Nvidia Says PS4 and Xbox One Are Good News For PC Gamers

[Steven Bogos]

Nvidia Says PS4 and Xbox One Are Good News For PC Gamers

E3 usually focuses on the "big 3" consoles first and foremost, but what do Sony and Microsoft's new machines mean for PC gamers?

Nvidia's senior vice president Tony Tamasi thinks that the new generation of consoles should be taken as nothing but good news for PC gamers. "I'm glad the new consoles are here," he says, "if for no other reason than to raise the bar." Tamasi means that now developers are no longer trying to squeeze good-looking games out of the aging PS3 and Xbox 360 hardware, and will start to work on games that can make the most of a gaming PC's raw power advantage.

"It's nothing but goodness for the PC," Tamasi explains, "The PC will keep growing, but the consoles will give us that next bump." He tells us that "Developers can now build really awesome content that can then scale to the PC," and that "To [Nvidia], the consoles are great because they catch up from a features perspective."

Tamasi refers to the handy little chart you will see above, which shows that while PC graphics card technology has evolved substantially over the years, it has remained, understandably, quite flat for our console brethren. The PS4 and Xbox One, while still not coming close to the monstrously powerful $1,000 GTX Titan, have definitely lessened the gap somewhat. For example, the Titan is only 2.5x more powerful than next-gen hardware, compared to the 13.2x more powerful the GTX 680 was versus the PS3 and 360 last year.

While Nvidia powered the PS3, it lost out to rival graphics chip developer AMD, which provides the GPUs behind all three next-gen consoles. Tasami said that this was a deliberate decision [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122736-Nvidia-Claims-PS4-Is-Only-as-Good-as-a-Low-End-PC?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=news] though, as he claimed that Nvidia was unimpressed with the closed nature of consoles, and wanted to instead focus on PC graphics cards.

Source & Image: The Verge [http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/12/4421944/nvidia-says-xbox-one-and-playstation-4-are-great-news-for-gaming-pcs]

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[GonzoGamer]

I see what you did there.
I thought they were going to twist the knife like Sony.
I do have the feeling that the new consoles are good news for them too; a lot of people are going to convert to PC gaming.

 

[Revolutionary]

I see what you did there Nvidia, I was already on board, but I see what you did there.
Yes This new generation of consoles will certainly see an increase in the amount of time I spend PC gaming versus console gaming (although admittedly that ratio was already pretty high).
I wonder how long before I have to replace my GTX680.

 

[devotedsniper]

NVIDIA has a point but personally i'm waiting to see the first ports before I decide. The architecture now may as well be a pc but if developers/porting houses are lazy then we'll just get more trash ports like Saints Row 2.

Either way I've just added a 2nd 660TI (and replaced dying RAM + overclocked CPU) ready for this gen coming but for now it's just making everything buttery smooth at 120fps average...except World of Tanks that still runs at 35fps, that thing really doesn't like SLi, guess that's another point really devs need to start utilising things such as Crossfire/SLi better on some games.

 

[Undomesticated Equine]

Nvidia let the AMD take the console GPU contract out of mercy because without it AMD would certainly go out of business or at least give up on the GPU market since they cannot produce competitive GPUs compared to the green guys.

 

[Lazy Kitty]

If people would invest less in realistic graphics and more in mechanics and better AI, that would be great.

Seriously, graphics were realistic enough in Half Life 2.

 

[RJ 17]

I'd say it's good news for PC gaming because Microsoft is literally telling a large number of people to not even bother buying their new console. As for Sony, it's true that all they had to do was "not fuck up" and they'd win E3, but there's still some concerns regarding the PS4.

My biggest one? How many times did the PS3 get hacked and have countless users' information stolen? 3 or 4 times, right? I hope they've got their security situation sorted out.

 

[wooty]

Aaaaaaand cue the inevitable and same old boring arguments.

If it were me I'd say screw the graphics for now. Two of the biggest problems of the last gen was bad/poor AI and in game lag. Perhaps the gaming industry should be focused on making better AI and improved mechanics rather than spending hours making a leaf look nice. Half the time I dont even realize the graphics in gameplay. Maybe the first 5 minutes of a game I'll go "ohhh, thats nice", but after that it all just goes back to playing the game without realizing shit.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Sour Grapes.

Besides, if they do do PC ports, AMD cards will be just as capable as running the games as their more expensive nVidia counterparts.

 

[Strazdas]

This is great news indeed. and i called it 3 months ago.
the jump will not be such an impact on graphics itself as scale. you would have higher resolution, more space for AI designs, more ram to store info in (so no mor fog 5 meters in front because console cant load further), real antialliasing and lots of other stuff that comes form raw power witout the need to actually improve the gprahic assets.
you know most devs do create high quality grpahic assets now and scale them down for consoles. becuase consoles cant run it. now they can. so it will be EASIER to develop since you dont need to do scaling down. and the PC component developement will jump too.

What worries me is timing though. my old PC is starting to die (its HDD Crash-reset this weekend, plenty of bad sectors, not going to last long) and i was planing on getting new tower by the end of the year (this 8600 GT is getting old by now, the processor is also ait the sharpest one in, and Ram is a DDR2) but the thing is, if i buy it in, say, december, then developement jump will happen next year, and im on the down side once again. though that being said current ahrdware will be on quite a nice sale perhaps. and frankly i expect if i buy a 560 or something it WILL last me for years. i dont care about graphics, i sometimes set it to minimuim even if my comptuer can run medium and stuff, but this rise in RAM alone will remove a lot of limitations that old consoles brought to PC-ported games. and im happy.

My biggest one? How many times did the PS3 get hacked and have countless users' information stolen? 3 or 4 times, right? I hope they've got their security situation sorted out.

I remmeber2 hacks, of which only 1 was confirmed to have information stolen. They supposedly upgraded since (not to say not going to happen again) and kinda did a huge sorry event. Still, everyone can get hacked. everyone.

Sour Grapes.

Besides, if they do do PC ports, AMD cards will be just as capable as running the games as their more expensive nVidia counterparts.

excelt that Nvidia is the better choice for PCs anyway. while they dont have raw flops power for same price, their graphic rendering for same price is superior to radeon, they were the first to introduce GPU =physics (radeon copied it pretty much) and they still lead in that (many games support nvidia physix, not radeons). not to mention the amount of driver issues radeons have (not a problem for me personaly as im a late adopter when it comes to drivers. only if there is a need, like, say, a new game requiring it) and sheer amount of developers that Nvidia worth together with and optimize their games for. And thats ignoring the lifespan (radeons go dead quickler, though if your a gamer youll likely need to replace it out of lack of speed than due to death unless overheating and stuff, but i got nvidia cards running for 11 years. not so for radeons)

Nvidia let the AMD take the console GPU contract out of mercy because without it AMD would certainly go out of business or at least give up on the GPU market since they cannot produce competitive GPUs compared to the green guys.

not sure if ironic or fanboy. while i agree that Nvidia cards are superior, there are still plenty of people buying Radeons. usually because its cheaper, sort of like how you buy china stuff cause cheaper. the place where AMD really cant compete is the GPUs. intel created a whole new faster architecture for GPUs. AMDs answer: lets slap twice the cores and pray to god it works

except World of Tanks that still runs at 35fps, that thing really doesn't like SLi, guess that's another point really devs need to start utilising things such as Crossfire/SLi better on some games.

WOT uses an ANCIENT game engine that is half based on flash and half on some sort of boject generating software (forgot the name) that makes render laggy as well. Add to that their lack of proper multicore support (it runs on a single core no matter what, engine cant support more than one) and you got yourself a game that forces your comptuer to run it as if it was a pentium 4. that being said, i get 25 FPS with a 8600GT, so your large GPU does nothing really

 

[bkd69]

Nvidia's hardly an unbiased source, as most of their revenue comes from the PC Gaming market.

Cum grano salis, my friends, cum grano salis.

 

[iniudan]

Nvidia let the AMD take the console GPU contract out of mercy because without it AMD would certainly go out of business or at least give up on the GPU market since they cannot produce competitive GPUs compared to the green guys.

Nvidia only really better if you go with multiple GPU, if stick to a single GPU AMD almost always better, due to nvidia been usually more expensive for similar performance, but SLI having much performance scaling then Crossfire.

 

[RJ 17]

My biggest one? How many times did the PS3 get hacked and have countless users' information stolen? 3 or 4 times, right? I hope they've got their security situation sorted out.

I remmeber2 hacks, of which only 1 was confirmed to have information stolen. They supposedly upgraded since (not to say not going to happen again) and kinda did a huge sorry event. Still, everyone can get hacked. everyone.

Very true, just saying that Sony already has a precedent for it while I don't recall it ever happening on the 360. I'm not saying that, as it stands now, the PS4 isn't the console to go with if you're going console. But I've always just been a little bit timid due to the fact that there seems to be (or at least seemed) that there's a lot of drama surrounding the PS...for example, the Skyrim DLC being up in the air for months. I can only hope that developers will see that the consumer choice is the PS4 and will as such tailor their products to better fit it rather than the 360. Of course THAT is, itself, most likely just a pipe-dream. I'm banking on the devs and publishers being the greedy SOB's they are and going where the money is, which at this point appears to be lining up to buy a PS4.

 

[Strazdas]

My biggest one? How many times did the PS3 get hacked and have countless users' information stolen? 3 or 4 times, right? I hope they've got their security situation sorted out.

I remmeber2 hacks, of which only 1 was confirmed to have information stolen. They supposedly upgraded since (not to say not going to happen again) and kinda did a huge sorry event. Still, everyone can get hacked. everyone.

Very true, just saying that Sony already has a precedent for it while I don't recall it ever happening on the 360. I'm not saying that, as it stands now, the PS4 isn't the console to go with if you're going console. But I've always just been a little bit timid due to the fact that there seems to be (or at least seemed) that there's a lot of drama surrounding the PS...for example, the Skyrim DLC being up in the air for months. I can only hope that developers will see that the consumer choice is the PS4 and will as such tailor their products to better fit it rather than the 360. Of course THAT is, itself, most likely just a pipe-dream. I'm banking on the devs and publishers being the greedy SOB's they are and going where the money is, which at this point appears to be lining up to buy a PS4.

i beleive there were couple times they crashed XBL, though no data stealing as far as im aware.
no console is the console to go to at the moment. a lto of drama came from horrible way they designed PS3 making it a hell for programmers to port stuff to. now that PS4 is clsoe to PC design (you know, the things they programm it on to begin with) and Xbone seems to claim it has "unique cell based CPU, which reminds me of the PS3 "unique design" talk, the tables will be switched.
if PS4 will take majority of 360 players now, the developers WILL focus on it more, just like any developer for PC focuses for WIN first and other OS later, sicne WIN takes over 90% of the market.

 

[iniudan]

excelt that Nvidia is the better choice for PCs anyway. while they dont have raw flops power for same price, their graphic rendering for same price is superior to radeon, they were the first to introduce GPU =physics (radeon copied it pretty much) and they still lead in that (many games support nvidia physix, not radeons). not to mention the amount of driver issues radeons have (not a problem for me personaly as im a late adopter when it comes to drivers. only if there is a need, like, say, a new game requiring it) and sheer amount of developers that Nvidia worth together with and optimize their games for. And thats ignoring the lifespan (radeons go dead quickler, though if your a gamer youll likely need to replace it out of lack of speed than due to death unless overheating and stuff, but i got nvidia cards running for 11 years. not so for radeons)

You forgot one thing PhysX will not be relevant anymore due to this console generation all having AMD GPU. Why would developer go through the trouble of integrating physX on the PC version of their game, when that solution will be unable to work on their console version (now that we have console with enough memory to handle such a thing). Game developer will either go with a non-proprietary hardware physic solution or an AMD solution this time around.

 

[Strazdas]

excelt that Nvidia is the better choice for PCs anyway. while they dont have raw flops power for same price, their graphic rendering for same price is superior to radeon, they were the first to introduce GPU =physics (radeon copied it pretty much) and they still lead in that (many games support nvidia physix, not radeons). not to mention the amount of driver issues radeons have (not a problem for me personaly as im a late adopter when it comes to drivers. only if there is a need, like, say, a new game requiring it) and sheer amount of developers that Nvidia worth together with and optimize their games for. And thats ignoring the lifespan (radeons go dead quickler, though if your a gamer youll likely need to replace it out of lack of speed than due to death unless overheating and stuff, but i got nvidia cards running for 11 years. not so for radeons)

You forgot one thing PhysX will not be relevant anymore due to this console generation all having AMD GPU. Why would developer go through the trouble of integrating physX on the PC version of their game, when that solution will be unable to work on their console version. Game developer will either go with a non-proprietary hardware physic solution or an AMD solution this time around.

Except that PsysX is superrior to what AMD came up with. or your implyign that develoeprs are moeny grubbing freed driven peopel who do not care aboutr quality? everyone act surprised now please.

 

[Norix596]

Honestly I don't care about graphics wars. I played recent AAA games on my 360 because my laptop isn't a gaming PC by any stretch (I understand it has a virtual software as opposed to physical graphics card) but I've been using Steam a lot in the past year or two for older games just because it's so much cheaper and convenient. Turns out Mass Effect 2 works ok on my computer with the settings turned down enough. With the news out on the Xbox One I had decided I was not buying one. Now I'd like to play new AAA games going forward so I might want to invest in a slightly higher ended PC (as I said, I don't care if graphics settings are all the way down if the game runs without stuttering). I took a look at the PS4 (since neither have backwards compatibility anyway) but I honestly can't see any advantage at this point that consoles would be holding for me over PC gaming except that for some games I'm going to have to deal with Origin. However since I would have to deal with Xbox One anti-consumer nonsense if I stuck console, I don't see a huge edge.

Anyone have recommendations for a lower end gaming laptop that would be able to run near future games with lowered graphical settings?