As expected, E3 2011 saw the announcement of a new gaming console – Nintendo’s Wii U. There was much excitement, and also much criticism, surrounding the new device, as could be expected by any new Nintendo console. Rarely content to just make a simple no-fuss game console, the Wii U will be shipping with a touchscreen controller as well as WiiMote support.
There was more to the story than that, however. The big news is the fact that the Wii U will be packing brand-new hardware in the shape of a multi-core IBM processor and a custom AMD graphics chip based off the RV770 architecture. Used for the Radeon 4000 series, this is now a bit outdated in the world of PC gaming, but it’s a gigantic leap for consoles. The graphics chips in the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 are infants by comparison.
Nintendo’s announcement is the first, but Microsoft and Sony are sure to follow suite, most likely next year at E3 2012. Both companies would undoubtedly like to wait, but they also undoubtedly have development of their next-generation console well underway, and Nintendo’s going to force their hand. It will be embarrassing for these companies, both of which took pride in the graphical chops of their previous consoles, to be outdone on that front by Japan’s cute-and-cheerful game company.
With new consoles we’re going to see new GPUs. What we won’t see, however, is a part made by Nvidia.
Why Not Nvidia?
Nintendo has already revealed its hand. That leaves just Microsoft and Sony. So why wouldn’t they pick a component made by Nvidia?
Microsoft has some very specific reasons, which relate to the development of the original Xbox. It shipped with Nvidia chip’s, but soon after the green team and Microsoft found themselves in a disagreement over the pricing. Though resolved in arbitration, this dispute over a system-critical component left Microsoft with a bad taste its mouth. Of course, this was a decade ago – but it’s not as if Nvidia has had a drastic attitude change. It’s still a company with one great strength and one great weakness, that being CEO and founder Jen-Hsun Huang, a tenacious leader whose zeal sometimes seems to be channeled in the form of aggression – or at least a lack of respect for the company’s partners.
Of course, old wounds might heal if Nvidia had something special to offer, which leads us to the reason why both Microsoft and Sony are unlikely to have Nvidia hardware inside. For the last few years, Nvidia has been struggling to keep up with AMD in PC graphics. Although it’s managed to roughly match the red team on performance at numerous price points, it’s often done so with higher power draw and larger chips with more transistors.
For Nvidia, this is bad news because it means the company is spending more than AMD to produce products with performance on par with AMD (larger chips cost more to produce). For the console manufacturers, this means Nvidia appears less fit to produce a lean, efficient but powerful graphics solution. Consoles are looking to become smaller and quieter, as they’re beginning to serve not only as gaming machines but also multimedia hubs for everything from Netflix to streaming music. AMD is a better candidate for this more versatile breed of console.
The Wrong Pitch
There’s another reason why Nvidia is unlikely to appear in next-generation consoles – the company may not have been that interested in the first place.
After years focusing on desktop graphics, Nvidia has decided that it needs to forge its way into the mobile space. This is not, by itself, a bad decision – but it does take the company’s eyes away from other parts of the business. With so much focus going into mobile ARM chips with Nvidia graphics tied to them, it’s not clear that Nvidia was ever in a position to make a strong pitch to Microsoft or Sony.
Another possible disadvantage is Nvidia’s decision to focus more effort on GPU-compute technology. The latest PC graphics architecture, Fermi, was developed with this in mind. And in certain ways, it yields advantages – for example, the newest Nvidia chips have far better tessellation performance than those from AMD. This, however, is not the kind of performance the console manufacturers will be looking for. They already have the opportunity to compensate for any such short-comings in the CPU. What they want is a strong traditional graphics component, and Nvidia’s not as tightly focused in that regard as it once was.
Conclusion
Although we’ve yet to hear the announcements from Microsoft or Sony, for the reasons above I believe it’s unlikely that Nvidia will obtain any space in the next generation of consoles. This is an important moment for the company, as it yet again highlights the company’s changing focus. Once a hardcore PC gaming graphics company, it’s now focusing on a broader variety of products. It’s a risky move that could leave the green team behind.
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