Nvidia: GeForce RTX GPUs more powerful than next-gen consoles

During GTC China 2019, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed a slide stating that Nvidia’s current GeForce RTX mobile GPUs are more powerful than next generation consoles, Xbox Series X and Playstation 5. The slide, visible further down, is also present in the video below, starting approximately from minute 21.

The slide shown by Huang was intended to compare old Maxwell GPU-based gaming laptops with new products equipped with Turing GPUs.

In particular, the goal was to highlight how Max-Q technology has had a great impact on the gaming laptop market, allowing notebooks to gain the power of dedicated video cards by consuming much less and favoring the creation of products with greater autonomy and compactness. .

The slide compared a Lenovo Y900 Gaming equipped with GeForce GTX 980M to a more recent Lenovo Y740 Gaming with GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q. Apart from the comparison of the dimensions and weight of the two products, it can be read that the laptop with GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q is more powerful than the next consoles which will debut next year. It therefore follows that desktop GPUs such as the RTX 2080 and above are already much more powerful than the solutions within the next consoles.

The GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q is a variant with lower consumption (operating voltages and lower frequencies) than the traditional RTX 2080. It is based on the same TU104 GPU as the RTX 2080 with 2944 CUDA cores, and is accompanied by 8 GB of 12 Gbps GDDR6 connected to a 256-bit bus. Being an RTX solution, it supports ray tracing and DLSS.

As for next generation consoles, we know they will be based on AMD architecture, Zen 2 with some improvements regarding the calculation part e Next generation RDNA with hardware ray tracing support on the graphic front.

It is rumored that the GPU will be faster than an RX 5700 XT, the current standard-bearer among Navi video cards. Consoles should be able to handle 4K at 60 fps and beyond. As for the Xbox X Series, rumors say that Microsoft points to 12 TeraFLOPS for its new gaming machine.

The truth is that they are all currently Chatter, both those of Nvidia as well as those of Microsoft and Sony: declarations that no one can really put to the test today, not to mention that in a comparison between PC and console the whole theme of optimizing games would be included, which has always been a harbinger of great debate.

The only likely element not mentioned in the slide is that the new consoles should cost a quarter or less (400/600 euros) of the current RTX 2080 Max-Q laptops, traceable online starting from 2600 euros. Without forgetting that we ask ourselves what numbers or information Nvidia has to make such a statement.