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David Roman, corporate marketing boss of NVIDIA, recently spoke with US website X-Bit Labs about the company’s involvement with the creation of Sony’s next home console. He said: “This is the next generation GPU. After the GeForce 6 series this is going to be the next generation – it will support DirectX 9, Shader Models 3…”
In short: “it will be the most feature-rich, the most powerful GPU that we’ve ever created.”
Sony have a track-record of producing chipsets for themselves, but in this instance the company have decided to go to the specialists for help with the creation process, meaning the PS3 will have a custom next-generation GeForce chipset. According to Roman, this decision was as much about software as it was hardware: “As graphics become more and more complex, it’s not just the actual technology of the graphics processor, but it’s also the whole development platform that’s available to the software vendors to actually be able to take advantage of the feature set; in terms of the tools, in terms of the support, in terms of the code that’s already written, the routines that are there,” and he went to clarify, just in case Sony hadn’t actually realised: “That’s something we do very well because that’s our business.”
Along with the PS3, NVIDIA have also been licensed to help with other technologies that support the Cell processor – though none of which are known about right now.
Another interesting tidbit came from Roman, as he pointed out that Sony were not actualy referring to their new console as “Playstation 3” – though again, no other details were revealed.
