Sony Playstation 5 getting thrown under the bus for poorly-received Radeon RX Vega series

AMD's Polaris series launched for desktops with the introduction of the mid-range Radeon RX 480 to compete directly against the Nvidia GTX 1060. The current AMD Vega series later succeeded Polaris through the introduction of the Radeon RX 56 and RX 64. For PC gamers who have been following graphics cards, however, the Radeon RX Vega products offer vastly inferior performance-per-Watt when compared to Nvidia's Pascal family of GPUs.

A new report is claiming that it now knows why the AMD Vega GPUs fell flat out of the gate and it may all be because of Sony. According to unnamed sources close to Forbes, the engineering team responsible for developing Vega was also simultaneously developing the Navi architecture for use in the eventual successor to the Playstation 4. Unfortunately, most of the team's limited time and resources were reportedly funneled into developing Navi and so the performance of Vega products suffered. In short, AMD "phoned it in" on its desktop Vega products just so it can focus on advancing Navi in time for the Playstation 5.

The apparent revelation seems to fit the current direction that AMD is heading towards as a company. AMD CEO Lisa Su appears content with investing more into the semi-custom SoC business rather than creating traditional desktop GPUs to compete directly against the still-uncontested Nvidia GTX 1070/1080. Combine this with the fact that the lead architects for AMD Ryzen and Vega are now at Intel to head the development of an original desktop graphics card by 2020 and the report begins to make a lot of sense. Should trends continue, future desktop GPU comparisons could be between "Blue and Green" instead of the "Red and Green" that we have all become accustomed to since the 1990s. Intel, after all, has much deeper pockets than AMD to help stand toe-to-toe against Nvidia.