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Revolution Horsepower Revealed
Revo writes "IGN.com unveiled leaked specs for Nintendo's upcoming Revolution console today. The system really is about twice as powerful as a GameCube and a far cry from the Xbox 360 and PS3. Of course, the focus is on the innovative controller and the affordable price."
The original Xbox is, on paper, much more powerful than the GameCube and yet for my money (and I own many games on both of these systems), nothing on the original Xbox looks nearly as good as Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube.
I'm a lot more excited about the Revolution than either of the other next-gen systems (though I'll probably buy an Xbox360 when more good games come out for it)... in the meantime I'll keep trying to boost my online ranking in Tetris DS.
Matt Casamassina hates Nintendo and takes every opportunity to talk about how weak and worthless their hardware is. Every three months for awhile now he's posted "leaked" specs about the Revolution. Every one of these "leak" stories takes care to talk about how much more powerful the XBox 1 is than the Revolution. In all cases the source is "sources".
Frankly I think it's most likely the Revolution will be the weakest of the three next gen consoles, but I'll believe this when I see , and after the rabid and rapidly decaying lack of journalistic integrity shown by Matt Casamassina in the last couple of years, I personally refuse to believe anything I read on revolution.ign.com at all.
You can feel free to believe what you want of course.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
They aren't aimed 'at' younger kids... They're aimed at casual gamers, more. They're good fun, and many can be played from anyone between about 5 years old and someone who's near-dead.
Just because a game gets an "E" rating doesn't mean people over 13 can't play it...
"Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."
I don't think there's any implying taking place. The article clearly states that Nintendo isn't trying to battle Sony and Microsoft on raw speed or capacity. They believe that machines are powerful enough already that they don't have to push that particular envelope. They're concentrating on other stuff, controllers, price, making it easy for Cube developers to transition to the revolution.
:)
It's all in the article. This article is interesting because you can see exactly how the revolution is going to match up in terms of power. The fact that you're non-plussed says more about you than nintendo, or this article. It's just saying what's been said all along. we've just got numbers now.
And for the record, i'm nearing 27, and i'm really interested in seeing what's gonna happen on the revolution.
There are lives at stake here!
nintendo has alyways made sure that their games are better.
i think it will hold true to this console. i still like pokemon and zelda. call me childish all you will, but they were good games, regardless of the system it was run on.
Seriously, i look at the xbox 360 games, and theres nothing there that excites me. just all this stupid crap that tries to emulate real life. thats not why i play video games, i play them to excape from real life. at least nintendo has an art style.
I welcome Nintendo's new console, it's not just about the fine detail or how many poly's the gpu can process per second... it's about game innovation, and Nintendo has always had well branded games that kids like. I've been impressed with some of the games on the Gamecube, even if it is slower than hell by spec. The fact is they have good selection of games kids love to play, and even some of us older folks. I currently own an XBox 360, PS2, and a Gamecube. My kids play the gamecube more than the others because they enjoy the games more.
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can read binary, and those who can't.
I don't think a weird controller is going to awe enough people to their platform.
It might. Wasn't it weird when they came out with a touchscreen on the DS? That's selling huge (fastest ever to reach 5 million in Japan), and creating entirely new genres, including Nintendogs, which sold a quarter-million in the first week, and the new Brain Age game which has done incredibly well with people who have never played a video game in their life.
I suppose Nintendo is trying to either fill or a niche market or impress a disappointed crowd.
They made the most money in the last console wars. This time around, Nintendo might be mass-market while Sony and MS are forced into the comparatively "niche" hardcore gamer market.
I love the author's impliciaction that The revolution's 729MHz PPC is somehow going to be slower than the 733MHz Celeron that runs the original XBox (and the silent implication that the 3-way 3.2GHz chip in the 360 is meaninffully comparable to either of these on clock-speed alone) .
We're dealing with a real technical powerhouse here and he's giving us some insighful hardware analysis.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
I love how you directly compare the horespower. All that's been released is the clockspeed of the processors.
As we all know, from the big AMD vs Intel war, clockspeed isn't everything. Also keep in mind, that IBM usually develops PPC chips - and PPC chips generally are faster per clock speed than PC chips.
Also keep in mind that the revolution won't need to fill a 1024i or whatever resolution - just a standard dvd resolution. So it doesn't need as much power to do the same quality of graphics (in terms of what it's rendering, not what resolution it's rendering at).
My prediction? The step between platform graphics is going to be similar to how the dreamcast fared last time around - ie, somewhere between the two generations of graphics. But also keep in mind that graphics aren't all the revolution is bringing to the table, meaning it probably won't fare the same as the dreamcast did.
Nintendo has made clear their intent _not_ to support hi-def formats on the Revolution, whereas MS and Sony are heavily marketing the 1080i capabilities of their respective consoles. One theory for the viability of this relatively small increase in graphics power: with much fewer pixels to push, the Revolution's hardware will be able to produce framerates similar to what the Xbox360 and PS3 can do in hi-def. And on a non-HDTV, a game on all three consoles may end up looking the same.
You know, that's an interesting point that I hadn't thought of but it's obvious in hindsight. I'm a 32 year old Nintendo fan with disposable income. I'm a lot more interested in playing youthful games like Mario and Zelda that have great design than GTA and other "mature" games that are actually aimed at kids who are still thrilled by random violence and high polygon counts. No offense intended, I was one of those kids 16 years ago. In fact I even coded a couple ultra-violent games on my C64 back then. No polygons, though :)
But yeah, people like me are probably a better market. And I could care less what kind of horsepower it has. As long as it has good games I'm in. Nintendo must understand this at some level.
Cheers.
>I mean, what would LOTR be without the sweeping views of the New Zealand countryside, or the huge, detailed shots of giant armies?
Umm... a really good book?
I know you were joking around, but some people will not understand that. The 1.2Ghz UltraSPARC in the Sun T2000 has recently set a few world records for performance, outperforming 4 dual core Xeons. It is a multi-cored chip, but that is only one reason why it performs so well. Anyone who has taken any hardware architecutre course quickly learns that clock speed is just about meaningless, in fact if you only increase clock speed and don't change anything else, you'll typically see higher percentages of your processing time being used to handle hazards and other nonsense. Another example is the Pentium M, which often runs at under half the clock cycle of the P4, but leaves the P4 in its dust for just about every benchmark. A high clock cycle amounts to nothing but outrageous amounts of heat and energy when you can be processing the data faster and more efficiently as Intel has learned in recent years. The Mhz myth needs to end.
What's even better for Nintendo is that these chips are custom built for Nintendo's needs, and a chip designed for a purpose always performs very well against generic processors (even if the generic processor is supposed to be several times faster). I mean noone would expect their P4 to match up against any modern Nvidia or ATI GPU for graphics performance, thats just how it is. Nintendo also knows how to squeeze performance out of its hardware (i.e. the often cited Resident Evil 4, if I can get graphics twice as good as that on this new console, then really Sony and Microsoft will have nothing to stand on). The cell processor doesn't even have a good compiler yet, and its developers don't know how to effectively use its resources, same thing goes for the XBox (but not to as bad of an extent). By the time the XBox and PS3 are being effectively used, it'll be time for the 4th gen consoles. I am betting that Revolution will be capable of graphics on par if not better than PS3's release titles.
And as a final point, this is only a dev box we are talking about and not final production specs, so the whole argument is pointless.
Regards,
Steve
Nintendo doesn't take risks on things that don't fundamentally enhance gameplay.
DS and Revolution do this. HD does not.