Monday, February 4th 2013
It's Sony, Not AMD in GeForce Titan's Crosshair
When we first heard of NVIDIA launching its GK110-based consumer graphics card by as early as February, it took us by surprise. Intimidating naming (GeForce Titan 780?) aside, the graphics card is hoping to better NVIDIA's current-generation flagship, the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 690, in a single-GPU package, but does the graphics card market really need NVIDIA to launch its card at the moment? Perhaps not, but the answer lies not with AMD and competition in the graphics card market, but Sony, and competition between PC and console platforms.
Over the weekend, it surfaced that Sony would introduce its next-generation PlayStation console (codenamed "Orbis") later this month, and it would mark the beginning of the next-generation of game consoles. PlayStation 4 features an updated hardware feature-set, and promises to raise the bar with graphics detail that the console industry held with an iron fist for the past half decade. This presents a challenge for not only NVIDIA, but PC gaming in general. Here's how.
It's no news that PC graphics have always trumped consoles, but lost out on the "cost factor." Advocates of consoles falsely compare the cost of an entire PC (approaching or crossing $1,000) with a $300 console. In our opinion, marketing honchos at both NVIDIA and AMD failed to adequately present the argument that a graphics card as a single component costs exactly the same as a game console, and transforms desktop computers that average households already own, into gaming PCs.
With the introduction of the next-generation PlayStation "Orbis," PC graphics companies such as NVIDIA need to launch new products to remind the masses that PC gaming looks, feels, and plays better than consoles, even the newest ones on the block. NVIDIA just happened to have the GK110 lying around.
The GeForce Kepler 110 (GK110) is NVIDIA's (possibly the industry's) biggest GPU. Conceived around the time when the 28 nanometer silicon fabrication process at TSMC was relatively new and prone to yield problems, it was put on the back-burner when NVIDIA realized its second fastest chip, the GK104, stood a real chance against AMD's "Tahiti" high-end GPU. Even as New Year's 2013 approached, the most audacious speculators in the press were led to believe that NVIDIA would take its time launching the GK110 with its GTX 700 series, some time much later than February. What changed? Well for one, Sony and Microsoft agreed to chart out their next-generation console launch schedules, so either's products get maximum market exposure, and that is bad for the PC platform.
The GeForce "Titan" 780 GK110 card, hence, is NVIDIA not only batting for its own GeForce brand (which already leads AMD Radeon in the PC space), but PC gaming in general. We don't expect to see crates full of these graphics cards making their way to stores just yet, but a text-book NVIDIA launch. Over the decade NVIDIA learned that when it has limited initial inventories of a new product and yet wants to avoid the dunce cap of a "paper launch," (a launch that's just on paper, with no public availability), it pools up just enough quantities of the product for worldwide press (for launch date reviews), and limited launches in key markets such as the US and EU.
Over the weekend, it surfaced that Sony would introduce its next-generation PlayStation console (codenamed "Orbis") later this month, and it would mark the beginning of the next-generation of game consoles. PlayStation 4 features an updated hardware feature-set, and promises to raise the bar with graphics detail that the console industry held with an iron fist for the past half decade. This presents a challenge for not only NVIDIA, but PC gaming in general. Here's how.
It's no news that PC graphics have always trumped consoles, but lost out on the "cost factor." Advocates of consoles falsely compare the cost of an entire PC (approaching or crossing $1,000) with a $300 console. In our opinion, marketing honchos at both NVIDIA and AMD failed to adequately present the argument that a graphics card as a single component costs exactly the same as a game console, and transforms desktop computers that average households already own, into gaming PCs.
With the introduction of the next-generation PlayStation "Orbis," PC graphics companies such as NVIDIA need to launch new products to remind the masses that PC gaming looks, feels, and plays better than consoles, even the newest ones on the block. NVIDIA just happened to have the GK110 lying around.
The GeForce Kepler 110 (GK110) is NVIDIA's (possibly the industry's) biggest GPU. Conceived around the time when the 28 nanometer silicon fabrication process at TSMC was relatively new and prone to yield problems, it was put on the back-burner when NVIDIA realized its second fastest chip, the GK104, stood a real chance against AMD's "Tahiti" high-end GPU. Even as New Year's 2013 approached, the most audacious speculators in the press were led to believe that NVIDIA would take its time launching the GK110 with its GTX 700 series, some time much later than February. What changed? Well for one, Sony and Microsoft agreed to chart out their next-generation console launch schedules, so either's products get maximum market exposure, and that is bad for the PC platform.
The GeForce "Titan" 780 GK110 card, hence, is NVIDIA not only batting for its own GeForce brand (which already leads AMD Radeon in the PC space), but PC gaming in general. We don't expect to see crates full of these graphics cards making their way to stores just yet, but a text-book NVIDIA launch. Over the decade NVIDIA learned that when it has limited initial inventories of a new product and yet wants to avoid the dunce cap of a "paper launch," (a launch that's just on paper, with no public availability), it pools up just enough quantities of the product for worldwide press (for launch date reviews), and limited launches in key markets such as the US and EU.
86 Comments on It's Sony, Not AMD in GeForce Titan's Crosshair
it takes a lot more time and effort to maintain a desktop where a console is automatic. less parts to fail, less to worry about. flick the switch on and you are gaming.
If anything, nVidia is in a much stronger position now than they've ever been in the past.
With Sony and MS both looking for 60fps @ 1080p (well they should be!) and with consoles using similar hardware to PCs (more than before) we should in theory see more better looking ports but how they will play and perform on PC in terms of the quality of the ports remains to be seen.
As DX9 was the previous standard for consoles, does anyone know if the next gen console games will be developed using DX10 or DX11 etc?
As both new consoles will use Bluray, will this mark the end of DVD games as a format on PC too? (I know there are other factors like digital distribution too).
I don't think this analyst is worth his weight in horse manure.
FYI Carmack already said next gen consoles are staying at the 30FPS cap in most circumstances so that "analyst" is playing with semantics......or is just a retard.
Only breakthrough they made there is because of the Nexus 7, and all the OS/software optimizations and tweaks that came with.
Well, I remember the rumored pricing on AMD's HD 8800s cards, and the speculation that they would outperform any of the current gen (pre-Titan) single GPUs. And I'm pretty sure a pair of R8870s would demolish the GK110... for what? $560?
A well-executed APU with shared GPU and CPU cache could be a rather potent tool in the hands of a skilled coder. Having an engine that never fetches GPU instructions and mesh data from RAM, only using it for immediately needed variables for final rendering, and only looking in VRAM for raw texture data would mean it executes an order of magnitude faster than a typical Direct3D title. Add a bit of driverless low-level access to all registers and shaders, and you have a machine that could very well render at 120 FPS constant. 240, I'm not sure about, but I suppose it's doable...
What gets me is the sleight of hand that nvidia did to increase the price of graphics cards by pitching the mid range chip of the next generation architecture (Kepler) as a top end product (GTX 680) instead of something like GTX 660 where it belongs, simply because it beat the GTX 580. In contrast, the previous generation Fermi GPU in the GTX 580 is a true top end chip.
Thus, we've paid top dollar for a mid range card, pushing up the price of the true top GPU to stratospheric levels.
And that really sucks for us. If you don't feel resentment towards nvidia for doing this, then you should.
I say bring on the $1000 GPU's.
You also have to understand that while PC may be more complicated, it's not locked down platform. I can play games that were designed for PC's from 20 years ago on a current modern systems.
Or even patch them yourself. For example Need for Speed 3 game released in 1998, i've patched it myself and you can play it on a brand new 2013 PC pretty much without any hassle. You just slam in CD, run my patch that copies the game files and updates them and voila. Try doing that with a PS2 game on a PS3. Or an Xbox game on a X360.
Developers don't give a toss even though some of us would buy refreshed games (like we did with Serious Sam HD series). But on PC you at least have community patches like my NFS3 patch and hundreds of others. On consoles you can only stick a finger up your bottom because developers don't care and you have no community.