When we first heard of NVIDIA launching its GK110-based consumer graphics card by as early as February, it took us by surprise. Intimidating naming (GeForce Titan 780?) aside, the graphics card is hoping to better NVIDIA's current-generation flagship, the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 690, in a single-GPU package, but does the graphics card market really need NVIDIA to launch its card at the moment? Perhaps not, but the answer lies not with AMD and competition in the graphics card market, but Sony, and competition between PC and console platforms.

Over the weekend, it surfaced that Sony would introduce its next-generation PlayStation console (codenamed "Orbis") later this month, and it would mark the beginning of the next-generation of game consoles. PlayStation 4 features an updated hardware feature-set, and promises to raise the bar with graphics detail that the console industry held with an iron fist for the past half decade. This presents a challenge for not only NVIDIA, but PC gaming in general. Here's how.

It's no news that PC graphics have always trumped consoles, but lost out on the "cost factor." Advocates of consoles falsely compare the cost of an entire PC (approaching or crossing $1,000) with a $300 console. In our opinion, marketing honchos at both NVIDIA and AMD failed to adequately present the argument that a graphics card as a single component costs exactly the same as a game console, and transforms desktop computers that average households already own, into gaming PCs.

With the introduction of the next-generation PlayStation "Orbis," PC graphics companies such as NVIDIA need to launch new products to remind the masses that PC gaming looks, feels, and plays better than consoles, even the newest ones on the block. NVIDIA just happened to have the GK110 lying around.

The GeForce Kepler 110 (GK110) is NVIDIA's (possibly the industry's) biggest GPU. Conceived around the time when the 28 nanometer silicon fabrication process at TSMC was relatively new and prone to yield problems, it was put on the back-burner when NVIDIA realized its second fastest chip, the GK104, stood a real chance against AMD's "Tahiti" high-end GPU. Even as New Year's 2013 approached, the most audacious speculators in the press were led to believe that NVIDIA would take its time launching the GK110 with its GTX 700 series, some time much later than February. What changed? Well for one, Sony and Microsoft agreed to chart out their next-generation console launch schedules, so either's products get maximum market exposure, and that is bad for the PC platform.

The GeForce "Titan" 780 GK110 card, hence, is NVIDIA not only batting for its own GeForce brand (which already leads AMD Radeon in the PC space), but PC gaming in general. We don't expect to see crates full of these graphics cards making their way to stores just yet, but a text-book NVIDIA launch. Over the decade NVIDIA learned that when it has limited initial inventories of a new product and yet wants to avoid the dunce cap of a "paper launch," (a launch that's just on paper, with no public availability), it pools up just enough quantities of the product for worldwide press (for launch date reviews), and limited launches in key markets such as the US and EU.