Since Nvidia provided both Sony and Microsoft chips for their earlier consoles, a lot of gamers believed that the green team will at least offer a chip to be powering one of the next-generation consoles. Well, that isn’t going to happen, as you most probably know that both PS4 and the upcoming next-Xbox will feature a GPU from AMD. However, what has happened and Nvidia is nowhere to be found? According to Tony Tamasi, Senior VP of content and technology at Nvidia, that the green team came to the conclusion that it didn’t want to do the business at the price Sony was willing to pay.
As Tamasi told Gamespot:
“We’re building a whole bunch of stuff, and we had to look at 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?”
Tamasi confirmed that Nvidia understands ‘the economics of [console development] and the tradeoffs’ since it was the one who provided the graphics solution to both PS3 and the first Xbox.
Tamasi concluded that Nvidia could not afford developing a specific chip for only PS4 and next-Xbox:
“In the end, you only have so many engineers and so much capability, and 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.”
It will be interesting to see whether next-gen games will be compatible with Nvidia’s specific features or not. Nvidia stated a while back that PhysX will be supported by PS4, though we don’t know whether developers will actually take use of that physics solution over the Havok one. Not only that, but we are curious to see whether other upcoming next-gen titles will be fully optimized for Nvidia’s cards at their time of release or whether we’ll be getting more ‘Tomb Raider’ games.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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