PS4 specs are in the neighbourhood of a low-end CPU, says Nvidia

When Sony announced the PlayStation 4, it had revealed that the next-gen console will be powered by AMD’s chips. According to TechRadar, Tony Tamasi, Senior Vice President – Content and Technology, Nvidia, compared the PlayStation 4 to a low-end CPU.

“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 Tony Tamasi to TechRadar. “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 doesn’t help that consoles, by design, are meant to not be upgraded to the latest and greatest hardware. This prevents them from ever bridging the gap between them and PCs. “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,” said Tamasi. “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.”

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Like a low-end CPU

He continues, “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.”

Earlier this month, Nvidia had announced that it will be supporting the PS4 with its popular PhysX and Nvidia Apex software development kits (SDKs). Nvidia’s PhysX technology lets developers design real-time, real-world effects in games. Examples of PhysX can be seen in most of the AAA titles out there, the most famous of which include Batman: Arkham City and Borderlands 2.

Game designers use PhysX and Apex technologies for collision detection and simulation of rigid bodies, clothing, fluids, particle systems and more across a range of platforms, including PCs, game consoles, and mobile and handheld devices.

The Apex technology lets developers create intricate physics-enabled environments. They can expand the quantity and visual quality of destructible objects, make smoke and other particle-based fluids integral to gameplay and create life-like clothing that interacts with the character’s body to achieve more realism.

Sony earlier confirmed that an AMD-based x86 processor and a GPU on par with the Radeon HD 7850 would be powering the console. It will have 8GB of unified high-speed memory and a “massive” hard drive. The new controller—dubbed the DualShock 4—will have a touch pad, a share button, a headphone jack and a light bar to identify players. The light bar also works much like the Move sensor through a 3D camera.