Matt-IGN to reveal some Revolution technical specs tonight ?

[pc999]

HDR, environment mapping, fur shading, self-shadowing, water effects, that ATI sand stuff, subsurface scattering, and depth of field are certainly not attempts to make up for a lack of "real" geometry.

Some fx can even impact gameplay serious and that is good reason to improve the HW.

 

[Megadrive1988]

I have a theory about all this.


Year 2002:
Nintendo start the project of a new controller for Gamecube.

I believe the Rev controller was started in 2001. certainly the Gamecube's successor was started around 2001, not 2002. Nintendo has to already be at work on the next-generation console beyond Revolution, has Iwata has said Nintendo will have an HDTV capable console in the future.

Year 2003:
Nintendo and ATI make a colaboration pact for a Portable Gamecube that is going to be the next GameBoy.
Sony shows the PSP and breaks the plans of Nintendo, Nintendo needs something against the PSP.

maybe

Year 2004:
Nintendo rescues an old idea from Gunpei Yokoi for the creation of the Nintendo DS.
Nintendo controller project is moved to the next generation
Sony PSP and NintendoDS are released in the market

okay

Year 2005:
NintendoDS is a success and the GBA 2/GCP project is canned, but the final processors are better than the processors used in Gamecube and they decide to use overclocked versions of them for their next non-portable console.

even if it's not based on Portable Gamecube, I do NOT believe the next generation GameBoy is canned. we will see it emerge in the next couple of years. Microsoft and Sony both have new portables in development too.

 

[Inane_Dork]

Oh yes and doing it on 1st april would be alot less supiscious

I'm not sure you're totally aware of how April Fool's works...

 

[Farid]

I told you guys to wait before speculating about the GPU performances

Don't expect nintendo to EVER annouce the specs of revoloution publicly. They will not get caught playing that game this time around, becuase the specs simply won't match up to PS3 and Xbox 360.

This isn't an april fools joke as it would be damaging to nintendo if false information was spread. Also if IGN was going o play an april fools joke, they would wait until april fools!

I quote these words of truth just to add one thing.

Could Nintendo just as well make a SOC, from day one? It would require common work from IBM and ATI, though...

 

[heliosphere]

if Hollywood does not have shaders, maybe ATI has come up with something that goes beyond shaders. since shaders are only an expensive trick that tries to make up for lack of real geometry....

i guess we can go back to talking about displacement mapping and curved surfaces....

Absolute guff.

 

[dukmahsik]

oh come on everyone, let's have realistic expectations and speculation! it's right inline with what ninty has been saying all along.

 

[Farid]

if Hollywood does not have shaders, maybe ATI has come up with something that goes beyond shaders. since shaders are only an expensive trick that tries to make up for lack of real geometry....

i guess we can go back to talking about displacement mapping and curved surfaces....

I'm not exactly certain about what you're trying to say by "expensive trick that tries to make up for lack of real geometry"?
Because Pixel and Vertex Shaders are definitely not that.

A programmable rendering pipeline is required even in REYES (Micropolygons) type of renderers, anyway, if you want to implement certain effects.

And, no, Ati didn't come up with something beyond Shaders for the Revolution GPU, in case you were still wondering.

 

[Teasy]

HDR, environment mapping, fur shading, self-shadowing, water effects, that ATI sand stuff, subsurface scattering, and depth of field are certainly not attempts to make up for a lack of "real" geometry.

Environment mapping, fur shading and water effects are certainly attempts to make up for lack of real geometry. For instance pixel shaded water is simply putting random shading patterns on the surface of the water in order to give the illusion that there are actually ripples in the water. If you had enough geometry to actually model the whole surface of the water and all the ripples ect on it then shaders wouldn't be neccesary.

 

[Farid]

Environment mapping, fur shading and water effects are certainly attempts to make up for lack of real geometry.

Fur shading is done, on GC, via geometry.

And, yeah, great effects can be achieved with EMBM.

 

[swaaye]

Heh heh. Get ready for some sweet talking from them Big N folks, eh. I'm sure they will come up with some interesting bullet points that put things out of perspective.

I bet we're going to see how cheaper != less impressive graphically. Especially if it runs 480p.

It sure is something though how ATI is building both N's and MS's chips. That is some crazy scary way to bring in conflicts of interest.

 

[Reznor007]

It sure is something though how ATI is building both N's and MS's chips. That is some crazy scary way to bring in conflicts of interest.

Well, IBM is doing the CPU's for all 3.

 

[Fox5]

Environment mapping, fur shading and water effects are certainly attempts to make up for lack of real geometry. For instance pixel shaded water is simply putting random shading patterns on the surface of the water in order to give the illusion that there are actually ripples in the water. If you had enough geometry to actually model the whole surface of the water and all the ripples ect on it then shaders wouldn't be neccesary.

Wouldn't that require vertex shaders? I thought vertex shaders actually did manipulate the geometry.
And I don't think the patterns on the shaded water are random, even if patterns could be random.

 

[Farid]

Wouldn't that require vertex shaders? I thought vertex shaders actually did manipulate the geometry.

You can create these geometry effects with standard TnL.

 

[OtakingGX]

Wouldn't that require vertex shaders? I thought vertex shaders actually did manipulate the geometry.
And I don't think the patterns on the shaded water are random, even if patterns could be random.

Vertex shaders do manipulate geometry. I don't see how they would be necessary to do what Teasy said. He was just pointing out that advanced pixel effects are used to make up for finite geometry constraints.

ATi's TRUFORM also manipulates geometry (by tessellating triangles into more triangles). I'm pretty sure it doesn't require a vertex shader to do that.

 

[fearsomepirate]

If you had enough geometry to actually model the whole surface of the water and all the ripples ect on it then shaders wouldn't be neccesary.

No, you would still need some kind of shaders to tell the ripples how to appropriately color. Transparency and Gouraud shading wont't cut it. Further, to have enough geometry for convincingly smooth ripples (and don't forget reflections, which are based on bouncing light rays, not a world of geometry in a magic portal behind the mirror), you'd run into severe aliasing problems. Of course, if we want to be really anal, we can say that textures themselves are simply to compensate for a lack of geometry. In the real world, coloration doesn't come from having a 2-D painted surface, it comes from light interacting with tiny particles. Of course, telling the light how to interact with the particles would require, well, some sort of shader. Further, we can regard polygons and splines themselves as an attempt to make up for not having real geometry, which is really a probability distribution of electron clouds and nuclei interacting with each other in real life. Likewise, all lighting engines are an attempt to make up for not really modelling the actual wave-particle characteristics of light...and on and on and on. Talking about the gouraud shaded Euclidean shape as the fundamental building block of all reality is really kind of ridiculous. Euclidean geometry is merely a paradigm that must be severely bent if realism is to be achieved.

 

[pc999]

You can create these geometry effects with standard TnL.

But using the CPU.

Anyway there are a lot of fx that can add a lot to gameplay and do not are used to fake geometry, for examle shadows.

 

[fearsomepirate]

But using the CPU.

Anyway there are a lot of fx that can add a lot to gameplay and do not are used to fake geometry, for examle shadows.

It's like "real" vs "fake" HDR. The fact is computer graphics merely approximate the real world (or, at least, a hypothetical world). Arguing about which is the "true" approximation of the world is, in my estimation, patently ridiculous. Some approximations use more data, some use less. Some are more accurate, some are less. But none of them are "real" in the slightest. The question should never be "Is this the true way or the false way?" but rather, "How good does the result look?"

 

[Urian]

I have a doubt but...

Is possible to make all the DX 9.0/OpenGL 2.0 FX with fixed hardware in the form of small specialized DSP?

Perhaps Revolution is a new architecture without Shaders but capable of doing the same image quality of a DX 9.0 card with things like High Dynamic Range.

 

[Mariner]

Although it wouldn't surprise me too much discover that Broadway was a rehashed/upgraded version of Gecko it seems too much of a stretch to expect Hollywood to be little more than an upgraded Flipper.

I realise cost is just about the most important factor when it comes to this console but the advances in shader technology since the design of Flipper must surely be too much to ignore.

Personally I was expecting something well-featured - probably SM2.0 equivalence with 'performance' somewhere around a third that of Xenos. I'd have thought such a chip could be small, cheap and cool enough for Revolution

Admittedly, this is all a complete guess on my part.

One point is that I'd expect anti-aliasing to be of some importance for this console. Since Nintendo are eschewing HD entirely in favour of SD, surely a good level of AA will be required or at least very desirable?

 

[OtakingGX]

No, you would still need some kind of shaders to tell the ripples how to appropriately color. Transparency and Gouraud shading wont't cut it. Further, to have enough geometry for convincingly smooth ripples (and don't forget reflections, which are based on bouncing light rays, not a world of geometry in a magic portal behind the mirror), you'd run into severe aliasing problems.

Googled 'lighting without shaders' really quick and came up with this: http://developer.nvidia.com/attach/6741

Shaders aren't required to do convincing lighting. The linked .pdf is from nVidia and at the very end calls for developers to contact them concerning supporting pixel shaders on DX7 hardware.