Ok, full interview from anonymous third party about Wii GPU.

mmmmmmmm......No?

 

Basicly, the xb2 similar to a corvette, the ps3 to a mercedes, and the wii is a small toyota car.
The corvette fast, but rought and badly designed, the mercedes nice and have a better quality,but it is still badly desinged and roufgt, and the toyota small car...so ,that is a toyota.

 

Why has this thread turned in to a discussion about hardware cost?

 

That still doesn't change the argument though?! Whether the money and time and manpower and facilities (and all those things can be summed up as money spent anyway) was lots or not, that's not going to be reason to skimp on the CPU and GPU. Argue that point. Is it your opinion that due to the development of the Wiimote which took time and manpower and facilities, Nintendo were influenced to use less a less powerful CPU and GPU than they could have within the form-factor and price of the Wii? If so, why? That they had used all their engineers up on designing new controllers and didn't have enough to spare for designing a mobo that takes a 9800 and dual-core CPU (remember that Nintendo didn't need much by way of engineers to design CPU and GPU as there's were tendered by IBM and ATi, and all Nintenod had to do was send enough money their way to get custom solutions to whatever standard they wanted)?

Not modded, but custom. Large CPUs and GPUs are pricy things to develop and produce. They have an impact on final box cost. Sony need to make back the hundreds of millions spent developing Cell, so on their part they either had to cut back elsewhere, or up the price of the machine. Same with MS. Controllers less-so (though MS do have proprietary comms in effect) and they have minimal effect on the final box price. Thus the choice to include motion detection in Sixaxis didn't see Sony also choose to use a doubled-up GS for a GPU to save money!

 

No way.The GS and the gekko was custom,the cell is custom,the xb2 cpu and gpu is modificated power pc and ati gpu.as the ps3 gpu.
The major part of the development was done for the pc gamers, the small part was done for the ms and for the sony.And did we talk about the xb1?

 

bolmat makes zero sense.

 

Uhhh...360's GPU is the most innovative console accelerator in history, I'd say. It's not a direct descendant of any PC product. And Xenon is a pretty seriously customized PowerPC tri-core. Neither of those components are off the shelf or trivial at all. The console also has the most innovative and user-friendly fully-integrated online service, bar none.

Sony's hardware is a semi-custom G71 with a CPU developed by a variety of companies. A CPU which may not even be that great for game code. Less interesting than 360, IMO, from a games standpoint. Unless you think Folding @ Home is exciting entertainment. The machine obviously is heavily slanted in cost by that CPU and the blue ray drive which is also of questionable worth for games.

Wii has some slightly reworked 1999-2000 hardware on a 90 nm process. The CPU is identical to Gekko other than clock speed, AFAICT. The GPU isn't even as capable as a 4+ year old R300, or even maybe a 6 yr old R200 for that matter. When I wonder why Nintendo didn't just use something like a off-the-shelf X700 GPU with some glue logic added (which would likely be stupid faster and much more feature-rich than Hollywood), I realize that it's rather clear that they wanted that cheap recycling of development tools.

 

Huh?!?!?! What GPU did ATi start with and modify to get Xenos and it's unified shaders?

 

No its not, the Cell cpu was an allready designed cpu primarily as a cheap cpu for scientific usage made mainly by IBM, there has been no customization to make it more suitable for gaming.

The Xenon cpu is a customized PowerPC, and the GPU is unlike anything we have ever seen from ATI, there has been no modification done with a prior ATI product to get Xenos, its brand new

The RSX is a slightly modified G71.

 

You're saying it wouldn't be a good idea if it was in a bigger case?

 

I think everybody suffer from a one way thinking on this forum.

the guy that came here is somebdy who possibly know how many embedded FOR cycle can be in a ps2.0 vs programm.This mean that for this guy a gf3 style gpu (xb2 ) is something grounbreaking (and not only an early version of the new ati product palett,with a assymetrical cross bar memory controller).

But if you are serious, what is the cost of even a new gpu?50-200 designer for one-two year,after that max 1 year testing on a proto line, after that the real testing on the final prod line,finaly the prod itself.The develop of the xb2 gpu architecture was a medium project from this standpoint, mainly based on existing things,or based on major backbone projects that will be in other commercial products later .

If you start to see what is the resource that you need for the wiimote, that is the same or more than in the case of the xb2 gpu, (I bet that the wiimote was more costly than the xb2 gpu.Simply,the ati develop many gpu paralel, but the wiimote was a never in this volume never on this level thing, and these are very and realy expensive things)
The same is true for the dvd rom.

Just for the scale:25000$ is the cost of the process to be able to make a minor modification on a car industry part.example to be able tomove avay a connector by a few mm.Not the cost of a new product.Only the tools for the injection molding are cost much more money by a few magnitude.

 

You know that's as wrong as saying Xenos is a modified GPU, right? Cell did not exist in any form until Sony got the posse together to design and build the thing over a couple of years. There was no scientific CPU with assymetric cores and ring-bus and local stores which Sony had tweaked a bit to fit their console.

Not sure what your arguing against here? Are you saying Wii's hardware is sufficient for Nintendo's purposes, or the Wiimote is sufficient, or...um...what? That Wii is adequate for Nintendo's games is guarenteed for precisely your points, but it could also have been better if Nintendo had been willing to spend a bit more money.

 

---456456456

 

*Bangs head against wall* We do know some stuff. We know it's a single core 730 MHz CPU. We know Hollywood is a Flipper derivative, beefed up and speeded up. We know given the form factor of Wii, more powerful components could have been used. Even if various wishful thinking comes true and Wii manages to add 4x AA and lose the alpha dithering and improve it's shader capabilities in later years, choosing a standard GPU would have enabled those effects from day one, and a faster CPU would enable more exciting stuffs like better animations, physics, effects, etc. The product we have now, and can play now if you've got one, could have been a better experience if Nintendo had chosen to use other hardware. The reasons for choosing the hardware they did haven't got anything to do with form-factor or better components being too costly or the price of developing the Wiimote being so high they had to save money elsewhere. They chose the simpler hardware for one or more of : development simplicity; extra profitability; backwards compatibility. I don't think any gamer would rate those choices above better hardware, though obviously for a lot of Nintendo's market it makes no difference and Nintendo can reap the benefits of gamers' loss.

And it's not assumption. It's logical deduction, the basis of huge amounts of human understanding.

 

Sigh...

 

I'm not even going to dignify that with an answer.

1. Geforce 3 was made in 2001, and a derivate of that was in the Xbox 1.
2. Of course the Ati Xenos was groundbreaking, it was the first gpu with unified shaders, its the only gpu with memexport (or is this dx10?), it also had the most advanced hardware support for shaders at the time. If your an early version of something, you are not a modification of something, you are the first, you are what everything else is made from.

ROFL.

How if comparing making a car (a brand new car model costs 100reds of millions if not billions to prepare for production) to a wiimote?

 

I picked up Okami yesterday. I was a little hesitant,not sure how it would look on a 62" HDTV. It looks incredible. Playing games like that help give you back some perspective.
I think the Wii has lot's of life let in it and will do just fine,regardless of the minute details of it's specs.

 

Just for sh*ts and giggles, how much do you guys estimate it cost Nintendo to reinvent/upgrade/re-engineer the slim slot loading DVD-ROM drive to handle "kiddie abuse" as well as perform that magical supersmooth eject sequence?

 

Wouldnt know. Though sometimes its suprising how much money is needed do design something wich looks really simple.