The source was collaborated by the WSJ article writer it seems... so it is as legitimate a rumor as the WSJ one. http://www.nintengen.com/2015/10/nintendo-nx-tech-demo-not-able-to-run.html Polygons = geometry which honestly is still very important to the average person, that DX12 demo people saw earlier this year with the cities above and below, is probably similar to the demo Nintendo is showing off. (in target area anyways)
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Deleted member 13524
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Any 3D demo can have a polygon counter, and a high-polygon-count intensive demo would be a decent benchmark for geometry performance.
Geometry performance alone isn't enough to measure a system's performance, but you also can't measure system performance without measuring geometry performance too.
I'd guess a proper demo benchmark suite would have a tesselation/geometry-intensive demo, a shader-intensive one, a compute-intensive one and maybe a balanced one.
In these days of tessellation, PoM, normal mapping etc... there is really very little cause for a high end PC GPU to be geometry limited. I think it's much more likely that source simple used the terms polygons as a throwback to the PS2 generation when relative graphics performance really was measured by that metric.
In terms of needing cutting edge PC components to run this demo, I suppose it's possible from a power draw perspective. I think it's fairly safe to assume that the console would be running AMD tech and thus the reference to a "current generation Intel CPU" being in the Dev box is irrelevant and likely massive overkill compared to whatever the final console will be using. So in GPU terms we might be looking at something along the lines of Fiji level performance which is 275w. But assuming the console would use Arctic Islands then 2x performance/W may be possible requiring around 130W for the GPU with the rest of the system (including 8 Puma cores) fitting into another 70W.
But that's still pretty power hungry for a console and likely to be very expensive.
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Deleted member 13524
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It's a Software Development Kit, not a System Development Kit. There's no box. It's just a software suite with probably premature APIs and a bunch of demos showing what the console is expected to do at a certain framerate and resolution targets.
Again, I haven't seen any of the rumours suggesting Fiji levels of performance. The only comparison in place is the one about the geometry, which again means nothing since the guy didn't know the specs of the test machine.
A 16FF+ APU with a Tonga-esque GPU at 800-1000MHz, 8 Puma+ cores at ~2GHz and 8GB HBM2 (two stacks for 512GB/s?) probably wouldn't consume much more than 100W. Even more considering that AMD has been saying that Arctic Islands will double the GCN1.2's power efficiency.
Aaaand here I am heading myself towards utter disappointment.
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There's obviously a box that the demo's are running on that the source is referring to. I don't disagree with anything else you're saying, but I was referring the PC that the demo was running on. I probably shouldn't have referred to it as a dev box though. Wrong terminology.
"Specifically, one software demo included with the kit crunches so many polygons that it's currently impossible to run at 60fps using a current-generation Intel CPU and a nearly top-of-the-line graphics card"
That is the quote you are talking about, the thing we are saying though is that near top of the line graphics cards can be out performed in some areas by weaker performing cards. If say NX's tessellation unit is newer or the card performs more polygons/hertz it is possible to have a lower end GPU (even one weaker than the PS4's) still out perform a near top end GPU in a particular area (polygons in this case) depending on the architecture.
I'm pretty much completely convinced all of this is sheer and utter tosh; clickbait generated by evil trolls (or evil ad revenue-seeking webmasters). All we have are unnamed "sources", and a Nintendo that for the last twenty years have refused to build anything approaching cutting edge. Even the gamecube's hardware was years old by the time it launched, and decidedly conservative in all respects except for using Mosys DRAM.
I'm not gonna effin believe any of it.
I'm not gonna effin believe any of it.
First of all, no one has counted polygons in a decade or so.
Secondly, and most importantly, this whole "highest spec PC performance" really belongs in the "believe it when I see it" pigeon hole.
So now Nintendo is going to either release a way-too-expensive console, or selling this hugely expensive console at a loss? Performance don't come cheap, everyone here should know that by now.
I will believe that maybe, just maybe, Nintendo will want to release a console which is at the same level PS4/XOne were when they were released. Moderately powerful for 2013 but far, far from being high spec PCs.
That middle ground in one or two years time will certainly be more powerful than the middle ground of late 2013.
Secondly, and most importantly, this whole "highest spec PC performance" really belongs in the "believe it when I see it" pigeon hole.
So now Nintendo is going to either release a way-too-expensive console, or selling this hugely expensive console at a loss? Performance don't come cheap, everyone here should know that by now.
I will believe that maybe, just maybe, Nintendo will want to release a console which is at the same level PS4/XOne were when they were released. Moderately powerful for 2013 but far, far from being high spec PCs.
That middle ground in one or two years time will certainly be more powerful than the middle ground of late 2013.
It isn't a no named rumor, it comes from: I have more news from Takashi Mochizuki the man who posted the Wall Street Journal article about the NX Dev Kits being shipped out to Third Parties and the console having quote "Industry Leading Chips", I have emailed him directly for more details on the tech of the console and what exactly he heard from developers who have seen the console dev kits in action. -http://www.nintengen.com/2015/10/nintendo-nx-tech-demo-not-able-to-run.html
I don't believe the system will be some $500 monster, Miyamoto said himself that one of Wii U's problems was it's price point, so I assume $299 is the highest they are planning to go. You can make a more powerful console than PS4 in that price point though, especially because you can avoid things like disc drives, GDDR5, and go for higher clocks thanks to 14nm/16nm. As a Nintendo fan, I'm not convinced that is what Nintendo is doing though, I feel they would hit around 1TFLOP with a more modern architecture than PS4 before they go for a 2TFLOP+ machine, however they could just take a 20CU GPU from GCN 2.0 at 16nm and clock it at 1GHz, 2.56TFLOPs at a price point that should always stay below Sony's while easily out performing it.
cheapchips
Veteran
Is there any gain at all in hitting >ps4 TFlops other than marketing to people who already own a console?
Realistically, power/heat constrains would place them as within half a TFlop ish? Top end pc cards don't show a visual improvement on cross platform titles that the avg consumer would notice.
Realistically, power/heat constrains would place them as within half a TFlop ish? Top end pc cards don't show a visual improvement on cross platform titles that the avg consumer would notice.
Well he didn't see the purported dev kits in action himself did he? He's reporting (possibly generating) second-hand information of unverifiable veracity. That was pretty much my entire point.
The "industry leading chips" claim is also extremely vague; without further context it could mean almost anything really. Industry leading, as compared to what exactly? It's just clickbait, like I said.
We need more Beyond3D pixie counters to compare consoles.
Rikimaru
Veteran
I can confim this. Nintendo invented it long ago. But technology was not there to realize it.
Behold the power of BOTTLE NX
Isn't this how leaks work? Second hand information? I mean even if you are told it from someone who did see it, you now have second hand info? Also these are software development kits, not physical dev kits. For these 2 sources to collaborate, one of which coming from such a reliable source, it seems pretty silly to outright dismiss it. Makes much more sense that Nintendo is simply using GCN 2.0 and it has a new tessellator that pushes polygons easier, that doesn't make the console some sort of million dollar super computer.
As for the bolded, it does remove older architectures. For instance you couldn't call Jaguar an industry leading chip, nor anything from IBM, older ARM cores. It would have to be fairly modern.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
Someone please refresh my memory; how many watts did Wii U draw, and how many watts for just the GPU (if that is known) ?
35 watts max draw for entire system in games.
Sounds like the usual overselling via wishful thinking of Nintendo hardware, but, I'm for it. More more more! Excite! MOAR graphics. Hope it's true (it's 99.9% not).
But yeah saying it tops top desktop hardware is just laughable. That's pretty much not actually physically possible in a console (since by it's small incremental nature PC will have access to whatever technology the console does, except newer and better and with less thermal and power constraints). If NX has THE top 20 billion transistor PC GPU (impossible of course), PC will have the same thing but clocked 20% higher, then in 6-12 months PC will have a whole new generation. The only way it would be possible is if it was using some novel more powerful Japanese (non AMD/Intel/Nvidia) tech, and well, that's not possible anymore either, PS2 was the last console where it sort of was.
Anyways the other problem Nintendo is going to be facing is by the time this comes out PS4/XBO will be entering their 4th holiday. It wont be long before they can start the rumbling about PS5/XB2 that will similarly crush any high powered NX in tech terms...that's the problem with a tweener console. By the time it really gets going it will be nipped in the bud (Dreamcast good example).
The problem is more the concept of console generations, which is, IMO, plain stupid. A reset every 5-7 years and having to rebuild your customer base from scratch ?
It would be much better to have them evolving w/ backward compatibility, but that requires a fair amount more work and less low level access...
It would be much better to have them evolving w/ backward compatibility, but that requires a fair amount more work and less low level access...
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