The console war is nothing new. Microsoft and PlayStation have been trying to upstage each other every generation. Even though there have been heated debates between console players and PC players, companies which deal in PC hardware have hardly commented or tried to be in competition with consoles. Last week, though, Nvidia did comment on it, claiming that their 2080 Max-Q laptops would be faster than PS5 and Xbox Series X.
The comment was made at their GPU Technology conference in China. The comment wasn’t necessarily aimed at the consoles, but more towards the company that would make the GPUs for the consoles. Both, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X will use AMD’s Navi GPU, custom made for the consoles.
The claim was made through a slide that Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huan showed in the presentation for the conference. This is a really bold and controversial claim, considering the 2080 Max-Q isn’t the same as a normal 2080. It still performs at par with the standard RTX 2070, though.
Nvidia’s Max-Q GPUs are meant for smaller, more compact and thinner notebooks. This requires smaller GPUs, which comes at a cost to the performance. "Gaming requires powerful PCs and powerful PCs tend to be large. When we started working on gaming notebooks they were quite large so that the GPUs, which are very powerful, requires a lot of thermal and electricity, and therefore the systems tend to be quite large," Huang said.
Max-Q GPUs power some of the best gaming laptops in the market right now, with the added benefit of portability. They are pretty powerful. The GPU on PS4 pro is currently equivalent to Nvidia’s 1060, and both were released around the same time. If we are to take that as a benchmark, the coming consoles will be as powerful as an RTX 2060. Which would mean that 2080 Max-Q laptops would indeed be more powerful than the new gen consoles. But then again, there are reports that the GPU on Xbox Series X is more powerful than any Navi hardware on the market currently. We will have our answers after they are released.