Sony PS5 and Xbox Series X will be fine consoles but they’ll be less powerful than their pricey PC tower counterparts. However Nvidia is also confident that, thanks to its RTX chips, even laptops will outperform PlayStation 5 and the new Xbox. At its Q4 earnings call, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang not only kind of called out PS5 from Sony and its Microsoft rival Xbox Series X, he more or less threw shade at them too, by implying that they will be less successful than laptops. Not gaming PCs, but gaming laptops. That is so much shade.
Huang confidently states that Nvidia-powered laptops have are now so powerful and so popular that they are genuine rivals to next-gen consoles. Gaming laptops powered by RTX graphics cards, he implies, could overshadow not just current consoles but next-gen ones as well. The result: laptops will become the 'largest game console' in the world. Now, that's fightin' talk.
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"Our notebook business… has seen double-digit growth for eight consecutive quarters," Huang told investors. "This is unquestionably a new gaming category. Like it’s a new game console," he then added, perhaps slightly more questionably.
“This is going to be the largest game console in the world I believe," he added, working up a head of steam. "And the reason for that is because there are more people with laptops than there are of any other device.”
The logic may appear somewhat flawed there because most laptops couldn't remotely go head-to-head with a next-gen console. There are some laptops – some with Nvidia's excellent GPUs, that are powerful enough to pull off high-end gaming. However the number of such laptops sold to date is, we suspect, comparatively rather small. The PS4 family of consoles has sold over 106 million units (as of December 2019). Microsoft is less forthcoming with its own figures, but we can safely assume Xbox One has outsold any gaming laptop you care to mention.
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However, as Huang says, “The fact that we’ve been able to get RTX into a thin and light notebook… is really a breakthrough. And it’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing such great success in notebook."
Perhaps the onboard power of any gaming device will end up being irrelevant. Earlier this month, Nvidia announced (opens in new tab) that its GeForce NOW game-streaming service – which had a beta as far back as 2015 (opens in new tab) – would be open to everyone, and since that does all the necessary processing for gaming in the cloud, it theoretically makes any game that can be designed, playable on just about any laptop. Sit back in your gaming chair (opens in new tab) and contemplate that.
Source: Seeking Alpha (opens in new tab) via TechRadar (opens in new tab)
