When Sony unveiled its next-generation PlayStation last May, one of the slides displayed in the presentation showed that the PlayStation 3 GPU had the power of two GeForce 6800 Ultras working in SLI mode (nVIDIA's Scalable Link Interface multi-GPU technology). At that time, nVIDIA (the developer of the PlayStation 3 RSX GPU) has not yet unveiled its latest graphics architecture, formerly code-named G70.
But now that the GeForce 7800 GTX and its little brother, the recently announced GeForce 7800 GT graphics processing unit, have been announced, and an interesting tidbit comes from none other than the Official PlayStation Magazine.
The Inquirer reports that an nVIDIA spokesperson was quoted in the magazine saying that the RSX GPU is basically a slightly less powerful GeForce 7800.
That means that almost a year before launch, there’s a PC graphics chip that is more powerful than the RSX GPU found in the PlayStation 3. And make no mistake, this is not a crazy, speculative conclusion ; this comes straight from the company that makes both parts: the RSX and GeForce 7800 graphics processing units.
That’s not good news for consoles, being that the typical 4-to-5 year lifecycle a console must survive allows computers to catch up quickly with the technology found on next-generation consoles.
Usually, game consoles ship with hardware that is not available on personal computer at the time of launch, and a few months later, PC hardware manufacturers create hardware parts that surpass console technologies.
But launching with a technology that is already available on PC is not good at all for a “next-generation” console. By the time the PlayStation 3 launches, there will be already a new GPU from nVIDIA that will be more powerful that their current flagship GPU, the GeForce 7800 GTX.
So, what about the Xbox 360? In the case of the graphics processing unit designed for the Xbox 360, ATI has included technology on the Xenos GPU that won’t be available for PC graphics chip in the next twelve months, including the unified shader architecture and the embedded DRAM daughter die.
A so called R600, which might debut towards the launch of Windows Vista, in the fourth quarter of 2006, might incorporate the special technologies ATI put into the Xbox 360 GPU.
With a three-core processor and its state-of-the-art GPU, the Xbox 360 hardware won’t be matched by PC until late 2006, when quad-core processors from AMD and Intel arrive and Windows Graphics Foundation 2.0-compliant GPUs, featuring unified shader architecture, arrive.
The next-generation begins with the Xbox 360. Don’t you forget!
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