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ATI Talks Revolution Graphics
Via 1up, an interview at the site Revolution Report talking with ATI about the power of the Revolution's graphics. From the article: "What I can say is that ATI is focused, as is Nintendo, in making [Revolution] a great, gaming entertainment platform. I know that a lot of journalists are very focused on specs. It's the big thing; as a geek, I look for that too. The key thing to keep in mind is that Nintendo, with ATI's help, is trying to create a game console where you don't have to look at [specs]."
As long as it illuminates pixels on a TV I'll be happy :-)
btw, first post ;-)
DxBlog - It's where you want to be
What do you mean by not have to look at specs? Will the graphics hardware be included with the game? ;-)
But seriously folks, what exactly does that mean.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
He doesn't say a damn thing. Do not bother.
> The key thing to keep in mind is that Nintendo, with ATI's help, is trying to
> create a game console where you don't have to look at [specs]."
Yeah, like when I buy a car, I don't care about the performance. Or a PC - I don't mind if it costs £200 or £2000, or whether it's got 256MB or ram or 2gigs - hell, who's got time for that sort of detail. As long as it comes from a company with a track record of making hardware capable of providing adult gamers with fun, and which will be around for more than just a few months, I'll be happy. Take the most recent successfull Nintendo console - it'll be a long time before other companies release something similar to compete with it.
Generally when you put a game into a console, it works without needing to worry about power, specs, and other nonsense. That's the beauty of them.
Don't worry, a lot of first timers get confused.
I'm not scared of anonymous cowards.
It's usually understood that when you buy a Nintendo console, you buy first party games. I agree on lack of third party support, but it's obvious you're not making an effort.
I wonder, do you attempt to drive a car without wheels, and then blame the car manufacturer?
I'm not scared of anonymous cowards.
What he meant to say was, "Nothing to see here folks, move along."
Why do an interview if they aren't going to give any new information? Great, we understand ATI and Nintendo don't care what the specs are... but we do! GIVE US ZE INFORMATIONS!
Something similar happened a couple years back (IIRC) when AMD was losing the MHz battle and stated that MHz isn't everything. Well, sure, it isn't. But your whole argument this entire time has been that it is. So, when you shift your argument only when your losing... probably means the argument isn't all that good.
God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
..the pitch they made with the N64 and its crap graphics courtesy of SGI. Remember how wonderful it was supposed to look? And how terrible it ended up looking? Nintendo pitched the same junk at the public back then also. "Don't worry about the specs and what's inside, worry about the games themselves."
Personally I haven't played anything with Nintendo on it since the N64 and the batarang controller, but I still love and play alot of SNES and NES games.
...you probably don't consider driving a rewarding experience. You aren't alone, I imagine the majority of people consider their vehicle a utility which simply gets them from A to B. On the other hand, I don't think the many people consider a game console to be a utility which simply consumes spare time in a safe and cost effective manner.
I enjoy a nice drive in the country, putting the top down and feeling the breeze. I don't see how fast I'm going or how quickly I accelerate to change the fun of the ride. How well my car performs doesn't matter- its the surroundings that do. So long as my car doesn't die on me or spew noxious fumes into the car, I'm all good. It just needs to work as expected without problems. After that, things like the music on the radio and the color of the trees matter more to enjoyment than the performance of the car.
Same with a console. It doesn't matter if it can push 5 polys or 5 million. Its how fun the games are to play. I was happy with graphics back on the SNES. Its gameplay that I want now. Specs don't matter, the games themselves do.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
If you say "With the Revolution," it's obvious you haven't been existing in the same reality the rest of us have been in.
I'm not scared of anonymous cowards.
Nintendo has never, ever said that games were about power. They've always said they are about gameplay, pure, simple, and only. There's never been any reason for them to say anything else, they never have, and they never will.
The funny thing about this is that Nintendo says "we need to focus on gameplay," people tell them to piss off and say it's an effort to avoid the power argument, and then, later on, when everyone else comes back and says "well it's not about the power, it's about the gameplay," everyone applauds that as a geniune show of clarity and insight.
Whatever.
I'm not scared of anonymous cowards.
With the lack of exclusive games on consoles these days all we have left to argue about is console specs. It's sad that todays generation of kids will not experience what it means to be a true fanboy. For the record, Sonic could kick Mario's ass anytime, anywhere ;)
Cars are more like PCs than consoles. A car is built for the road it will run on. A PC is built for the software it will use. With consoles it is the other way around, they have software built specifically for them. It doesn't matter what their hardware is like, because(ideally) the games will be designed around the system.
Like all the others who have posted, I don't seem to remember any over the top claims of the N64's potential.
In a unique situation for consoles (about a year before the Nintendo64 shipped) you could actually go to an arcade and see the what the N64 could do first hand.
"Killer Instincts" and "Cruisin' USA" were popular arcade games that both ran on the Ultra64 hardware... which was nearly identical to the final shipped Nintendo64 hardware.
Simply put, any hype that was out there at the time could be completely validated by a trip to your local arcade.
Sony, OTOH, has always made outrageous claims of sheer power and have always failed to deliver.
The PS2 was supposed to be able to render "Toy Story" quality graphics in realtime...
(which we all know to be utter bullshit now...)
Yet at the time these claims were enough to make nearly everyone I knew pass up on a Dreamcast and instead opt to wait for the PS2.
Sony's *outright lies* were effective enough that they killed the Dreamcast and
nearly drove Sega out of business altogether.
The PSP was supposed to be a PS2 power to-go, yet I have yet to see a game that even comes close
to looking as good as an average Dreamcast game.
(The PSP *IS* a damn fine portable genesis/snes/gba/tg16/nes/sms/neogeo though...
and Sony has done everything they can to prevent that from being the case with the 'firm-wars' ^_^ )
Anyway, back on topic...
The Revolution will likely be underhyped (compared to PS3 anyway) and over-deliver.
If 'Resident Evil 4' was done with (1x) Gamecube power and the Revolution will be roughly
(3x) Gamecube power, then I am not worried *at all*...and the new input methods make it that much more appealing.
The Killer Instinct and Crusin USA boards weren't even remotely like each other let alone like the Nintendo 64.
...and that's just the CPUs! The rest of the hardware is just as different. The KI board used a HDD!
Killer Instinct:
50MHz SDT79 R4600-100MS
Crusin USA:
50MHz TMS32031
N64:
93.75MHz R4300i
I'm not saying that Sony and Microsoft haven't lied, I'm just saying that you shouldn't beileve everything that a game manufacturer tells you.
Processor Speed != Performance.
The N64 was ultimately very different from what KI and Cruisin' USA perspective, but also keep in mind other details... with Cruisin' USA, for example, that extra 40 Mhz could have been used for additional processing such as split screen play--since the original arcade machine was networked for multiplayer, the N64 had to do that alone. And as you point out, there were differences. Which goes back to my first remark...
Processor Speed != Performance.
Deja Vu
n. 1. The sensation that you've read this very article before.
What? You're full of crap. Does a person have to know exactly how many Gs they experience in order to have fun on a roller coaster? Absolutely not. In the same way, obsessing over horsepower, torque, or other numbers does not make your driving experience any more or less fun; wanking off about how many shaded pixels per second your game console can put on your HDTV does not make the games it plays more or less fun either.
Yes, we are geeks here, and enjoy knowing those kinds of things. But to believe that the way that you do things makes your experience more valid than someone else's is plain short-sighted elitism, and is plain wrong.
What a bunch of horseshit. I don't know and don't care what the performance of my car's engine is, but I find driving very rewarding, I'm just not a fanatic.
To drag this back on topic, when I was five I didn't know or care what the specs for my Amstrad were, just that I could play Jet Set Willy. Later, I didn't know or care what specs my Amiga 500+ was, just that sensible soccer was a good game.
Geeks care about specs, users care about the experience. If videogames are going to be mainstream, console makers have to realise this. If you can give a good price, experience, and specs then fine. Otherwise the majority of people would rather lose the third for the first two.
This is actually a fairly expected answer. They are working on a product for Nintendo, who is notorious for having quality games for their consoles but not necessarily the flashiest, prettiest games. So we should have seen a comment along these lines. Now, it is also sort of intersting to look at it from another angle. Here you have a chance to create a product that by looking at the numbers you would suspect is slower and underperforming, while in reality it is actually better then its competitors.
I think it is also good that Nintendo is not (nor would I expect them ever to) trying to sell their console on statistics alone. The hardware configuration and statitistics of the 360 and PS3 were constantly being touted by M$ and $ony for how great the systems are. It is also possible they are losing focus by trying to extend the grasp of gaming systems and turning them into full out "media centers."
Nintendo is not worrying about all the bells and whistles, but is instead designing a gaming console to be used for gaming. By keeping your attention focused on that single task, you do not need to throw tons of processing power and ridiculous hardware into the machine so it can perform its specialized task.
It would be intersting if during this experience ATI managed to come up with a nice, more efficient graphics processing design that could still be powerful and useful in a PC computing environment. The power drains that some graphics cards seem to pull nowadays is getting crazy and it is always fun to laugh at the cards so big they take an extra slot just to cool them.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
We already know that it is not going to do High Def. Sure sure, you don't have a High Def set right now so why do you need it? Becomes in a few years DIGITAL tv WILL replace ANALOG tv and you will have to ditch your current setup anyway so why not go high def at the same time? Tech moves faster then you think. Just try to remember back when was the last time you saw a movie in TV screen format vs widescreen? Do you have a widescreen tv?
HD looks fantastic. There are some people who claim it is only a marginal imrpovement over DVD but they are idiots or have only seen extremely poor examples. I just watched a HD version of Spirits Within and while the movie itself hasn't improved it is a far better visual experience then the regular DVD version. It truly looks stunning.
Or put another way, do you still play your PC games at less then 640*480? By the end of this year there will be 3 consoles standing next to each other in the shops and the revolution better offer some incredible games because graphically it is going to be the looser.
Will Nintendo deliver? Who knows, they succeeded with the DS in deliviring fun games on inferior hardware BUT not with the gamecube.
Nintendo will certainly have one giant disadvantage. It probably will not be peoples main console. The big cross platform games will look better on anyone else console AND will not require you to buy a controller addon just to play them in a low res format.
Being different can work, iPod is very different from other DAP players, or it can fail, Apple PC vs IBM Clones.
As for people not looking at specs. Right. Nice try. Specs matter. Specs determine a lot of gameplay. The simplest thing of level size and level load is determined by the specs.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
While I understand that the hardware is functionally different, my main concern with ATI is their written drivers.
I have 2 'gaming' computers in my home LAN - one with a pretty good ATI card, the other with a slightly older Nvidia card. IMO ATI and Nvidia have been relatively neck and neck technologically for years now. ATI advances half generation with this new product, Nvidia leapfrogs that 6 months later, ATI leapfrogs Nvidia 6 months further on, etc.
Where there is a HUGE difference is the drivers. Nvidia drivers seem to be to simple to install, very stable, and really outstanding. ATIs on the other hand are buggy, kludgy, and inconsistent until MANY generations after first release. I frankly use the Omegadrivers in preference to whatever comes directly from ATI. In performance, I read the specs and my Nvidia card should be slightly worse than the ATI, but the ATI doesn't appreciably outperform the Nvidia.
So you put ATI hardware into a box that CAN'T be upgraded, can't easily be patched by the user? From my experience with ATI drivers, that would make me nervous.
-Styopa
Uhm... Nintendo isn't losing. They made a conscious decision to have slower hardware. They weren't forced to have slower hardware. They decided on it.
It's a tradeoff: If you want the fastest hardware, get a PS3. If you want adequate hardware at a lower price with a funny controller, get the Revolution.
Neither of them wins, it's a design decision.
Thanks fopr nothin pal.
What I want to know is when the next Zelda game will be out.... It was supposed to have been out last May.
I wasn't aware of those differences....clearly someone hit wikipedia or something!! :)
I do however remember seeing that Ultra64 logo during the demos
for both of those games. EGM and others at the time were writing that the Nintendo64
(or Nintendo Ultra64 in Japan) was the same hardware as the "Ultra64" arcade boards.
openly stated that they wont be making a major graphical increase in their games, that instead they "are relying on developers to create new and innovative games". Now, I realize that graphics aren't everything, and that storyline and the amount of fun provided by the gameplay are some of the biggest factors in a game being successfull, but, hell so are graphics. The Gamecube was in my opinion a kiddie machine for kids whos parents were either to stupid to buy a PS2 or Xbox (ya, I hate the Xbox also, but for the love of god, anything is better than GC), or the parents are too damn worried about what their kids play and so when they get older and invite friends over, the friends go "aw, man, he's stuck with a GC, lets get the hell outta here", he has no friends - when hes like 15 playing on a kiddie platform. Not to mention that the graphics on GC were only about a 150% increase from the N64, versus PS2 and Xbox, which were MUCH better. If the graphics on GC sucked, and Ninendo doesn't plan on any major graphical improvement, the Revolution wont look any better than the PS2 and or Xbox.
End of post on how much Nintendo has grown to suck since their days of 8 and 16 bit glory...