed yet again that both the next generation platforms are already out-dated when compared to a latest PC with high-end configuration.
“It’s no longer possible for a console to be a better or more capable graphics platform than the PC. I’ll tell you why. In the past, certainly with the first PlayStation and PS2, in that era there weren’t really good graphics on the PC,” Tamasi stated. “Around the time of the PS2 is when 3D really started coming to the PC, but before that time 3D was the domain of Silicon Graphics and other 3D workstations. Sony, Sega or Nintendo could invest in bringing 3D graphics to a consumer platform. In fact, the PS2 was faster than a PC.”
Taking past references into account, he stated that by the time the Xbox 360 and PS3 had already made their mark, the consoles were already on par with the PC. “If you look inside those boxes, they’re both powered by graphics technology by AMD or NVIDIA, because by that time all the graphics innovation was being done by PC graphics companies.”
Tamasi also reminded everyone that NVIDIA spends $1.5 billion a year on research and development in graphics every year, “and in the course of a console’s lifecycle we’ll spend over 10 billion dollars into graphics research. Sony and Microsoft simply can’t afford to spend that kind of money. They just don’t have the investment capacity to match the PC guys; we can do it thanks to economy of scale, as we sell hundreds of millions of chips, year after year.”
Tamasi added that the PC graphics industry wasn’t operating at the limits of device physics and power. "If you wind back the clock, a high-end graphics card at that time was maybe 75W or 100W max. We weren’t building chips that were on the most advanced semiconductor process and were billions of transistors.”
“Now we’re building GPUs at the limits of what’s possible with fabrication techniques. Nobody can build anything bigger or more powerful than what is in the PC at the moment. It just is not possible, but that wasn’t the case in the last generation of consoles. Taken to the theoretical limits, the best any console could ever do would be to ship a console that is equal to the best PC at that time. But then a year later it’s going to be slower, and it still wouldn’t be possible due to the power limits.”
Both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are currently slated for an arrival later this year.
