The PlayStation 4 announcement last month immediately led to
a PS4 vs Xbox 720 debate, but perhaps Sony and Microsoft's
next-generation consoles are competing for second place.
"Compared to gaming PCs, the PS4 specs are in the
neighborhood of a low-end CPU, and a low- to mid-range GPU
side," said Nvidia's Tony Tamasi to TechRadar.
As Nvidia's senior vice president of content and development, he
sees the PS4's specs as outdated, even today.
"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."
It only gets worse
Tamasi also notes that consoles, by definition, are closed platforms and not
upgradeable.
"What you get today in terms of performance is what you're stuck with five
- 10 years down the road. PCs don't have these problems," he told
TechRadar.
"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."
The gap between console and PC gaming has become more apparent this
console generation, and Tamasi expects more of the same when PS4 and
Xbox 720 get here.
"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."
PS4 not worth the cost to Nvidia
The comments from the Nvidia senior vice president are noteworthy
because they aren't just from an industry rival trying promote PC gaming vs
PS4.
The remarks come from the same company that powers the PS3's graphics
chip.
Nvidia isn't buying into the PS4, however. Sony announced specs that
include an eight-core AMD processor and a custom Radeon GPU.
"I'm sure there was a negotiation that went on," Tamasi 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."
Instead, Tamasi said that Nvidia, with only so many engineers and so much
capability, will be able to focus on another portion of its business that it
wouldn't be able to if it did chips for Sony.
Nvidia's projects include delivering high-end graphics cards like the GeForce
GTX Titan and supplying Apple computers with GPUs.
It's also looking to capture mobile processing with its Tegra 4i system on a
chip for smartphones and tablets, and by releasing its own handheld
gaming platform, Nvidia Project Shield .
https://www.techradar.com/news....1138051 
