Nintendo's hardware choice philosophy *spawn
- Thread starter Shifty Geezer
- Start date
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
Here are the first results from Nintendo's choices on hardware budget.
That has nothing to do with hardware budget. We know that straight launch port 360/PS3 games can run pretty well on the thing already (ACIII and CoD BLOPS II show us this).
The reason they aren't coming are much different. Things like
1) No budget for Wii U version
2) Taking wait and see approach to see if it sells
3) Massive install base of current gen HD systems
4) Publishers don't really care for Nintendo
Any, or all of those might be true, but I doubt it's anything to do with hardware budget.
BlockheadBrown
Newcomer
I agree with AzaK and Kaotik.
It has at least a little to do with it if the ports need a lot of new optimization effort that they wouldn't have needed if the cores were stronger.
I don't think PC would be getting all these ports if it weren't so easy to port to it these days.
BLOPS2? with worse performance? I don't think so...
"pretty well" doesn't mean it runs just as well - but considering the things that at least I mentioned, I'm surprised it works even this well.
Give it some time, let the devs familiarize themselves with the new platform, build the real base to build on it and have as long development times as the competitors and we can see what it's really made of
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
The point is: Will devs really bother? They didn't bother with wii either. I think Nintendo cut their own fingers again. They should have come up with a system that could have atleast handeld ps360 games withouth any problems. But instead they had to come up with something that is going to cost devs time and effort just to have it work as well on the ps360. So why bother? ps360 has a far larger install base, and power is about the same. So why should they bother with anything more than ''good enough'' when they know the majority of sales is going to be on ps360?
Blazkowicz
Legend
Quoting from the first page :
Oh, I remember being so much disappointed. First thing you see is the "can't see damn see anything" screen, which required particular lighting conditions to be able to play. The audio, I was expecting SNES quality and the thing was like Genesis or even worse, it raped your ears if you were using a headphone. I wonder if the DAC was broken or something
So to me, it was a lost gen, it sold on brand name and lack of competition alone and for the kids.
The Game Cube was good and sold on its hardware strengthes back then, it just lacked games. (and had weird controller, weird purple esthetics). So, I remember Metroid and F-zero, and.. well, Super Monkey Ball was awesome! can't really remember the rest.
Oh, I remember being so much disappointed. First thing you see is the "can't see damn see anything" screen, which required particular lighting conditions to be able to play. The audio, I was expecting SNES quality and the thing was like Genesis or even worse, it raped your ears if you were using a headphone. I wonder if the DAC was broken or something
So to me, it was a lost gen, it sold on brand name and lack of competition alone and for the kids.
The Game Cube was good and sold on its hardware strengthes back then, it just lacked games. (and had weird controller, weird purple esthetics). So, I remember Metroid and F-zero, and.. well, Super Monkey Ball was awesome! can't really remember the rest.
I refused to even buy a GBA w/o an afterburner kit installed. I put up with it on GB and even GBC but by the 2000s I was tired of it. Also a big reason why I didn't get a GP32 instead (IIRC they didn't have the lit versions at the time)
The audio, I was expecting SNES quality and the thing was like Genesis or even worse, it raped your ears if you were using a headphone. I wonder if the DAC was broken or something
It didn't even have a real DAC
It was a PWM with a simple low pass filter, that's it. Even worse, the audio inputs were only 8-bit and the resampling was effectively nearest neighbor to 32KHz (usually), which sounded awfully because games rarely actually generated audio at 32.8Hz or a clean divisor like 16.4KHz but something in between. There was at least one game that set both the sampling and the generation at 65.6KHz, though..N64 didn't have a very great audio setup either, the RSP was given double duty of both graphics (T&L, triangle setup, etc) and audio synth.. pretty cumbersome for a coprocessor with so little RAM. While PS1 essentially got a successor to SNES's audio DSP (and PS2 a successor to that). It's a shame Nintendo lost Sony on this, although moot these days now that CPU performance has risen a lot faster than audio demands.
Sure. I do think Nintendo should have at least made sure it'd handle current gen games with ease just so they can avoid the negative press they are getting. If it could have done it at 720 as well that'd be icing on the cake. Alas it wasn't to be but I still think any refusal by a developer to put their 360/PS3 game on the Wii U has as much to do with the console's power as it does that the sync button is on the outside.
BLOPS2? with worse performance? I don't think so...
I did say "pretty well". I have CoD BLOPS 2 for Wii U and am having a blast so far. What little issues there are are hardly noticeable and definitely not going to ruin the experience. Anyway, my point was there are some reasonably good ports already.
I guess we could say that Nintendo sacrificed sideways compatibility for backwards compatibility. If the Wii U was a 'turn key' port machine then I don't see why we would have any future 2013 title without already announced Wii U versions.
I also wonder actually if publishers are deliberately avoiding ports in order to ensure that the core userbase remains on the Xbox and Playstation platforms and hence keeping them predictable.
I also wonder actually if publishers are deliberately avoiding ports in order to ensure that the core userbase remains on the Xbox and Playstation platforms and hence keeping them predictable.
The window for the Wii U that they actually delivered closed a few years ago for developers and publishers standpoint. UK is the only place we have second week sales and dear lord it looks brutal for the future
Nintendo totally blew a huge chance here. They needed good OS and sufficient specs to deliver a new "PS2"
Nintendo could have had a big jump on Sony/MS if they had released a PS4 lite in 2012. All they needed to do was communicate those generic PC like specs to devs in early 2011 and im confident they wouldnt be sitting here wondering why there is no support
The pricing for such machine could be easily the same as Wii U currently. They could have even take $100 loss for the first year to build that base. It only would have costed $1B for 10 million machines which isnt too bad
Nintendo totally blew a huge chance here. They needed good OS and sufficient specs to deliver a new "PS2"
Nintendo could have had a big jump on Sony/MS if they had released a PS4 lite in 2012. All they needed to do was communicate those generic PC like specs to devs in early 2011 and im confident they wouldnt be sitting here wondering why there is no support
The pricing for such machine could be easily the same as Wii U currently. They could have even take $100 loss for the first year to build that base. It only would have costed $1B for 10 million machines which isnt too bad
hate to see it but see little future at all for wii u already. seems already almost forgotten and each news that comes out is bad, such as most big 2013 multiplats not showing up. that was the whole point of wii u, ps360 multiplats, and it is failing miserably at that one thing.
if nintendo had made the box beefier people would be a lot more excited. thinking in terms of a modest amd apu or so, that would still easily clock ps360. i dont think that would have saved them once real next gen hits, but certainly people would be a lot more hyped in this few months window it has now.
it's already become clear to me its very strictly being perceived as a core box. as such, it's power is the key factor and it is currently struggling to even match current gen.
Me too. Thats not really news since we already knew nearly all of those weren't coming to WiiU didnt we? I though the next round of titles would be the important ones. ie: the ones which weren't in development before stable WiiU dev kits were available.
Not saying the outcome will be any different - just that this isn't the information to draw a conclusion (edit: about WiiU hardware) from.
Unfortunately, we've been here before in the "wait and see" approach from Devs. Didnt turn out well for Wii so lets hope it turns out betetr for WiiU.
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We know that AC3 and BLOPS ports run pretty well on WiiU.
We don't know how much work was involved, or how much work would be involved for games that stress different aspects of the PS360.
Some engines are probably better suited to WiiU ports that others.
If publishers are playing wait and see, it means they have no faith in the platform, Ubi did really well out of Wii early on because many of the other publishers ignored it, expecting it to fail. I'm actually surprised we aren't seeing more 3rd party support, given a relatively low cost of entry, seems like a decent risk to me.
It might just be opportunity cost, if your shipping a Wii version those engineers aren't shipping something else, and if we believe that next-gen titles are already in development, there probably isn'y an engineering surplus.
Damn it I was mostly done with a long post when Windows notified me with its desire of restart da computer for the sake of finsihing the installation of some random update. I saw clear through its tricks and decided to postpone by 4 hours, or so I though as I clicked on restart instead of postpone without thinking much about it, how lame am I...
Anyway... I do agree with Pachter on the matter, Nintendo should have launched earlier, 2011 was perfect. The tech and lithography they were to use a year later were available and pretty much ironed out.
When it comes to design choices, I kind of change my pov with regard to their CPU choice. After having discussed with Exophase it seems to me that Nintendo face a shortage of CPUs that would have got the job done. Putting aside BC for a moment what did we have available in 2011/12 (and so earlier at design time)?
ARM had nothing that would have matched their need, A15 came way too late, is only available on 28nm process.
AMD had nothing either as I would say that Bobcat is a bit short too, if Nintendo were to aim (for cheap) at a system that sit (or try to) in between this gen and the next one. Bigger cores were not an option, even if Nintendo while remaining reasonable allowed them-selves a higher power budget.
That let IBM, and they did not have the perfect fit either. They have impressive IP but not a well rounded option.
So Nintendo did not much choices, they were to stick with the Big Iron.
Taking in account the cost of the revision of Broadway (1 billion), I think that can safely discard the option of something both custom and new. So what were the choices at IBM: not much
A revision of Broadway
a SMP PPU set-up (not the modified xenon cores)
a Cell like / revision
I wonder if the two latter choices could have proved cheaper as the "parts"/"building block" (ie the PPU and the SPUs) are "available" on IBM 45nm process. I don't know but it sounds like a bit less work than mostly rebuilding Broadway on a completely different process, adding support for SMP, + others possibly undisclosed improvements made to the existing design.
Looking at Nintendo power budget (or what it could have been), I don't think that a SMP PPU would have cut it. Looking at the last 360 revision, the 3 xenon cores still takes quiet some room, they aren't not marvel either, so looking at an under clocked even quad core PPU (not Px/ xenon core) set-up might not have ended that competitive with say Xenon (which is the reference point imho as it is the lowest common denominator for this gen of product) and the prospect looking forward may not have been great either. On top of that looking at the last 360 revision a quad cores and a sane amount of cache may have take quiet some room.
So I'm back to it (wondered about it a while ago) a Cell like, with all the pain that comes with it, might have been the only to ensure that within a low transistors and power budget Nintendo could have been competitive at release and latter down the road (for all its lacking in the gran scheme of thing the Cell still achieves impressive things).
Assuming a Cell freed of a lot of graphic work, I would think that a PPU with more cache and 3 or 4 SPUs, even running ~3/4 the "full version" speed would have been enough to keep up for a while on the CPU front.
Back into Nintendo's pants, I can see how that may look scary, quiet scary, especially with all the problems faced by developers at the beginning of the gen. Then there is BC. But I'm close to think that it was pretty much the only option they have to launch something competitive (at least on the "cpu" side of things).
That let BC, imho, they made a mistake it was time for them to consider a software (/ hybrid they could have some hardware support on the GPU as it seems they have though it is still unclear). We are speaking a 10 years old design, the Wii was not powerful either, it was time for them to come with a "virtual console" for that generation of products. They will have to anyway.
Overall I think that Nintendo exec have been way too conservative lately, possibly too pumped up by Wii success and the easy stream of money their handled consoles provided.
I think the 3DS hardware sucks (not even looking down to the silicon, the lack of a second analog stick is staggering, the add-on to make up for it... I can't get close to understand how they get away with it... though it seems they don't in the occidental part of the world).
For the WiiU I think the same, it is late, one year may not sound that much but it is a lot, have the system been more attractive to cores gamers, 2 years without competitors is a massive advantage (there are noise about MSFT planning to launch in 2012 but it seems that Kinect success changed their minds, If Nintendo have been secretive enough (as MSFT with Kinect), there is no way they could have reacted in time).
So Nintendo hardware philosophy, I would say that there is none, but lately it seems that the execs did not exactly make an awesome work with I think a lot of knee jerk in the face of the raising of mobile gaming on one side and the massive investment home consoles now call for on the other side. The prospect of the end of pretty easy money and the raise of risks seems to have shown the company execs lack of leadership and clear enough vision to go against the most likely resistance of the share holders (used to pretty high profits, low risks, etc.).
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