PS4 VS Xbox One? Nvidia Says The Steam Machine Beats Even The PlayStation 4

The PS4 vs Xbox One battle is already over according to Nvidia, who says neither is the winner in comparison to PC gaming and the upcoming Steam Machine.

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, if you compare the AMD Radeon R9 290X video card to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 GPU the consoles are blown away.

While the full article gets into more detail, the short of it is that the R9 290X GPU produces 5 TeraFLOPS (or trillions of FLoating-point Operations Per Second) while the Xbox One GPU is capable of 1.33 TeraFLOPS and the PS4 GPU boasts 1.84 TeraFLOPS. This is why the PlayStation 4 can handle most games at 1080p while the Xbox One is forced to run at lower native resolutions.

It’s obvious performance differences like this that have Matt Wright, consumer sales manager at Nvidia, saying PC gaming is the winner:

“The PC platform is far superior to any console when it comes to gaming. We are proposing small form-factor PCs to be a viable alternative to the next-gen consoles. Enthusiast players want the ultimate games system and that is the PC. We want to make PC gaming as simple as possible and we think that it’s already becoming much more relevant and appealing to casual gamers.”

The cynics among us might point out it behooves Nvidia to hype PC gaming considering they’re not making a single penny off of the next generation consoles. While Nvidia GPUs graced prior generations, the CPUs and GPUs for the PS4, Xbox One, and Wii U are already made by Nvidia’s arch-nemesis AMD (who bought up ATI several years ago).

Still, as evidence of PC gaming’s impact Nvidia also points out the long term popularity of games like Minecraft and World of Warcraft. Steam membership now exceeds 50 million users while Microsoft’s Xbox Live can only boast around 40 million people.

Speaking of which, details about some of the high end Steam Machine hardware has begun to come out. Technically, Valve isn’t producing a console. Instead, they are offering design guidelines for various levels of power combined with their SteamOS system. So you can buy a system based upon your budget and the types of games you plan on playing. Some companies will offer systems at the $99 budget level and some will offer the Cadillac model.

For example, iBuyPower’s Steam Machine costs $500, which is the same price as the Xbox One, and comes with a 500 GB hard drive, Valve’s new thumbstickless controller, an AMD multicore CPU, AMD’s R9 270X graphics card, and 8 GB of RAM. Sound familiar? That’s because the hardware specs are almost exactly like both the PS4 and Xbox One. If you check out the Xbox One breakdown the insides of the case are almost exactly like a PC, although the R9 270X is rated for 2.69 TeraFLOPS, making it a better deal overall (unless you taken into account the Kinect 2.0).

In fact, this writer has already stated in the past that the hardware similarities between the Xbox One, PS4, and even the Wii U will only help PC gaming. In the past the PS3 had a specialized CELL processor although the Xbox 360 was definitely more PC like. But now all the gaming platforms share practically the same hardware and the Xbox One even runs Windows 8.

But some people may point out that console exclusive games put a damper on PC gaming fairly quickly. You also cannot rent PC games through GameFly or any other service. (Although one might ask why they can’t simply have a digital rental service that limits your access to one PC game at a time, but I digress…)

Do you think PC gaming and/or the Steam Machine will eventually win over the Xbox One vs PS4 console battle?