Nvidia VP: "There's no way a 200-watt Xbox is going to beat a 1,000-watt PC"

Nvidia is suddenly all over the news this week, announcing that it's working with the new SteamOS and boasting about how much more powerful PCs are than consoles. Given that Nvidia was skipped over for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, it's understandable that it wants PC gamers to know it loves us very, very much.

In an interview with PC Power Play , Nvidia's senior vice president of technology Tony Tamasi said that PCs will, again, leave the consoles behind. “By the time of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the consoles were on par with the PC," he said. "If you look inside those boxes, they're both powered by graphics technology by AMD or NVIDIA, because by that time all the graphics innovation was being done by PC graphics companies."

Of course, he would say that, wouldn't he? That doesn't mean he's wrong, though: if the next console cycle is anywhere near as long-lived as the last one, console gamers in 2020 will be playing on small, power-starved PCs almost a decade after the rest of us have upgraded.

“The consoles have power budgets of only 200 or 300 Watts, so they can put them in the living room, using small fans for cooling, yet run quietly and cool,” Tamasi said. “And that's always going to be less capable than a PC, where we spend 250W just on the GPU. There's no way a 200W Xbox is going to be beat a 1000W PC.”

Nvidia is partnering with Valve on the new SteamOS by opening up its drivers to Linux—something independence-minded gamers have been asking about for ages. In a blog post on its website, Nvidia writes that “engineers from Valve and NVIDIA have spent a lot of time collaborating on a common goal for SteamOS: to deliver an open-platform gaming experience with superior performance and uncompromising visuals directly on the big screen.”

Check out the full interview at PC Power Play and read up on all our coverage of the new SteamOS .

Image via PC Power Play .

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