DaveBaumann
Senior Member
Joined: 29 Jan 2002
Posts: 8288
Location: Bedforshire, UK
Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 4:28 pm Post subject:
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Quote:
What do you think about the 18 months comment? Do you think perhaps that's just how much time they had been working on their next generation gpu anyway, and they can use it as a convenient "been working on this with sony for 18mo" excuse?
Partially, yes, that probably is how long their own architecture has been underway, but I'd also say that lines of communication have been open for as long if not longer; I'm sure that NVIDIA would been very keen to have their hand in there even if it wasn't at a hardware level - the idea of being frozen out of all the next generation consoles would not be a good one as this is where a significant quantity of development, so of which will end up on the PC, will be done.
Quote:
I'm just curious why you seem so convinced they missed their performance target. Just from the general information available, that seems like one possible explanation for going with nVidia, but certainly not the only one.
It may not necessarily solely be their performance target, but the targets for what they could achieve with their prefferred solutionin terms of general capabilities for graphics use - NVIDIA may have made a very convincing argument that it may not be achievable that route and going their route would be far safer (re: the post about development trends towards fragment shading).
(BTW - something that may have helped NVIDIA's relationship, and given them a decent line in, with Sony is they hired one of Sony Computer Entertainments Del Rel managers a few years back. When Chris Donnelly left as NVIDIA's head of Developer Relations (only to crop up at MS later on) NVIDIA back filled that postition with the guy from Sony)