Was AMD a bad choice for the consoles? *spawn

[Nesh]

Both MS and Sony tried Nvidia in the past. I believe Nvidia didn't serve them well in terms of cost vs performance. Nvidia as a huge market leader can charge extra. AMD needing to cover for the market gap is willing to do more attractive offers for MS and Sony.

Since Nintendo aren't competing head to head in performance and Nvidia has Tegra for smaller devices, Nintendo isn't experiencing the risks and prohibitive HW costs that Sony and MS are trying to reduce

 

[troyan]

Since Nintendo aren't competing head to head in performance and Nvidia has Tegra for smaller devices, Nintendo isn't experiencing the risks and prohibitive HW costs that Sony and MS are trying to reduce

The Switch is designed to make money from day one. So cost has always been a high priority for Nintendo.

Sony and Microsoft have the problem going with outdated IP combined with high production cost. You can not offset it with something like DLSS performance.

 

[Nesh]

The Switch is designed to make money from day one. So cost has always been a high priority for Nintendo.

Sony and Microsoft have the problem going with outdated IP combined with high production cost. You can not offset it with something like DLSS performance.

Well yes exactly this.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

And this is the thing, even if it could, it would offer noticeably less raster performance than PS5/XSX actually have at the cost of having DLSS, and RT wouldn't really be all that much better to be honest.

Plus cost more, needing a CPU and more complex board versus the APU, plus would nVidia have cared to supply any silicon?

 

[raytracingfan]

Blaming AMD for the lack of AI and weak RT capability of the consoles, or Microsoft and Sony for not demanding powerful AI and RT capability is strange when you consider that AMD would have been chosen as the hardware vendor long before the announcement of the RTX 2000 series and hardware design was completed by 2019, before the the announcement of DLSS 2.0 and genuinely impressive examples of ray tracing started to appear in games (and I mean actual games, not tech demos). Since then Microsoft and Sony have learned that AI and RT capability is important and thus Sony requested AI upscaling capability and much better RT performance for the PS5 Pro. If the PS5 Pro and RDNA4 still have abysmal RT performance and upscaling capability then we can start talking about AMD hardware holding back the consoles.

 

[Karamazov]

Was AMD a bad choice ?
For MR PC people not interested in consoles at all: Yes
For people interested in consoles who actually buy them: No

The end. Next topic.

 

[davis.anthony]

Was AMD a bad choice ?
For MR PC people not interested in consoles at all: Yes
For people interested in consoles who actually buy them: No

The end. Next topic.

And yet there are Mr PC people in this thread who agree that AMD was the best choice.

So I'm not suree not your reply adds to the discussion.

 

[arandomguy]

Is something like this even remotely answerable in meaningful way in the business context without knowing contract terms and alternative proposals? Things like PPA estimates for example are not actually reflective of what the costs would the console makers which is all they would care about. Nor is just extrapolating from the off shelf consumer hardware necessarily indicative of what would even be offered to said console makers.

But I do think there's multiple questions being asked here as well.

From the consumer side I guess the real question that should be asked is if backwards compatibility is preferable or more technological/hardware flexibility on newer generations.

 

[Frenetic Pony]

From the consumer side I guess the real question that should be asked is if backwards compatibility is preferable or more technological/hardware flexibility on newer generations.

Gods yes, can you imagine how cratered PS5 would've been without backwards compatibility or the ability to easily do cross gen? Cross gen took up years of this console cycle, it's so easy to picture "current gen" launching 6 months+ after "last gen" without easy portability.

That alone should definitively answer the question, combined with Intel being a non existent option and Nvidia being in an easy position do demand several times the margin AMD did on a per chip basis, AMD ends up as the only logical supplier.

 

[arandomguy]

Gods yes, can you imagine how cratered PS5 would've been without backwards compatibility or the ability to easily do cross gen? Cross gen took up years of this console cycle, it's so easy to picture "current gen" launching 6 months+ after "last gen" without easy portability.

That alone should definitively answer the question, combined with Intel being a non existent option and Nvidia being in an easy position do demand several times the margin AMD did on a per chip basis, AMD ends up as the only logical supplier.

That seems again from the business perspective though which overall I feel that it's impossible to get anything substantial in terms of online debate since no one has access to any of data or ballpark numbers.

As such I feel the consumer stand point has more substance in terms of a discussion. Granted of course not all consumers fit in one bucket so we can't really answer the consumer question generically. I feel should be kept in mind that backwards compability being prioritized isn't likely without a trade offs regardless of the IHV choice.

Also if we want to pin the business choice on backwards comptability this actually presents an interesting side debate in that the choice then for this gen seems to have been made by decisions from the last gen as opposed to inherent merits of the options for this generation. Which you can argue then is the industry on a more stagnant (and less competitive path) then due to backwards compataiblity and basically platform lockin?

Which would be kind of poetic justice in a way that the console platforms wanted to create more user lockin with less freedom to moving platforms and in doing so themselves are also locked themselves into a platform with less freedom to move.

 

[techuse]

Gods yes, can you imagine how cratered PS5 would've been without backwards compatibility or the ability to easily do cross gen? Cross gen took up years of this console cycle, it's so easy to picture "current gen" launching 6 months+ after "last gen" without easy portability.

That alone should definitively answer the question, combined with Intel being a non existent option and Nvidia being in an easy position do demand several times the margin AMD did on a per chip basis, AMD ends up as the only logical supplier.

I don’t think this is at all a given. I can easily envision a reality where back compat and easy cross gen have hurt the success of these consoles. Without those, we may have had much more in the way of software that actually does something the previous consoles couldn’t. I believe there is a very real possibility that would have driven more sales than playing games you have already shelved at a higher frame rate.

 

[Inuhanyou]

AMD is good for Sony and MS. The problem with Xbox is that Microsoft are a 3 trillion dollar company that doesn't actually care about gaming or know how to even operate in they space so they try and buy people who do only to shut them down.

And the problem with PlayStation is that Sony stupidly bet everything they have on games that cost minimum 150 million dollars to make instead of allowing their devs to make smaller projects and stagger AAA releases to a wider degree. Their HW is doing fine


Companies like square think AA is the problem but it's not. It's not making quality games in that space people want to buy. On steam you can have a good indie blow up because it's good. It has nothing to do with the money invested

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Let's not spread that topic to this thread as well. There are other places to talk about game publisher choices.

 

[egoless]

Was AMD a bad choice? Maybe.

There doesn't seem to be PS5 complaints. RT seems to be wasted silicon due to its performance, but AMD seems to be a fine choice for Sony. Sony is the high end (as phrased in the court documents) market leader. So whoever Sony goes with the market will follow anyway.

For Xbox though...

The number one complaint for Xbox Series seems to be tools. Microsoft should have been the one to go back to Xbox og principles since they don't depend on the console as they advertise. Microsoft should have realized the overall sentiment to tamp down perceived Sony hubris in the PS3 era isn't happening again.

• Nvidia's marketshare pretty much guaranteed and still guarantess mature tools that everyone uses
• Intel was and is hungry for mindshare with CPUs and GPUs
• Qualcomm was and is hungry for the same as Intel. Well ARM in general has lots of expertise and support with the Apple effect alone, and those developers strutting their scaling prowess.
• Xbox is pretty well abstracted from the hardware, going from Intel to PowerPC and back to Intel without a hitch.

Those hungry companies make deals just as lucrative as anything AMD proposes so they can get mindshare and people using their wares. Wasn't this the case with nvidia to not miss on every console? It seems logical that companies working on console would transfer AMD specific use cases to PC, to crack the Nvidia stranglehold. But it hasn't worked that way for any console generation. You already saw the sentiment when something was optimized for AMD over Nvidia for once.

In this view, Microsoft would not have lost anything with:

• Intel CPU + Intel GPU. Yes it would cost them more. No more than how Xbox og cost more, and certainly less than $69B. Intel gains prestige. Devs would actually have to port instead of save as Xbox version and ship. Intel goes out of their way with support, again for the mindshare and getting as much exposure to their GPUs as possible for future development.
• Intel CPU + Nvidia GPU. The og xbox config. Yes it would cost them more, but no more than $69B. Intel gains, nvidia gets a high-end win, tools are solved. There's no need for tensor cores since the performance isn't there at this tier. You would gain ubiquitous, mature, performant tools.
• ARM CPU with either of the above GPUs. Again, they are already comfortably abstracted. And it bolsters the future anyway with everyone chasing Apple moves and chasing performance per watt per unicorn per moon phase per whatever the marketing point is today.
• BitBoys GPU. BitBoys Oy! Seriously though, PowerVR in a console would be fun to see.

Anyway, all this to say Sony going AMD wasn't a bad choice since they are the high-end console market leader, and it's the best back compat path to continue their dominance. Xbox though, they could have changed things and offered some sort of differentiation this gen along with bolstering the aforementioned companie's wares.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The number one complaint for Xbox Series seems to be tools.

Any links to this? I don't recall ever hearing of devs complain about developing on Xbox Series.

 

[Seanspeed]

Any links to this? I don't recall ever hearing of devs complain about developing on Xbox Series.

I haven't seen complaints per se, but I definitely remember reading from a couple smaller-time devs that they found PS5 easier to develop for. This was earlier in the generation though, and haven't really seen much talk on this since.

 

[Davros]

For MR PC people not interested in consoles at all: Yes

First off "MR PC people", that sounds so pedestrian it's Member of the Glorious (and yes the Glorious is important) Member of the Glorious P.C Gaming Master Race.
Now that I've got that off my chest I disagree : We need AMD Making graphics chips because the more competition there is the better It would be absolutely terrible if Nvidia was the only choice (and yes I know intel has now entered the market)

 

[Karamazov]

What about Qualcomm ? They want to enter the portable PC space.