NVIDIA May Jump Into the Fray Against Xbox & Playstation with Their Own Tegra K1 Powe

[dgstorm]

With the silly fan-boy politics creating a ridiculous opinion war between fans of Sony's Playstation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One, it seems like the market is saturated with negativity. It makes you wonder why anyone would want to wade into this contentious arena. However, that's something NVIDIA may actually be doing very soon.

The above screenshot is supposedly from a NVIDIA Tegra K1 console device and is meant to showcase its visuals.​

It's no secret that AMD won the contract to produce the internal hardware for both the PS4 and the Xbox One. This possibly rankled NVIDIA just a tad, since they previously provided some of the internal hardware for the Playstation 3 and the first Xbox. Rather than grousing about it, they may have decided to actively do something about it by wading into the console wars themselves with their own console.

According to the latest intel, NVIDIA recently had a gaming console controller pass through FCC testing. It's entirely possible this device could simply be meant to work with some of NVIDIA's other products, like the Shield and/or their gaming tablets, but the BBC is reporting it is meant for some form of gaming console.

This new console will be powered by NVIDIA's Tegra K1 chipset and will hook to your TV through HDMI. Not only will it be designed to handle Android games using the Android TV interface, it will supposedly also stream PC games by connecting to your existing PC graphics system.

When analyzing this strategy, it actually makes some sense. First, if you can't get manufacturers to use your chipset in their consoles, then why not just make your own competing device to use your own hardware? Second, NVIDIA's Shield product turned out to be a consumer market dud. Using the Android TV UI will simplify the process for NVIDIA and provide them with some additional marketing leverage.

Alternatively, this move could be a huge waste of resources for NVIDIA. It will be interesting to see how things work out as the once mighty titan of graphics struggles to regain its dominance in an ever-changing technological landscape.