Equate what you expect from the revolution with a graphics card

[EndR]

I personally think that we can forget about X1000+ gfx specs.
If you think about some of the comments Nintendo have made, it dosen´t equate very good with having a X1000+ gfx.

For starters:
1. NIntendo wants to be the cheapest out there when they come out.
-What is cheapest, 249 dollar or 199 dollar? Somewhere between these two, maybe one of them. Having the core pack att 299 dollars, well, I think that NIntendo wants the Rev to be sold with more than 50 dollars in between.

2. Nintendo wants to make profit from their hardware. (this is one of my speculations)
-Nintendo knows that their thirdparty support will be less than spectacular, therefore they cannot count on so much royalties from thirdparty. Wanting to make a profit of each hardware (or at least sell it at +/- 0) means that the hardware must be cheap to manufacture, veeery cheap to manufacture. Making a profit on each hardware and also wanting to be cheapest of the three really puts pressure on what hardware you want to have in the machine.

3. Size
-Revs size is an important factor as well. Depending on what CPU they´ll have, will they have a DSP for sound, or maybe an PPU as well. You cannot fit that much into that casing because of the heat issues of each components.


I don´t know but I think that Nintendo will use something in the range of a X800, modified of course. The X800 (or maybe X850) is a great card that should be able to be produced very cheap and that also is "powerful" enough to put up "comparable" IQ on a SD-tv. Maybe this is a modified version, supporting shader 3.0 (don´t know if it already does that).. but yeah.. around X800- X850 tech wise I believe...

 

[Carl B]

Well whatever the case, I think it's safe to say that 'Hollywood' will be something of a custom job, not a modified chip per se. Afterall they've got their old ATI team working on it and the projects been affott supposedly for years now. So I'd take the view of evolved Flipper design rather than re-scaled R420 or R520 designs. 8, 16, more pipes? Who knows. But I think Flipper - at least philosophically - will form the base.

 

[Teasy]

2. Nintendo wants to make profit from their hardware.

Since when?, could you post a quote from Nintendo to back that up please.

 

[EndR]

Since when?, could you post a quote from Nintendo to back that up please.

Sorry.. that was one of my speculations.. but NIntendo have made comments that was akin to it. Besides, look at history, NIntendo has always been very price sensitive. With Gamecube, the machine was sold during some occasions with 1-2 dollars loss. Why would Nintendo change that stance?

And also.. the thirdparty-comment is valid in the sense that Nintendo will, according to them (I think I red somewhere that Iwata expected thirdparty support to be not so so great, comparing 360 and PS3). Less thirdparty means less royalties and therefore, it is more important to have a hardware that is sold close to making a profit or at a few dollars loss..

 

[Qroach]

Since when?, could you post a quote from Nintendo to back that up please.

Common teasy, you're kidding, no?

 

[dukmahsik]

I'd expect gfx output to be within 75% of ps3/360, it'll def be no worries in that area.

 

[PC-Engine]

I don't think Revolution hardware will be profitable right off the bat. They could sell it for $250 and maybe only lose about $30 a unit.

 

[Alpha_Spartan]

All you guys are wrong. The Revolution will contain a stripped-down Voodoo 3 running at 50 MHz and will retail for $39.95. It will launch with 500 AAA launch titles.

Seriously though, I think the Rev will ship with an X1300 level GPU.

 

[pc999]

Personally I think they will be a ble to put a console that is able to play well a UE3 game easly (now it should be) , and that is enought IMO.

Plus remember that we dont know a lot of variables, for example, will they use Fast14?

I wonder if Nintendo will use that weird animated cube maps patent that we discussed maybe a year ago. If they do, wonder if their graphics chip will feature some kind of acceleration features to render/use such cube maps.

Can someone give me more info on that?

 

[V3]

Whatever it is, Broadway and Hollywood probably be the same size of Gekko and Flipper at launched of Gamecube.

So around 50mm2 for Broadway and 150mm2 for Hollywood on 90nm, that's probably Nintendo's budget.

On another note, what are the chances of Nintendo is using 64 bit wide bus for main memory to keep cost down ?

 

[Teasy]

Sorry.. that was one of my speculations.. but NIntendo have made comments that was akin to it. Besides, look at history, NIntendo has always been very price sensitive. With Gamecube, the machine was sold during some occasions with 1-2 dollars loss. Why would Nintendo change that stance?

Being pice sensitive and wanting to release a console at profit are two different things though, Nintendo have never sold a console initially at a profit to my knowledge. GC was sold for far more then a $1-2 loss at first (more like $20-$30).

Common teasy, you're kidding, no?

I'd ask the same thing of you, only I'd actually have good reason. With GameCube Nintendo lost between $20-$30 on hardware on release day. So why should we assume that they will try to actually make a profit on hardware on Revolution's release day? Or do you have some more inside info from the same friend who said EA weren't going to make sports games for Revolution?

 

[LunchBox]

Why 16MB of eDRAM?

the way i figured was since last gen they had 2MB frame buffer and 1MB texture cache on flipper...

might as well be 16MB for their new gfx chip

 

[Azrael]

From the physical size of the Revolution, I am going to have to guess some sort of modified mobile chip. X1300-class probably.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Can someone give me more info on that?

It was an idea for a cube mapping with depth data. The idea was that you could prerender material in 3D and it'd be very simple to render in that this mapping could render 3D objects. Or something like that.

I never figured out how exactly it was supposed to achieve it's aim. You simple can't capture a 3D scene in a 2D texture, even with a depth channel. Personally I think it's a pie-in-the-sky concept.

 

[Andy]

What power level do you expect?

I personally expect mid-range X800 level technology in the revolution.

In all honesty, why are you expecting it'll have GPU equivilent to ones released last year, X800 pro - X800XL ?

By the time Revolution launches, it'll be more than 2 years since X800 Video Cards came on the market. The name of the GPU going into Revolution is RN520, which suggests a customized version of todays X1800 cards, tailored to the new console. Considering Revolution is coming a year later than the X1800, the RN520 will probably be superior to it.

 

[GwymWeepa]

Who said it was code-named RN520?

Regardless of the particulars, in terms of raw performance, I doubt it will outclass an X800.

 

[ChryZ]

I expect something that gets the job done ... troublefree ... in an economic way. I doubt it will suck nor be "teh topper" ... but Nintendo's software will make it sing and dance in viewtiful ways. Can't wait to shoo the pikmins with the rev controller thingy.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I believe I saw in a Nintendo patent something about Flipper emulation, so this doesn't rule out the possibility of using a truly modern architecture with either a software emulation layer (much like how DX10 works with DX9 and below) or a modern architecture with the ability to interpret Flipper instructions and execute corresponding shader operations. It doesn't seem like it would be too hard to execute TEV instructions on a modern ATI SM3.0 setup just by looking at the block diagrams, and ERP already said that the T&L engine is simpler than GF2's.

 

[pc999]

It was an idea for a cube mapping with depth data. The idea was that you could prerender material in 3D and it'd be very simple to render in that this mapping could render 3D objects. Or something like that.

I never figured out how exactly it was supposed to achieve it's aim. You simple can't capture a 3D scene in a 2D texture, even with a depth channel. Personally I think it's a pie-in-the-sky concept.

Somethingh like put spikes/thorns in a wall, but all in 2D made of prerendered data, if I understud well, that is very interesting, however only with depth data , that is a strange concept.

 

[fearsomepirate]

It was an idea for a cube mapping with depth data. The idea was that you could prerender material in 3D and it'd be very simple to render in that this mapping could render 3D objects. Or something like that.

I never figured out how exactly it was supposed to achieve it's aim. You simple can't capture a 3D scene in a 2D texture, even with a depth channel. Personally I think it's a pie-in-the-sky concept.

That's not how cube-mapping works. You store the 3D scene in 6 textures (or more), one for each orthogonal viewing angle. So maybe Nintendo's patent requires a few more textures; I don't know, but it's not just a single texture. And you can store a 3D scene in a single height map; you're just limited to what you can store (I believe that's how Novalogic's old voxel engine stored data).