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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."
Yeah, like Kidtendo right? I hate this attitude.
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."
Nintendo has a secret... the average 27-year-old gamer is a kid at heart with a lot more money than a 7-year-old punk with tight-fisted parents. :P
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!
That's good enough for me. I'm pretty much still in awe of the gamecube. It's this little f@#%@ing thing that rocks, kinda like my mac mini. I don't have a X360 but will get a PS3, so I haven't seen "incredible, PC like" graphics on a console yet. Hell, I'm still in awe when I fire up Shadowrun on my Genesis! It's all about gameplay, I can live without graphics on consoles.
My name is Wootzor von Leetenhaxor
The company has ALWAYS been about revolutionizing controllers - from the NES, to SNES up through the 64 & Gamecube.
Yeah, hiiiii, I'm afraid I'm going to have to go ahead and, uhhh, ask you to hand over your geek identification card.
It's Link dammit, not Zelda.
The protagonist of the Legend of Zelda series is named Link. Zelda is the princess that he often rescues.
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 am not a gamer (no real time for that), but sometimes I want to play a not-to-involved game. There were only two reasons I bought a gamecube:
1) It was cheap (only $100 with controller and a game, if I recall correctly)
2) It had some fun games (Metroid, Zelda, Mario, the usual)
I knew next to nothing else about the thing. I think more about ordering a meal at a resturant than I did about this purchase. Now, my PC is a different story, but consoles are for recreation. Keep it simple, cheap, and fun please.
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 thought this was one of the few things we "knew" about the revolution? Nintendo have been quite open about not joining the 360/PS3 horsepower bandwagon, and also quite open about not giving a toss about HD. Between that, the prospect of downloadable titles, significant efforts to make it friendlier to non gamers (hey, I *like* the controller) and Nintendo's history of being the best at producing cheaply it looks like they may be going to make really quite a bit of coin this time around.
Coin? Ha! B'ding! B'ding! B'ding!
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
There's a reason that console controllers have evolved into their current form, and that's because they are ergonomic and comfortable.
I think what you meant was "and that's because Nintendo leads the way every time."
Control Stick? That was Nintendo. Rumble [pack]? That was Nintendo. Next to add to that list? Wireless controllers with motion sensors using a nunchuck design.
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.
Reading the article, it seems like most of their "horsepower" statements were just backed up with the clock rate of each systems CPU and GPU. That, really, doesn't mean anything at all. Who cares if the Revolution's CPU is clocked twice as fast as the GameCube's? That doesn't really mean anything at all, unless they're both running exactly the same chip just clocked at different rates. The same thing is true of comparing the XBox 360's 3.2 GHz chip to the Revolution's 750-ish MHz CPU. Does that really tell us anything at all? Not really.
The article is mostly crap. It's just telling us that the clock speed of Nintendo's apples isn't as fast as Microsoft's oranges.
Narrative
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.
Is it just me, or are they completely ignoring that the Gamecube had a PPC chip, and Xbox had an x86 chip?
On paper clock speed doesn't put the Revolution between the Gamecube and Xbox. It easily puts it above.
Also, if I recall correctly, the 360 and PS3's processors need to be passed data sequentially, and because of that it makes it much harder to avoid bottlenecks and lag in code, whereas the Revolution's does not.
It could just be me, but looking at stats on paper mean nothing when you're comapring different architectures and chipsets.
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.
From the article:
Whether or not Revolution is, in fact, a vehicle for the new freestyle controller or not, systems specs rarely tell the whole story. We would remind readers that during an era when polygon numbers meant everything, GameCube's polygon peaks were lower than PlayStation 2 and Xbox. However, few would disagree with the assertion that Resident Evil 4 - a title developed from the ground-up for Nintendo's system -- was one of the prettiest games of the generation.
That is blatantly untrue. GameCube's published specs were lower, but they weren't the same theoretical specs that MS and Sony spewed out. Reportedly Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike had the highest polygon count of the current generation at something like 18 million/sec.
This is exactly the same story that came out when DS and PSP specs were announced. PSP is so much more powerful and DS is for kids, etc... But look at how well the DS is doing. Not that it is blowing away the competition but I don't think anyone expects the Revolution to "beat" 360/PS3. Nintendo just needs to recover from Gamecube's failure and grow it's user base. If Revolution is anything like the DS then I think they will do quite well.
The company has ALWAYS been about revolutionizing controllers - from the NES, to SNES up through the 64 & Gamecube.
I'll give you NES, Super NES, and N64, but not GameCube. The GameCube controller is just the Dual Shock with no L1, L3, R3, or Select buttons, and the D-pad and left stick are switched, and the L2 and R2 are analog like on the Dreamcast controller and Dual Shock 2.
just look at the hands on response, http://forums.nintendo.com/nintendo/board/message? board.id=revolution&message.id=889594
I have up modding this topic to point something out.
Nintendo do something Sony and Microsoft don't get. You'll shit yourself when you ehar what it is.. because it's like EARTH SHAKINGLY AMAZING. Nintendo make fun games, games you can pick up and just play, enjoy them and be done with them. They don't need Mario to be super realistic, or 12 hours of FMV per 3 minutes of gameplay. They just make good games.
If you can't see this or think that's "lame". I suggest you stop playing games and start watching films. Fun comes before the latest greatest graphics engine. If you'd look beyond your biast to maybe try Mario kart or something like billy hatcher you may enjoy something.
I'd also like to point out RE:make, RE0, RE4 and quite a few other games on the cube arn't aimed at children. The cube just happens to be a good console which is afordable and so suitable for games aimed at the new and old. Maybe you should check the PS2 release list and see the 5 million children's games released each year for the thing.
I like muppets.
but how many libraries of congress can it store on a football field?
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
Actually, Nintendo gave dev kits to game development companies, who then gave the specs to IGN.
I think Nintendo probably doesn't want this published, but they can't really do anything about it because they have to give the information to third party game developers. In that sense, it is kind of a "leak", but it's mainly just information that was inevitably going to be released anyway.
Worker bees can leave
Even drones can fly away
The queen is their slave
With traditional controllers players can rest their hands on the table, their laps, their stomachs, lying down with their hands on the floor or above their heads. I cannot imagine having to hold my hands in the air in front of me for more than 10 minutes with the new device. Then again, perhaps I am just lazy.
I am of course referring to the completely objective discreet units of fun, per billion.
I know a guy who was roommates with one of the head girlfriends of the 2nd assistant director of ALL OF NINTENDO and they said its a lot. Like, at least ... 9Gf. And it is scientifically proven that the original Xbox only rated a 2.3 Gf (and only with Halo), so this is, like, way better.
Plus, the console itself sort of reminds me of those power crystals that Superman used to control his arctic fortress of solitude, and that's about all the reason I really need to buy one. If I'm being perfectly honest with myself.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
All the nay-sayers have a serious lack of imagination as to what the revolution controller is capable of. Imagine a sonic-like game where you are controlling the speed of your character by the angle you tilt the controller, as he cascades over hills and obstacles and through turns (--also, tony hawk/snowboarding games). Imagine a soul calibur game which is fully 3d, you control the direction of your attack by "whips" of the axis of the controller, and moves derive from complex curvilinear shapes, but are intutively similar to the motions performed on screen. Imagine any flight simulator/racing/dogfight/war game, all you do is point the direction you want to go. Imagine madden but you pump fake with a whip of the hand, and throw the same way but holding a button. Not to mention whatever Nintendo has in store for mario and such (the revo controller was designed for a new mario concept originally...) So many more things are possible with this controller than were before. (oh yea, of course, FPS's)
**Disclaimer: I am NOT a gamer. I enjoy simple D-pad+four button games.***
My view on this whole Sony/MSFT vs Nintendo war is that Nintendo is trying to be a console, while Sony/MSFT are trying to be full blown entertainment devices. And I think Nintendo has chosen the right niche. Personally, I don't see myself buying an XBox360, or PS3, but I do see myself buying a Revolution. Nintendo has openly said that it will have emulation ability, so that you can play your old games (ie super mario, etc) on the revolution. I see this as the killer app. If the revolution costs 100USD, I'll buy one, just to have the ability to play older nintendo games on my nice tv. I assume they will recompile or do some graphics magic to make it look good on a 16:9 set, and so this is a 'good thing'.
Nintendo has a HUGE library of very entertaining games, and if you look at the demographic, the people who played super mario and had the original NES and SNES are now in the position of making purchases, and they will buy the Revolution. I know that I don't have the time to sit down and play Halo, but I do have the time to sit down and poink around with Mario Cart, or even Contra. The reason those simple Atari games you see at walmart are selling is because people want simple games again.
I guess I'm getting old (I'm 23!!!) but games sure aren't what they use to be.
--sig fault--
Why would you care about hardware stats? Do they guarantee "better games"?
News, MS and Sony fanbois...the answer is "no". Better games come out of better design which are sensitive to the kinds of passtimes people want to pursue.
But, um, Nintendo fanbois? There's another side to that. Hardware horsepower makes it far easier to build games with a wider scope for play. Remember the Halo grenade hacks? Those were damned fun, and, from talking to the dev manager on the product, I can assure you that nobody expected them or planned for them. They made heavy use of the fact that there was physics in the game -- and that depended on the hardware horsepower of the XBox.
So game design isn't
I'm getting a negative aura from this reporting. I don't think a weird controller is going to awe enough people to their platform.
It worked for the DS. And unlike the Xbox 360 and PS3, you don't have to buy an expensive new TV to get a significant difference compared to the old system.
IIRC, the last I heard from the big cheese at Nintendo is that they are working with augmented reality for their next generation of consoles,
Don't know where you heard that. Probably some random rumor site before Nintendo said anything. The rumor sites predicated practically everything but what Nintendo actually ended up doing.
and now we are getting a speed bump and a hard to use, tiny controller?
Nintendo has been saying for the past few years that we don't need more powerful machines. The controller is small because it's one handed. Once you realize that, it seems to fit well in people's hands - at least in the pictures. As to hard to use, everyone who's tried it has said it was great. Do you know something no one else does?
Is Nintendo still doing the whole "this console is for kids" thing?
Still doing? They never did. Bright colors does not mean kids game. Try something like Mario Sunshine sometime. The difficulty level is way to high for most kids. Things like Smash Bros & Mario Kart are big college dorm games. Pokemon, and to a lesser extent Kirby, are the only major things Nintendo really aims at kids.
I agree with you, and I'd further like to say that at some point all the graphics in the world dont improve gameplay. In fact, games I found fun 5 or 10 years ago that get revamped with "cutting-edge" 3d graphics are less fun to play. Fighting games and puzzle games are actually bogged down by graphics, as it's the intensity of the gameplay that really makes those games.
And for $200 or less, I'd definitely buy a Revolution. I've been waiting for a controller that doesnt rely on the 40 year old meme of arrow keys and buttons to control your avatar. That was acceptable back in the age of sprite-based games, where there was no way to convey a sense of depth. Revolution is an appropriate name for their new system because, with the advent of fast 3-dimensional rendering, it has become possible to completely immerse one in a game, simply by giving them the ability to act out what they want their avatar to act out. The Revolution controller seems to be a step in this direction.
If people dont think that the step is large enough, I'd like to point out that Rome wasnt built in a day.
In games like Armored Core, DOA2, and Soul Calibur 2, I get frustrated by my inability to make my avatar do what I want it to do. Maybe it's just me, but playing a game isn't about tapping a few keys and completing a pre-defined action anymore. I'm expecting something more intuitive from the Revolution. I'll wait and see, but for now they have me interested, and at a price point that I can accept.
And as for the article? There were about two sentences with any real information. The rest of it was drawing wild conclusions based on hardware specs. This wont be news until we see some gameplay. After all, that's what video games are about, right? Gameplay?
SRSLY.
Part of the problem with comparing the XBox and the Revolution prices is the fact that they are 2 completely different business models. While Microsoft is content with losing money on their hardware and gaining it back on software, I would presume Nintendo wouldn't have that same 'comfort zone' with their pricing. That being said, I would agree that the best price for this would be around $150... Maybe even $125...
And considering that at least one controller will come with the system, and the development cost alone of that technology, your conclusion is fallacious.
just some guy
I think you are right about positioning, however I feel the need to point out - if backwards compatibility is your killer app, then you must bow to the PS3 in that department - it handles PS2 and PS1 games, which is probably the biggest single-platform games library in the world outside of PCs.
Unless of course this is about the plumber, in which case I will simply say good day and good luck with those mushrooms.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
It seems to me that Nintendo is targeting anyone who isn't a "gamer." And by that, I mean people that don't care about graphics, don't care about shooting people, don't care about sports simulations or any other simulation, etc. These people are kids and adults alike. They're people that want to play games for the fun of it, games you can get in and out of, not games you can make a lifestyle from. They don't care if they're the best at Game X, they just like to play it. Its fun and its different. These games don't need to run at 1080p because it doesn't make a difference.
Do I think it will be the best selling console in the US? No. But when you can't buy a goddamn DS in japan except USED and for a higher price than retail, I'd say they're doing something right, at least where they are...
The SNES had its unique "color math" capabilities and the famous Mode7 affine matrix transformation mode.
Didn't help team sports games, which relied on raw video memory bandwidth to upload sprite cels for 22 players into the GPU. Those tended to play more smoothly on Sega Genesis.
I believe the N64 let you re-write the microcode in the GPU for custom needs.
The Atari Jaguar had that first.
I'm sorry, but in my opinion, the specs given are still pretty much useless.
This isn't like the Intel/AMD argument, because each of the chipsets has a different ISA
It isn't necessarily true that every command executed in the 3.2GHz cores of an XBox 360 will
constitute one clock cycle. In fact, I'm sure that a method of achieving those awesome frequencies
is by removing as much functionality as possible from each command the 'core' of the CPU performs.
The ON-GPU memory is really significant. 3MBs of in chip memory is more valuable than 15MBs of off
chip memory. It immediatly means that the GPU is able to concurrently manipulate the 3MBs of memory
as close to 'free of charge' as possible.
Since it's a gaming machine and doesn't need an independant os for much more than thread management,
This also means that those 3MBs will probably be dedicated to what is currently on screen.
From a texture memory perspective, one texel (texture pixel) is 4 bytes, assuming 32 bit color with
no compression. This means theres room for a million pixels in that memory at one time, or just shy
of a 1024x1024 pic. That memory can be manipulated quickly too!
For clarification, that is a REALLY COOL THING!!! That is the amount of data that can be played
with for FREE internally.
I don't know about anyone else, but judging by the 'spec' comparisons in the past, Nintendo plays
their resources to the fullest, and compared to the price tags of the other machines, I'm still
thinking Nintendo's box is probably going to be pretty nuts.
On a side note, I'm still not sure I like the idea of the controller...
I'm a 'reality' gamer, so if my natural habit of diving around while playing is a bad thing to have
while using a SDoF controller, the system is going to really let me down...
We'll find out, this is up for grabs for me
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
If they can go with 90nm, this can sell for under a $100, at which point, I'm there. This shouldn't cost more than the gamecube. They might even be able to sell it for $80 if they can fab it in 65nm.
My guess is that they're planning a portable around it as well for the 45nm generation.
Yeah this is definately about the plumber... oh and that remote thingy...
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything" -- Josef Stalin
First of all: those numbers of course don't make sense, what's next, comparing CPU weights and color?
Anyways.
Will Revolution be as powerful as XBOX360 and PS3, no, it can't handle highdef and this should tell a lot.
Thing is, once you remove high-def support, you suddenly have a lot horsepower left to render great imagery on a 480p / 480i device. So we can't say that Revolution games will look worse than XBOX360 games on an NTSC/PAL TV which most people have out there.
But scrap even that.
Do you think Nintendo accidentally missed the fact their console is slower? And what means this for a game anyway? Does it mean worse gameplay or experience? Nintendo apparently is confident in their vision, enough so not to get into the dick length comparison game Sony and Microsoft are doing with their machine specs.
I mean, they support NES/SNES/Genesis titles for Christ's sake, were those games crappy? They look GREAT on a TV screen, and some titles have gameplay unparalled in modern titles.
Also it has enough power and innovation for great new content, what could a gamer want? Value and entertainment or silly spec numbers?
MS and Sony realise that simple games are selling too. This is part of why MS setup Live Arcade, and why the games there are cheap. Sony has yet to reveil anything more than a "me too!" statement.
-]Phreak Out[-
As Lisa Simpson would say, I know what those words mean, but that headline makes no sense.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
To all the fanboys and haters, regardless of what you think, this is a smart move in the part of nintendo. Sure, they may not be the fastest of the bunch, but regardless, it'll profit. And isnt that the reason any business is around, the good old step #4. It'll cost nothing for nintendo to produce, they'll make profit on the consoles, they'll make more profit off the emulation of all the systems they are gonna cover. This will milk the last 20 years of gaming for all that it's worth.
So kudo's nintendo, while microsoft and sony fight it out and lose money on every console they sell, you will stay in the game, and get an extra life to play the next round with.
The fact is that the people who really care about mhz and clock speed have either a) already bought an xbox360 and will not buy a Revolution, or, b) will buy all three consoles anyway. Talking about speed and graphic capabilities is useless. It all boils down to: is it fun?
Executive summary: "I like the Xbox. I like the Xbox 360. These arbitrary comparisons of apples and oranges I pulled out of my ass prove the Revolution will suck. Also I have a big penis."
This is a sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
480p is not HD. Besides, Nintendo already said they will support 480p but no higher.
You're wrong. Out of order execution helps when you have memory and cache latencies. Basically, on any modern processor, where it takes multiple cycles to access even the L1 data cache.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Considering that I and my friends sit around and play the SNES on a 62inch screen TV, where the pixels become as big as my thumb and it's a helluva lot of fun, I'd say that fun>graphics resolution. If the revolution has lotsa fun games (as I'm sure it will), then who cares if it cant do 1080i... Most xbox660 games I've seen are pretty and stupid, I'll take fun with less graphics any day.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
You apparently don't realize how successful the ds is and how much people are craving innovation at the moment.
Gaming has temporarily (yes, Temporarily!) gone mainstream, just as it did in the early 1980's. This too, shall pass, Sony and Microsoft will fall, but Nintendo will remain, cranking out profitable quarter after profitable quarter. The mainstream audience demands tits and ultraviolence, so that's what Sony and Microsoft deliver, but the mainstream is fickle, and doesn't really give a damn about any one type of entertainment fundamentally. This era is going to come crashing down just like the Atari 2600, and Nintendo will be there, AGAIN, to pick up the pieces and move on.
Nintendo has repeatedly said that they weren't going to release the specs to their next console, because it's irrelevant and misleading. IGN just proved their point. Everyone who knows anything about CPUs knows that PPC chips perform better on a per-megahertz basis than x86 chips, yet IGN acts like Xbox's higher clockrate means it was necessarily better than the Gamecube. (Maybe, maybe not, but the MHz tells you exactly nothing about the question.) Similarly, he's comparing the Xbox 360 to the Revolution without noting that they have completely different architectures. It's like saying, "this Japanese guy's phallus is 10cm and this American guy's is only 6", therefore, 10 being larger than 6, the Japanese are more fun in the sack for the ladies."
This article is completely misleading, and further illustrates why Nintendo didn't care to publish their specs. None of these specs have anything to do with whether the Revolution is fun or looks good. For that, we have to wait until E3 when Nintendo shows off the console to the public. Until then, it's all just meaningless dick measuring.
It is easy to say that Sony's library is the biggest, but what does that mean when the games are not available to play? Let's say that you want to make use of that library, is Sony making all those games available online? Is there anywhere you can buy even a fraction of Sony's catalogue? And when I say buy, I mean go out and find a specific title that you remember fondly, not hunt through a bargain bin for some random junk.
The whole Sony catalogue is a false argument. Yes, it is compatible, but no, it is not available. Nintendo is making a huge chunk of their legacy library available for the Revolution, and that is a whole other thing.
All that's been released is the clockspeed of the processors.
And the fact that the architectures are identical to the Gamecube ones. That means the CPU is basically a 730MHz Gecko and the GPU is a 240 MHz Flipper. The per clock performance of the Gecko chip (which is basically a G3 with integrated cache and the ability to use its 64-bit FPU as a 2x32-bit SIMD engine) is probably quite a bit better than the Xenon, but enough to make up for the enormous clockspeed difference.
The G3 is a very ancient chip. It has almost no OOO capability. Per-clock, its probably going to be faster than Cell, but considering that the per-clock of the PIII-based core in the XBox is in line with the G4, it won't match up even to the older console in CPU performance. As for graphics chips --- clockspeed times the number of pipelines is an excellent predictor of GPU performance. Only in a relatively small number of cases (eg: the Geforce FX debacle for NVIDIA), has pure fill-rate proved to be a poor predictor of overall performance in the case of conventional GPUs. The integrated memory helps the Flipper chip quite a bit, but given that it h as about the same clock-rate and the same number of pipelines as the XBox GPU, I wouldn't expect much more than that level of performance out of it. Overall, expect the Revolution to perform somewhat like a slightly improved XBox. Between the 1T-SRAM and the familiarity of developers with the GC architecture, Revolution developers should be able to wring substantially more out of the Revolution than they did out of the XBox, but I'd be surprised if the improvement was more than 50%.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I agree. The "performance" number he's quoting are complete crap.
"IBM's "Broadway" CPU is clocked at 729MHz, according to updated Nintendo documentation. By comparison, GameCube's Gekko CPU ran at 485MHz. The original Xbox's CPU was clocked at 733MHz. Meanwhile, Xbox 360 runs three symmetrical cores at 3.2GHz."
Hmm your copy and paste seems to have malfunctioned:
"IBM's "Broadway" CPU is clocked at 729MHz, according to updated Nintendo documentation. By comparison, GameCube's Gekko CPU ran at 485MHz. The original Xbox's CPU, admittedly a different architecture altogether , was clocked at 733MHz. Meanwhile, Xbox 360 runs three symmetrical cores at 3.2GHz."
I wonder what you were thinking when you decided to omit that part?
And an Athlon XP is just an i386 with 2 GHz clock speed?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
It is the big screen experience that sells.
This is the sci-fi technology Popular Science has been promising the television audience since the 1950's. Television as The Jetsons know it, televison as The Incredibles know it.
We don't have flying cars but we do have this. In color, high definition and in multichannel theater sound. Interactive and affordable. $1700 at Walmart.
I think Nintendo has badly underestimated what HD brings to the market.
that and having 7000 games to play doesn't mean much if only 150 of them are worth playing
11 was a racehorse
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Some Rare game won't be making it, at least thats their current statement. The ones with Nintendo characters will most likely be available, but the other like Goldeneye won't be available.
yea, that's what all guys with a low clockspeeds say.
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.
This argument, while still speculation at this point since the Revolution hasn't been released, seems to mirror the current predicament of the DS and the PSP.
On paper the PSP is vastly more powerful. It has a 333MHz CPU with 32 MBs of main memory. The DS, in comparison, has an ARM 9 running at 67 MHz and an ARM 7 running at 33 MHz. On the RAM side it has 4 MBs of system memory as well as 32K of processor RAM for both ARM 7 and ARM 9, and 656K of VRAM. This should totally blow the DS out of the water and admittedly the PSP looks very, very nice.
Yet, the DS is well on it's way to making the PSP little more than a portable video player that offers a few games. While there are endless areas of speculation (e.g. the much higher cost of the PSP, the unique controls of the DS) I feel it really comes down to the games. Quite simply the DS has much, much better games and a pretty good library of them. The PSP has... uh... Lumines, GTA:LCS, Mega Man Powered Up and I've heard good things about Daxter. Even among the games available most of them haven't really seemed to inspire people to talk about them nearly as much as the DS's library.
Sure a few games work because they use the unique aspects of the DS (e.g. Kirby: Canvas Curse, Nintendogs) but the vast majority don't. A few (e.g. Castlevania, Phoenix Wright) aren't even first-party titles... though admittedly almost all of the top titles are.
It's just that when it comes down to it the system that people tend to prefer is the one with better games. Not flashier graphics, not more raw power on paper. I can't say that sales figures will necessarily back this up because, honestly, Sony and Microsoft both have their fans and a good enough stranglehold on the market at this point that they aren't likely to be upset very easily. But in the end this battle of specs over games has already more or less been won and the victor clearly seems to be the less-powerful, but more enjoyable machine from Nintendo.
I don't think so. It is just that Nintendo sometimes hates risks.
The problem with HD now, is that there isn't one standard. People have lots of different TVs that do HD at different resolutions.
And that just part of the market. About 10% of people now have HD displays. Yes, this can only grow, but the time isn't right for Nintendo.
I'm sure, that, by the time of Xbox 1080 (they jumped 720), Playstation 4 (Sony is boring) and Nintendo Apocalypse Now (People like ominous trademarks!) come, Nintendo will support HD, in whatever form the market has adopted as standard.
I am a games player I like to play games, and thats how I choose whether I buy a console, I have what I call my 3 game rule, if there are 3 games on a console I want to play then I buy it, its that simple. Its not about the MHz value or MBs value its all about the games. Nintendo sees that and I think alot of other games players do also. Its going to be intresting to see how it all pans out.
I always found the Slashdot attitude about graphics to be strange - more of a reaction against the common wisdom than anything really thought out. Every time a new NVIDIA card comes out, there are 200 comments about how it's unnecessary. About how the old card was just fine.
Let me say this - graphics are important. Of course gameplay is more important, but there's no reason that we can't have both. I want a system that can push an HDTV. I want a system that can push loads of special effects and maintain a constant 60fps. I want more realistic characters, larger environments, and smarter AI.
The Gamecube is a fine system. I one one myself. When the Revolution ships, I'll probably get one - I like the idea of playing 20 years of games on a system. I think that the controller will be cool, and while I'm not sure if it will be practical, I'm willing to bet taht the Big-N will come up with some cool applications. But I do not for a second believe that the Revolution is a replacement for the XBOX 360 or the PS3. I'm glad that Microsoft and Sony are pushing graphics forward. And I'm disappointed that Nintendo isn't doing the same. Having an affordable system is important, but why is the Revolution limited to 83MB of memory? How much does 256M of DRAM really cost? And why can't it output at least 480p? Even my Gamecube could output 480p.
It's looking more and more like the Revolution is just an updated Gamecube. But by the time the Revolution ships, the 'Cube will be more than 5 years old. Can't Nintendo do a little better?
Actually, Revolution will be quite capable of 16:9, as is the current GameCube hardware:
Source
A few reasons why I don't give a crap about the specs:
Pikmin
Monkey Ball
Legend of Zelda
Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
Just because the graphics aren't the most optomized to play the latest disposable first-person-shooter, doesn't mean it's inferior.
This may sound a little bit zealotly but I back up nintendo's formal commentary that we've(as consumers) have sufficient hardware for quite a while to produce stunning looking, great playing games.
After all when something gets too detailed, you can just pre-render the object onto a more primitive figure (3d users are already familiar with this technique called amongst other titles "surface sampling"). Additionally there are newer 3d engines that use depth based calculations to determine how heavy a polygon should be I.e close up models are polygon rich, further models are not.
With the algorithm advancements we've had in the 3D sector, it's no surprise that the raw performance of the nintendo console hasn't increased significantly.
One final point to make is that nintendo games are usually highly stylised. So for the majority of their bread & butter titles programmers+designers are not seeking photo realism.
I will kill your argument with only one proposition : You start paying the novelty tax, I'll root for you and call you the coolest kid on the block, and I'll buy a HDTV when it's dirt cheap.
We geeks are tech-savvy, not drug addicts. HDTV can wait.
doesn't the picture of that console remind you of Apple's recent products? (iPod, iBook, iMac)? I'll call this thing "iNtendo"... or maybe "NI! ntendo"
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
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
Are we on Slashdot or what?
Why is no one talking about developement tools for the Revolution, or for any of the other consoles for that matter? I heard that it was/is very difficult to develope for the PS2 for example. That (among licensing issues) forced out smaller developers. Maybe Revolution will have a very good, fast and easy developement platform and we will see many inovative titles from independent shops? Or they took a turn at Sony, or Microsoft ported Visual Basic?
Anyone got a clue? I clicked on comments to get some.
Intel v. AMD???
x _new.htm
I have had funniest experience with Intel itself.
P4 v. Pentium Dual Core: one core at 2.2GHz beats 3.5GHz P4.
P4 v. Pentium M/Centrino: at several benchmarks the notebook chip at 1.5GHz had beaten by 2 times 3.2GHz P4
If you have ever programmed in assembler and read even single spec for CPU and code optimization (Intel has good tradition of releasing such specs) you would definitely know that clock speed itself has only modest influence on overall performance. (To put it simply: exec'ing user's code isn't only task CPU is doing - all communication with peripherals goes thru CPU too. CPU normally do about 30-70% of their peek performance: interrupt latencies, memory latencies, bus access latencies, etc.)
Read on: older http://www.intel.com/design/pentium/manuals/ & newer http://www.intel.com/design/pentium4/manuals/inde
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
When all's said and done about which hardware produces the finest graphics, if you sat and played say "burnout 5" on all three next gen consoles, you wouldn't notice any meaningful difference unless you put all three on simultaneously and scrutinised the screens.
So even if Revolution has lower rez graphics, you won't notice. Console graphics havent improved to any perceptible degree since the dreamcast. The higher poly race isnt worth running anymore. Not that i'm saying graphics wont get any better, just that it isnt crucial for the gameplay experience to stay on the bleeding edge.
I just thank god nintendo have done something interesting and new. I hope this new console is as alien and captivating as the N64 was when it came out. A large part of the mind-blowingly fun experience of Mario64 was having this wierd new controller to play with.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
When I get a new system all I really care about is the controller. The graphics can be 8-bit for all I care. Thank you Nintendo for realizing this and making a system geared towards 1% of the gaming population because we feel left out when it comes to playing games on current consoles.
Can I bum a sig?
I've worked on all three platforms. And while I haven't didn't do the coding myself, I have worked with the coders who did.
The rule of thumb was that if you could do it on the Xbox, you could do it on the GameCube and you would probably have to shave it down to get it to work on the PS2. The problem child you have to worry about in a cross-platform title is always PS2.
I don't know where Casamassina is getting his assertion that GC polygon peaks were less than the PS2. Does he mean untextured polys? Again the PS2 is generally the platform that you have to optimize for.
Using MHz numbers to compare the speed of different processors is like comparing the speed of cars by looking at how much gas they consume. There is a relationship there, but it isn't the primary one. And it isn't the one you care about.
There are all sorts of reasons for performance numbers, such as the PS2's surprisingly fast cache but low ram, etc. I hope someone will do a detailed technical breakdown, because I really should remember this stuff. And also financial pressures play a part: you add optimization time for the Xbox if you think you will sell in North America, and optimization time for the GameCube if you have the possibility of Japan sales. But in general, the Xbox and Game Cube are similar in power, and the PS2 runs to catch up.
I can't really talk about the Revolution, partially because I don't have one, but I've heard other developers use the "2x more powerful than the GC" figure. That puts it somewhere between the Xbox 1 and the Xbox 360.
The ______ Agenda
Nintendo doesn't take risks on things that don't fundamentally enhance gameplay.
DS and Revolution do this. HD does not.
To be fair, the claim by Apple that the Intel machines are "three times faster" isn't really comparing Apples with, err, Apples.
Compare the G4 1.4GHz mac mini with the Core Solo 1.5GHz machine and you'll notice that there isn't much of a difference in performance.
If any place should be able to understand the stupid comparisons to the Xbox and how little they mean it should be the /. crowd. The numbers across the board are *better* than the Xbox... and it seems that everyone forgets that the Xbox was NOT streamlined or specialized hardware at all. This is not a bastardized PC tossed together from the spare parts bin, it is a highly specialized dedicated piece of hardware that will easily outpace the Xbox all around.
The Gekko was hands down, the best graphics chip of the last round with 8 texture layers available for *each* poly on screen! It just went majorly unused due to other constraints. Those have been dealt with and addressed, and now the Revolution is able to harness the hardware properly and utilize it.
Comparing the Revolution to the Xbox is about the most useless comparison anyone could have made since they are as similar as cheese and a toothbrush. It is no secret that IGN is receiving MASSIVE dollars from Microsoft for placement and advertising, and not so from Nintendo... if this is how they plan on handling "reviews" and "news" I have officially stopped even glancing IGN's way. How about a in-depth analytical breakdown of these specs and what they really could mean? Nah, lets compare it to the Xbox, talk it down and call it a day.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Ghost Recon? Oblivion? Kameo?
I'm not sure about the life you live but i sure as hell don't get to drive tanks, fight funny creatures and morph into different characters and go on epic journeys in lush forrests and such.
I'm sorry,you are completely wrong. Those number (clock speed) can't be compared _at_all_ on processors with different architectures. For example one CPU can perform only one simple operation during the CPU cycle and need to fetch each instruction from RAM, while other may perform dozen operations of different pipes and stages, take instruction from light-speed fast cache and predict most of the branches. That's just example, but it not far from the truth. CPU clock speed all alone can tell you _nothing_ about performance of the system. Even if you take into account the architecture, clock speed, RAM speed, main board and buses architecture, etc. you can tell nothing, because in order to compare, you have to run real benchmarks, because some architectures outperform others easily on some tasks, and lose on others.
Personaly I lean tward the latter, but I'm an optimist, and one can clearly get eather opinion out of the article as written.
If forums teach us anything, it is that logic and critical thinking should be required courses in the public schools.