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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."
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!
The company has ALWAYS been about revolutionizing controllers - from the NES, to SNES up through the 64 & Gamecube.
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.
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.
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.
'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.'
...Sounds pretty different to me.
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
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--
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.
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...
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 not the standard Gamecube controller, what about the Wavebird (wireless) controller? It was the industry's first reliable wireless controller.
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?
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.
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.
There are lots of classes of games for which graphics are important. Take for example sports games which are very popular in the US. Graphics are critical for such games to reproduce the realism of a real sports event. Since the actual game rules are fixed by the sport, there isn't a whole lot of room to innovate in the gameplay department, so going in the realism direction is the best option.
Also consider the genre of first-person shooters (which are also popular in the US). Graphics are important not just for creating atmosphere, but HD graphics are going to be great for multiplayer maps (you can see farther with more detail). CPU power is going to be critical to feed the advanced physics and AI engines that modern games are sporting. Take a game like F.E.A.R, whose great animation, physics, and AI really add to the experience, and shoe-horn it into the revolution, and you lose a lot of the specialness of the game.
Or consider RPGs. Console RPGs depend on a great degree on the ability to tell a story. Good graphics and animation are critical in conveying the epic feel of an interactive story. I mean, what would LOTR be without the sweeping views of the New Zealand countryside, or the huge, detailed shots of giant armies?
It seems very clear to me that the Revolution is destined to be another Gamecube: basically, a console only good for playing Nintendo's first-party titles. Sure, most of those are very good games, but how much is really in that library for a sports, RPG, or FPS fanatic? Because between the tastes of Japan and the United States, these are the genres that are really important to gamers. Of course, you could argue that Nintendo is aiming at a completely different market with the Revolution (eg: "The Sims" market), which could very well be true, but in that case, Nintendo isn't really competing in the same sphere as Microsoft and Sony.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I can live without graphics on consoles.
===================Super Mario Bros.=================
You've emerged from a giant green pipe. A large castle lies in the distance. Giant blocks with question marks painted on them float mystically in mid-air. A large turtle with a green shell is approaching you from left. From your right, what appears to be a giant mushroom with eyes and legs approaches.
>_
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
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.
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...
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.
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 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?
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 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
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.
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.