NVIDIA Passed On PS4 Due To Financial Disagreement

When the PlayStation 4 was announced last month, you might have noticed that the console's processing power was all AMD, with the 8-core Jaguar CPU and Radeon graphics. Since NVIDIA was the chip maker behind the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, what happened with the PS4? It turns out that NVIDIA wasn't willing to do business with Sony "at the price those guys were willing to pay."

Senior Vice President of Content and Technology at NVIDIA Tony Tamasi told GameSpot that the company "came to the conclusion" that they "didn't want to do the business at the price those guys were willing to pay," referring to Sony and the amount of money they were willing to dish out to NVIDIA to allow the console maker to use their chips.

AMD ended up getting a deal with Sony to use its chips in the PlayStation 4, and it's rumored that the next-generation Xbox will also be running AMD components, but it seems NVIDIA isn't phased by all that. Tamasi says that the company is "building a whole bunch of stuff," including Project SHIELD that we took a look at during CES back in January.

Overall, NVIDIA looks at the console business as an "opportunity cost." Essentially, NVIDIA had to weigh the pros and cons of developing their own products versus implementing their technology into other products. In the end, the company decided not to pursue the PS4 and instead focus on their own products.

[via GameSpot]