Makes sense. Nvidia's future is mobile markets; investing in a console isn't profitable when over half of your research and development is going to arm technology.
PS4 not worth the cost, says Nvidia
By
Mark Walton, Senior Staff Writer - Reviews
Chip-maker Nvidia didn't want to work with Sony "at the price those guys were willing to pay."
Nvidia passed on its hardware being used in the PlayStation 4 due to the "opportunity cost."
"I'm sure there was a negotiation that went on," Tony Tamasi, Senior VP of content and technology at Nvidia told GameSpot, "and we came to the conclusion that we didn't want to do the business at the price those guys were willing to pay."
"Having been through the original Xbox and PS3, we understand the economics of [console development] and the tradeoffs."
Announced by Sony earlier this month, the upcoming PS4 is powered by rival chip-maker AMD. The company is also strongly rumoured to be behind the hardware of the next Xbox, but Nvidia does not appear to be troubled by the loss.
"We're building a whole bunch of stuff," continued Tamasi, "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?"
"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."
AMD will be hoping that its PS4 business pays off, having recently fallen on hard times. Earlier this week it sold its Austin-based HQ for $164 million to raise cash, while a leading analyst called it "un-investable" following an operating loss of $131 million in its quarterly earnings report.
In Nvidia's latest earnings call, the company posted a profit of $174 million.
By
Mark Walton, Senior Staff Writer - Reviews
Writer, riff maker, purveyor of fine foods. Mark currently spends his days trying to overcome his small (large) obsession with high-top trainers and mobile games. He's known to respond well to Long Island Iced Tea, falafels, and karaoke, but not necessarily in that order.
3279 comments
To be honest i' only stick with PlayStation for gaming consoles, cause i have had ps1 , ps2 and ps3, as well as Psp and Ps Vita and love all the consoles and i bought the first ps3 launch model to come out and up till today it still works perfectly, and Sony gaming products always exceed my expectations , and in terms of reliability they exceed the competition by allot, u can;t compare the new Nvidia conscole with Ps3 or Xbox cause its there first conscole and how can u compare it with Xbox And Playstation?
I see this as another win for PC gaming, where you can buy any GPU for your PC, based upon your financial standings. Can afford 3-way Titan SLI? Go for it. Can only afford an entry AMD GPU? Well then get one. Consoles do nothing but restrict the end user who hasn't got the smarts to build (or have someone do it for them) a PC.
1 Like @3Z3K13L08 So you are saying that all console gamers are stupid because they don't build (or have someone do it for them) a PC? Well I play the PS3 a lot but I also have an Alienware Aurora R4 gaming PC... I guess that make you the stupid one for judging people like that.
AMD has had it time in the lime light in the past but looking forward in the powerful PC graphics market, NVIDIA is looking more and more like top dog.
Reminds me of how Nokia was once top then fell from grace...
1 Like Never thought that Nvidia would be the one paving the way into the next generation of gaming.
12 Like AMD a crappy company? Most of you must be pretty young. Was it not only a handful of years ago that almost every gaming rig was powered by a AMD FX or athlon64? Do you not remember how these chips costed less than a quarter of Intels high end x32 chips yet destroyed them in almost every benchmark?. Sure AMD hasn't been on top of its game lately, and I'm still on the fence of its purchase of ATI but to say its a "crappy" or second rate company is beyond ignorant.
Okay, now I can't believe how much I read. And the reason I can't believe it is the fact that I'm fairly positive that my IQ has dropped a few points. People, get your facts straight. Oh and, please knock some bias out of your posts, 'cause it simply makes you look like an absolute deranged idiot.
Good for Nvidia. Just stick with PC. Kind of a shame though, I was looking forward to finally getting a new console with hardware that's capable of producing games that don't like like they came out 20 years ago and everyone knows Nvidia makes the best GPU's. I'll just stick to my PC I suppose.
1 Like @wumpscutnut nVidia doesn't make the best gpus, how biased can you get?
Honestly the difference between big red's and big green's flagship architectures is very minimal at most. The only downside to AMD's cards is the occasional driver screw-up, and no hardware physx. However, nvidia does the same thing from time to time, and not many games use hardware physx. It's like trying to decide between two high performance cars, both equally fast. It's a personal brand preference if anything.
Lets be honest, even if nvidia did make another console gpu, to keep the costs down, you would see a chip that's around 2 to 3 gens old pcwise. If they made a gpu for the ps4 or any other console right now, it would probably be a re-branded gts 2xx or 4xx series gpu, and no, not the high end ones like the gts x80/x85 models either. As long as its better than the RSX(which doesn't take much seeing it's a watered down 7800), it would work for them if the console sold well. Meh, nvidia seems to be getting greedier, must be the green logo.
It's kind of a shame that 3dfx got bought out by nvidia however long ago that was, but whatever. Brands mean nothing, numbers do all the talking, and I haven't been disappointed by a single AMD or nvidia gpu yet.
@SergeantPole @wumpscutnut How bias can YOU get?
NVIDIA make the most powerful consumer and corporate cards, this is fact. So yeah, don't know where you're getting your facts from. Please show me proof that AMD > NIVIDIA in pure power. I'm not talking about "power to price" ratio, just pure performance.
1 Like @3Z3K13L08 @SergeantPole @wumpscutnut
new bf4 video was made on hd7990 6gb card. And why does a card like that belong in a console page? Titan or whatever? Consoles are always going to be graphically inferior to PC's. Pc hardware evolves so fast..every year a new cpu, a new gpu.
@SergeantPole @3Z3K13L08 @wumpscutnut Why so serious?
3Z3K13L ('L' is meant to be an upside down '7') is actually an apparel brand I used to wear, and as this account is ancient, made in my teens, I thought it would be cool to name it after the brand with 08 on the end (as my gamertag was ezekiel 08, and 8 being my favourite number). 3Z3K13L = ezekiel, also the name of a Dark Angel character from Warhammer 40K (Grand Ezekiel). Hmm, sounds like you know nothing about why I chose my name (shock horror!) and it's not just random l33t 5p33k that your puny mind thought it was.
Also, where is the NVIDIA Titan on those charts? Oh, it's missing. And what GPU's do the corporate sector use? Hmm, not AMD last time I looked.
2 Like @3Z3K13L08 @SergeantPole @wumpscutnut
How stupid can you get? I never said either company was better in my post. Also, your username and shitty death note avatar make you lose what little credibility you had in the first place. (Where are your numbers to counter my non-existent numbers eh? You also seemed to completely miss my point that neither company can pull a huge lead on the other.)
Also, I just use whatever card that works better, it can be either amd or nvidia depending on what I want. However, here's some food for thought seeing you like nvidia so much you have to go out of your way to talk shit to someone who doesn't hate the big green in the first place:
Jesus, why do I even bother. PC part brand wars are worse than console wars. It brings out all the 2l33t4u shit heads that can't even use proper English.
Oh wait, I'm arguing with a 12 year old on gamespot. What has become of my life. "pure performance," oh my sides.
I wonder how things would go if AMD actually folded and goes belly up in the middle of a console cycle? Would it leave Sony with no graphics chip and no system?
2 Like @mike468 The CPU and GPU rights are probably owned by Sony. So even if AMD goes bankrupt, Sony can still manufacture those components itself.
2 Like @mstrchf12 @mike468 yeah I dont think it would affect things all that much, if it happened before the next gen consoles get released, that might be a different story due to lack of hardware availability, rights dont mean much if the actual hardware is not available anymore... I'd be more concerned about the likes of Intel and Nvidia not having anymore competition so prices would escalate even more then what they are currently. I'm sure a new Provider would emerge if AMD really was to belly flop, but that would take some time to appear though,
I need some clarification on something. Whenever they do a graphics comparison of the PC, Xbox and PS3, the PS3 always seems to come dead last. Is it because of the ATI card inside the PS3?
Thanks for the help.
7 Like To everyone about to comment on here, if you dare say graphics "card" whilst referring to the internals of consoles, then you're in for some Predator-style despining.
These two contracts are the only thing keeping ATI from going under, and as always, NVidia has the quality edge in hardware life as I'm sure we'll see with bad batches of all the next gen consoles. Hello red-ring-o-death 2.0....
Also, there's a big architechture change coming in June/July of this year. Hardware out now is going to see a Big price drop then, so if you're planning on building a new gaming rig or getting a new GFX Card, put it off another 4-5 months and you'll get what's top of the line now for a few hundred dollars less.
@RavenXavier Red ring on xbox 360 was microsoft's fault, not AMD bad chip design. And you might also wanna mention Nvidia's shady rebranding scheme they had going a while back and how many laptop recalls did we see cause their mobile graphics chips were overheating? I was a victim of that myself in a Sony laptop, the whole thing is dead now even though it's only 3 years old. So before you tout Nividia as being superior in reliability, you might wanna check their history first.
3 Like @RavenXavier the redring of dead was caused by a rushed and fualty design by microsoft.. nothing to do with AMD.
plus Nvidia had a huge manufacturing problem that killed chips and they denied it at first.. you forgot?
1 Like @stev69 @LJSEXAY @RavenXavier Thats kind of subjective. The 7970 is a bit better then the GTX 680 so I've read. The 7970 cost about $470 where the 680 cost between $550 - $600. I have Nvidia in all my PC's but i've been thinking of changing to AMD the next time i need a video card there price out ways there cons IMO.
I don't care, as long as the consoles get made and there are some incredible games to play. These BIG companies can fight over their own budgets, profits and loses. As gamers, we don't have to deal with that nonsense.
@blackace I wish that were true. All the fallout of their negotiations rains down on us gamers :/
@Downloadpilot @blackace Well, it can rain down on the product. The product that a gamer can choose whether or not to buy. That's my two cents. Either way, I'm excited for all the new power that will be available for PCs soon and the desperately needed enhancements to consoles.
Shame. There's no doubt PS4 graphics would have been awesome with Nvidea inside. Now we'll just have to wait and see how this will work out.
1 Like Nvidia just released the GTX Titan and AMD has nothing to match it. I think Nvidia is ahead of the game. ATI can only lower their prices just like they did with their cpus.
@WonderfulTonite The titan also eats up tons of power and gets extremely hot. I do not see this as a viable solution for even higher end setups. As soon as that GPU hits 80 degrees, it starts cutting the performance. Go read the reviews, even normal gaming can make it get that hot and that is bad for the chip long term. I'd rather take a bit of a hit in performance, and pay a whole lot less for a 680 or 7970.
@WonderfulTonite TITAN is just a cherry-picked card. just like the old Ultras back of the 8800 series.
and with that price tag.. I dont think they can produce many.
more like a E-peen statement than an actual product.
NVIDIA Titan's chip size is 551 mm^2 while AMD Tahiti's chip size is 352 mm^2. One should expect the Titan to perform better.
1 Like @WonderfulTonite what about the 7990 which is now seen as the worlds most powerful card and was what was running the BF4 gameplay
7990 is dual gpu it's basically two 7970s on one slot. The GTX Titan is a single gpu so two Titans in SLI will cream a 7990.
1 Like @WonderfulTonite @ziggyww You could feed a family of four for a month with the money spent on two Titans.
1 Like @WonderfulTonite GTX titan specs and its benchmarks is incredible but its clearly not aimed for mass market (1000$) , and from what i see right now all three consoles have amd gpus sooo its a huge win for amd , i wouldnt be suprised if AMD did the harlem shake :P
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