NVIDIA Reportedly Walked From Sony PS4 Design Negotiations

NVIDIA recently announced plans to support Sony's upcoming PlayStation 4 (PS4) console with its PhysX and APEX software development kits (SDKs), but the core hardware inside all belongs to AMD. It didn't have to be that way -- NVIDIA could have powered the PS4 with a custom built GPU of its own, and had negotiations with Sony gone differently, that may have been the case.

Tony Tamasi, Senior VP of content and technology at NVIDIA, told GameSpot that the price Sony was willing to pay simply wasn't high enough. Whether that means Sony tried lowballing NVIDIA or whether NVIDIA itself was just too expensive for Sony's blood isn't known, just that the two sides couldn't come to terms on a deal.

"We came to the conclusion that we didn't want to do the business at the price those guys were willing to pay," Tamasi said. "We're building a whole bunch of stuff and we had to look at the console business as an opportunity cost. If we say, did a console, what other piece of our business would we put on hold to chase after that?"


Tamasi pointed out there's only so many engineers to go around, and once you devote resources to a project like the PS4, another part of the business inevitably has to be put on hold.

"And at least in the case of Sony and NVIDIA, in terms of PS4, AMD has the business and NVIDIA doesn't. We'll see how that plays out from a business perspective I guess. It's clearly not a technology thing," Tamasi added.

The PS4 is essentially a PC wrapped in a console skin. It sports an 8-core AMD Jaguar APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) and a GPU that's roughly equivalent to a Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition graphics card. One of the major things that has developers excited, however, is the 8GB of unified GDDR5 memory, which some believe gives the console an edge over PCs.