Consoles that provide(d) the best performance increase from 1stgen to last gen titles

As a console owner, you always hope that the hardware you buy will be able to provide significant advancements from it's first gen to last gen titles. I have owned almost every gaming console since Pong initially came out and I have always been excited to find out that my old hardware can pull off a few new tricks. I also believe as we move forward that this will be an important feature for any hardware as we are getting to the point of diminishing returns in this type of technology where in order to truly make an impact we either have to have a longer console lifecycle ( no more 4 to 5 years) or sell a more expensive product.

In my opinion the PS2 has been a very successful product in providing a significant gap between first and last gen products (ie God of War). The Sega Saturn and Super Nintendo also provided a significant upgrade in this regard.

On the other hand the DreamCast was one of the worst product to show a difference between first and last gen products (Soul Caliber always looked best to me and was a launch title)... same goes for XBOX1.

When it comes to current gen hardware it seems that both the PS3 and XBOX360 have been designed with significant headroom. Perhaps even moreso on the PS3 side of things based on future software. It will be interesting to see how far things will progress!!!

 

I think that it is far more than that... the question asked when developing the PS2 was most likely how can we make a system that will remain competitive for X amount of years at a low cost. Sony seems to take much greater chances on it's hardware designs and although things are rough at the start, the payoff is huge near the end of the lifecycle.

...and to add to that, it is difficult to provide proper documentation and tools with new unestablished hardware.

 

Agreed... truly a testament of good hardware design regardless of the fact of how difficult the transition was for 1st gen.

 

Perhaps Sony is on to something with their design decisions to go with powerful CPU based on multithreading, asymetrical cores with a relatively unimpressive video card. Everyone else's aproach is very GPU centric.

 

I would say quite to the contrary.. the Wii will get pushed the least because it offers the least amount of headroom.

 

Also the Wii is fundamentally an overclocked Gamecube, so I seriously doubt this!

 

Not at all... just saying that console's are cheap and have a long life cycle. They sometimes need to incorporate more complex architectures to keep competitive later in the life cycle.

 

Look at the 360 for example... only 10MB of EDRAM. This was not done to be leveraged day one. In fact it is hardly being leveraged today. But third generation software that is in delopment such as Forza is begining to make use of it. Microsoft clearly knew that it would be complicated but possible to make use of such a small amount of EDRAM and it will give them an advantage later in the lifecycle. XBOX1 had no such tricks to speak of and it shows.