NVIDIA: Era of fully-custom console hardware is over
NVIDIA Ceo Jen-Hsun Huang states that that fully-custom hardware for video game consoles is no longer feasible. Huang explains that with the power delivered by today's CPUs and GPUs, it no longer makes sense to spend lots of money into the development of custom processors with odd architectures, such as the Cell chip developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM. He adds that it's much easier to use off-the-sheld hardware, and proclaims the age of exclusive game console hardware is over as everything will be based on common architectures.
“You cannot make a game console such as the PlayStation 2 anymore. When it emerged, PS2 had a 100 times higher performance than the most powerful PC. I wonder whether it is possible to make something 100 times powerful than GeForce GTX 680? If possible, Nvidia will make it,” said Jen-Hsun Huang in an interview with PC Watch web-site.
Mr. Huang is in many ways correct. The forthcoming Microsoft Xbox Next and Sony PlayStation 4 are based on custom chips heavily rely on PC architecture and technologies developed by Advanced Micro Devices. Even PlayStation Vita features system-on-chip with ARM Cortex-A9 general-purpose cores and PowerVR SGX 5XT series graphics. Not surprisingly that Nvidia designed its own game console around Tegra 4 application processor, which will power numerous tablets and smartphones this year.
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Senior Member
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> When it emerged, PS2 had a 100 times higher performance than the most powerful PC.
I call BS on this. PS2 was over-hyped and hype was based on numbers which were useless in games. Apple used similar floating point computation PR scam for Mac Pro to claim superiority over PC and supercomputers in 2008. PS2 had 16 pipelines at 147 Mhz = 2352 Mpixel/s. But this is only for pixels with no textures. Speed dropped to 1175 Mpixel/s with one texture and just to 586 Mpixels/s with two textures.
GeForce2 had 4 pipelines at 250 Mgz = 1.000 Mpixel/s and had ability to add up to two textures at the same speed. Basically PS2 was only 18% faster than GF2 if all pixels in game had only one texture. PS2 was performance king in games like Pong only

I love posts and info like this, it just reads like s*x feels.
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How fast was the PS2? It was a 300mhz CPU according to the wiki specs. 32mb graphics.
I remember PS2 graphics as good for the time, but jagged and aliased when compared to the PC.
Soldier of Fortune, Deux Ex, Max Payne all came out around that time and looked pretty good on PC. I don't really remember any graphics hogs from back then. I don't even recall the first game I had FPS issues with back then (on my TNT2 32mb).
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God I know what you mean. That made me smile. Will make alot of us smile

When you go out of your way in a day to find stuff written just like that to find out...
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I see consoles becoming obsolete soon considering how fast mobile graphics is progressing each year, unless consoles are produced faster we'll be seeing phones/tablets with better hardware.
Senior Member
Posts: 138
Joined: 2003-07-08
> When it emerged, PS2 had a 100 times higher performance than the most powerful PC.
I call BS on this. PS2 was over-hyped and hype was based on numbers which were useless in games. Apple used similar floating point computation PR scam for Mac Pro to claim superiority over PC and supercomputers in 2008. PS2 had 16 pipelines at 147 Mhz = 2352 Mpixel/s. But this is only for pixels with no textures. Speed dropped to 1175 Mpixel/s with one texture and just to 586 Mpixels/s with two textures.
GeForce2 had 4 pipelines at 250 Mgz = 1.000 Mpixel/s and had ability to add up to two textures at the same speed. Basically PS2 was only 18% faster than GF2 if all pixels in game had only one texture. PS2 was performance king in games like Pong only