NVidia’s Tony Tamasi (senior vice president of content and development) has recently slated Sony’s forthcoming console the PS4 set for release in December. He has not only compared the next generation console specs to a low end gaming PC, but has also boldly made the claim that it is no longer worth the effort for NVidia to be involved in console graphics chips.

“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 in a recent interview with TechRadar. These are bold claims indeed, in fact according to Tamasi if the PS4 is released by December then it will already be outdated by today’s standards. “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.” With the PS4 rumoured to be priced at £300 it is hard to see any PC having even nearly comparable performance levels for the money. With these specs announced by Sony it’s hard to see any PC coming close on performance level in that price range.Sony revealed the system runs on a single-chip custom processor and utilizes eight x86-64 AMD Jaguar CPU cores, with a next-gen AMD Radeon based graphics engine powering the way.The PS4 will ship packing 8GB of GDDR5 memory.

Tamasi seems to be very quick in pointing out the flaws of the PS4, including the fact that as a “closed system” it will not be upgradeable and as such will quickly be outstripped by PC technology as new GPUs become available overtime. “What you get today in terms of performance is what you’re stuck with five – ten years down the road. PCs don’t have these problems,” said Tamasi.

I find it strange that he would take umbrage with this aspect of the console, as it didn’t seem to cause much concern when NVidia were supplying GPU chips for Sony’s current PS3.

While Tamasi maintains the PS4 to have an underpowered graphics chip, many developers are excited about the new console and feel the PS4 will outperform current PC’s due to its innovative use of fully integrated GDDR5 RAM.

Tamasi made little of the fact that NVidia lost out badly to AMD on all new generation consoles, claiming that the company had little interest in consoles and would be better able to concentrate its engineers on more worthy projects. “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.”

Not only do these scathing statements apply to PS4 but to its main competitor the Xbox720, which will also be using AMD graphics chips, it is impossible to ignore NVidia’s prowess when it comes to GPU’S and mobile chips but I pose the the following questions – With AMD scoring the contract on all three new-generation consoles, are NVidia left with a bitter after taste by losing out on these major contracts for next generation consoles?

Are Tamasi’s comments just a thinly veiled attempt at boosting the profile of PC gaming while undermining a sector of the industry it was once quite happy to be a part of?

We would love to hear your thoughts?

Souces: Techradar.com  and nextpowerup.com