The PS4 announcement last month immediately led to a PS4 vs Xbox 720 debate, but perhaps Sony and Microsoft's next-generation consoles are competing for second place.
"Compared to gaming PCs, the PS4 specs are in the neighborhood of a low-end CPU, and a low- to mid-range GPU side," said Nvidia's Tony Tamasi to TechRadar.
As Nvidia's senior vice president of content and development, he sees the PS4's specs as outdated, even today.
"If the PS4 ships in December as Sony indicated, it will only offer about half the performance of a GTX680 GPU (based on GFLOPS and texture), which launched in March 2012, more than a year and a half ago."
It only gets worse
Tamasi also notes that consoles, by definition, are closed platforms and not upgradeable.
"What you get today in terms of performance is what you're stuck with five - 10 years down the road. PCs don't have these problems," he told TechRadar.
"They are open and can be upgraded at any time to harness the power of newer GPUs for more performance and to take advantage of newer, modern graphics technologies."
The gap between console and PC gaming has become more apparent this console generation, and Tamasi expects more of the same when PS4 and Xbox 720 get here.
"If history predicts the future, then these next-generation consoles, while being more powerful than the current ones, will very quickly end up more than an order of magnitude behind the PC."
PS4 not worth the cost to Nvidia
The comments from the Nvidia senior vice president are noteworthy because they aren't just from an industry rival trying promote PC gaming vs PS4.
The remarks come from the same company that powers the PS3's graphics chip.
Nvidia isn't buying into the PS4, however. Sony announced specs that include an eight-core AMD processor and a custom Radeon GPU.
"I'm sure there was a negotiation that went on," Tamasi told GameSpot, "and we came to the conclusion that we didn't want to do the business at the price those guys were willing to pay."
Instead, Tamasi said that Nvidia, with only so many engineers and so much capability, will be able to focus on another portion of its business that it wouldn't be able to if it did chips for Sony.
Nvidia's projects include delivering high-end graphics cards like the GeForce GTX Titan and supplying Apple computers with GPUs.
It's also looking to capture mobile processing with its Tegra 4i system on a chip for smartphones and tablets, and by releasing its own handheld gaming platform, Nvidia Project Shield.
