"2x the power of the GC," can someone clarify what this means? (ERP)

[Li Mu Bai]

It gives the impression that Hollywood is just double the polygon performance, pixel pipelines, texture units(though knowledge on this front is an unknown). So basically what he has just done, is tell everyone to expect a console thats slightly above the Xbox in power.

I think its highly possible the CPU may be an derivative of the Gekko processor, only really consisting of some similar instructions for compatibility with the (GC)API.(Correct me if i'm wrong). The GPU is an unknown, because its not a doubled Flipper. ATI said that its a ground up desgin, it may inherent some of the Flippers strengths.

I wouldn't think that the comment simply doubling the clockspeed of the aforementioned units would be sufficient enough information enough to speculate on pixel pipelines & texture units, although you may be absolutely right. (as that 2-3x performance must be coming from somewhere) Regarding the Gekko, what's the PPC750 CXE's next advancement power-wise that would fit in nicely based upon these power claims? I haven't been following the PPC's chip family progression. It would be dirt cheap by now I would assume.

 

[NANOTEC]

Regarding the Gekko, what's the PPC750 CXE's next advancement power-wise that would fit in nicely based upon these power claims?

A dual core PPC750GX at 1.6GHz?

 

[Urian]

I believe that ATI was choosen because the mobile technology is better and they have a new architecture, with more effectivity than the PS+VS architecture.

Am I dreaming if I a say that the Hollywood is a reduced version of Xenos/C1?

360 GPU has a power consumption of 35W running at 500Mhz and a Mobile version with less clock speed and/or less Shaders and TMUs could be great for Revolution.

The only problem that I see is the CPU limitation, this is a thing thay annoys me more than other. We know the info of the CPU (Twice power of the Gekko with improvements) and it sounds like a "Gekkonized" PowerPC 750GX like Shogmaster have said.

A CPU limited GPU is a problem in the number or polygons of the scene, if the number of polygons is limited we cannot see huge scenarios, great quantity of enemies in the same screen, physics are gone...

Thanks to this I can understand the fustration of a lot of developers with Revolution because they are attached to 128 bits complexity games.

Do you want an example?

Play PGR3 in HD and this is what you can expect from 360.

Now imagine PGR2 with better textures (like Xbox having 256MB of memory) running at 60fps without slowdowns and Shader Model 3.0 FX like Self Shadowing, HDR... at 480p and you have Revolution.

 

[EndR]

The CPu/GPU should be "in the same family line" of Gekko and Flipper. More powerful version of them of course, but not a new architecture.. I don´t think so. How else are they going to pull of full backwards compability with NGC games?

The Rev casing "seems" to small for additional components (the Gekko/Flipper combo) so this leads me to believe that Nintendo will use the same architecture but modified with extra stuff, beefed/souped up if you will...

(Or maybe Rev will contain a Gekko/Flipper on a same die, as the Dragon-chip from Sony (EE+GS)... but once again, not likely)

 

[dukmahsik]

with everything all said and done, i think sony and ms can learn a thing or two from nintendo. power isn't everything.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Do you want an example?

Play PGR3 in HD and this is what you can expect from 360.

Now imagine PGR2 with better textures (like Xbox having 256MB of memory) running at 60fps without slowdowns and Shader Model 3.0 FX like Self Shadowing, HDR... at 480p and you have Revolution.

I personally expect more than PGR3 from X360 and I think it's realistical, and I expect the difference between REV and X360 to be much bigger than your example. I think your example is streched best case scenario and thus not very realistic.(meaning that the diffrence will be bigger than that)

 

[dukmahsik]

PGR3 is not representative of the 360, the engine wasn't built for 360 and it shows at 600p using no tiling.

 

[Eagle-Vision]

Personally I hope it's more than 2x because if you take the best looking GC game RE4, doubling the performance would only get you 60fps with same quality or 30fps with twice the rendering quality. That's not that great relatively speaking. I want at least double the framerate and double the rendering quality.

RE4 is not the best looking GC game, Rebel Strike is, which is in a complete different level, and having at least twice its rendering quality should be enough.

 

[pc999]

The CPu/GPU should be "in the same family line" of Gekko and Flipper. More powerful version of them of course, but not a new architecture.. I don´t think so. How else are they going to pull of full backwards compability with NGC games?

Gekko isnt really much more than a normal PPC with a few SMID instructions a those L2 instructions so it should be very easy to make a BC CPU, for the Flipper I would expect to be emulated by shaders just like every other modern (DX9) GPU do for TnL games (and IIRC it will happen by emulation with PS3 too).

So BC should not be a problem.

Li Mu Bai

They really said a bit more than XB so I guess that this 2-3x GC is not tied to any unknow architetural form.

 

[Megadrive1988]

I believe that ATI was choosen because the mobile technology is better and they have a new architecture, with more effectivity than the PS+VS architecture.

Am I dreaming if I a say that the Hollywood is a reduced version of Xenos/C1?

yes because Hollywood is totally different than Xenos/C1. Hollwood will not be a reduced version of Xbox360 GPU.

Play PGR3 in HD and this is what you can expect from 360.

PGR3 does not run in even the minimum HDTV resolution which is 720p. PGR3 is 600 something. it's also not a good indication of what to expect from X360 overall.

Now imagine PGR2 with better textures (like Xbox having 256MB of memory) running at 60fps without slowdowns and Shader Model 3.0 FX like Self Shadowing, HDR... at 480p and you have Revolution.

maybe

 

[Megadrive1988]

If you think back to the article released a month ago from Matt-IGN you would think devs had actual working hardware(Broadway and Hollywood). One dev actually mentions experimenting with the hardware, how is that even possible, when devs still have yet to receive hardware thats consist of actual Revolution hardware.

How many dev kit revisions did the XB360 have?

I seem to recall that developers had not seen the Hollywood GPU at all.

 

[pc999]

yes because Hollywood is totally different than Xenos/C1. Hollwood will not be a reduced version of Xbox360 GPU.

I think that (if it is indded a modern CPU) we may find at least some key architetures to be present, ie, unified shaders edram, tesselator/displacement mapping tech (or something even better for reduced dev cost, something like processedural works), multiple Z pass ...,I think that those may very well appear in any ATI GPU from now (weill at least from a while).

IIRC even Dave had said they do have a central R&D and then smaller teams addapt it for their needs (or something like).

 

[Mr. Saturn]

TP, (you'll see what I mean come the next trailer)

You mention TP and a new trailer my question for you is, do you have any idea when we're going to see this new trailer? On GAF one of the writers of a new Nintendo Magazine publication in the UK said that Nintendo's been working hard on the game since the last screenshots were shown and that when we saw the game we'd see what he meant. He also said something about how they were supposed to have an exclusive scoop on TP but then said they couldn't get it in time, he mentioned something interesting though. He said that the game would defenitely be well worth the long wait. Also do you have any idea what this new trailer will contain at all? Like new gameplay elements, locations, bosses etc?

 

[ninzel]

I wasn't impressed with what I've seen of Zelda:TP so far. After seeing the kinda of graphics games like RE4 and Metroid Prime 2 put out, I expect more from Nintendo themselves.

 

[OtakingGX]

Nintendo isn't known for making lopsided designs. They don't cram a lot of circuitry into an area, then starve execution units of bandwidth. Generally, if one component is lacking in an area, they'll try to make up for it with an efficient design in another component.

I'm sure that whatever Hollywood can and can't do will be perfectly complemented by Broadway. Many people have said that Revolution will suck at physics and AI. I haven't done any physics simulations myself, but if it's anything like finite element method, then it's just lots of arrays and Gaussian elimination thereof. PowerPC is known for its superb vector performance and if Broadway is based on anything close to a PPC 970 I can't see physics being limited at all. Also it seems that an out-of-order execution processor would be equally adept at AI.

I doubt Nintendo sat down when they started Revolution development and said "We want this thing to suck." I bet those early meetings were more about brainstorming what sort of technology they could expect in 5 years, and how to balance the performance of their machine.

 

[fearsomepirate]

The CPu/GPU should be "in the same family line" of Gekko and Flipper. More powerful version of them of course, but not a new architecture.. I don´t think so. How else are they going to pull of full backwards compability with NGC games?

The processors just have to be capable of reading NGC instructions, kind of like how DX9 vertex shaders can handle instructions originally written for fixed-function DX7 T&L engines. I highly doubt we'll see a fixed-function T&L pipeline in the Revolution; they'd be paying ATI way too much money if that's what they got, and Nintendo's not one to waste cash. There's just no reason to reuse Flipper--you can fit much more advanced technology in the same amount of space for just as much fabrication cost.

 

[ninzel]

In the PC world, they update VPU's and CPU's abilities often, while still retaining BC. No reason why this can't happen for GC to REV.

 

[akira888]

The processors just have to be capable of reading NGC instructions, kind of like how DX9 vertex shaders can handle instructions originally written for fixed-function DX7 T&L engines.

True, but with one massive caveat. The PC havs a driver layer between the application and the hardware that maps API calls to older interfaces to the native instruction set of the newer hardware. Consoles on the other hand, in general, statically link the native graphics hardware instructions into the .exe in order to bypass the overhead of going through the driver.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Well, given "virtual console" and Nintendo's patents pertaining thereto (IIRC, there's one about GC emulation as well) I'm going to guess that a driver layer will exist for Gamecube games as well as N64, SNES, and NES games. Either that, or the Flipper instruction set will be a subset of the Hollywood set.

 

[darkblu]

what you are referring to is called emulation. you don't emulate some hw on another one which is not at least an order of magnitude more powerful than the original if you want to preserve the original sw performance. that is unless binary translation techniques are used, which, again, is highly infeasible for a console scenario. so you can safely expect backward compatibility.