Well, my main beef here is the 8GB vs 4GB, which for Microsoft, would be akin to them including 1GB in the 360, which would have made the console quite a bit larger and more complicated with the tracing on the mainboard for years to come, not to mention even much more supply constrained as GDDR3 700MHz was the cutting edge in 2005 and one of the major reasons the console was supply limited in the first place.
I do realize that PS3 represented a 16x increase, but again, there's the physical I/O involved here as well. PS2 was smaller than Xbox.
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One thing I would like to point out is how the Xbox 360 dev kits still only used 512MB RAM for years because they used identical hardware. There was just no room for double the RAM chips. It wasn't until the 1Gbit GDDR3 chips were in mass production that they finally updated them.
Will devs need that doubling for dev kits next gen? Maybe not, but they'll be wanting to make use of the whole amount of memory without the headaches of fitting dev tools in memory simultaneously with the game content.
Doable... it's just there are a number of factors involved.
Nobody said Sony, Microsoft, etc, should be over ambitious. But if you realize what happened to Wii, the catastrophe this console is, you can understand that good software sometimes requires fine hardware.
Take into account how much time the Wii lasted, not even 4 years and a half since it has been launched, they announced a new console. The Wii U launch is nearing..( and I feel horrible for Nintendo and the mistakes they've made ).
Having a Wii right now is having a beautiful paperweight at home. It does nothing but playing games with outdated technology, visuals and possibilities. No online updates in most cases, limited support for storage.., and the list goes on and on.
Their hardware strategy has been a success in the beginning. The Wii has been prohibitively expensive, taking into account what its hardware offered, since the beginning, making a HUGE profit for every sold unit, but this strategy backfired on them.
Now Nintendo find themselves in a complicated situation, launching two consoles in an interval of a year and a half, having to deal with the colossal and immense investment the launch of a new console requires, and an uncertain future.
If this wasn't enought, there are rumours that the Wii U is underpowered already...
PS3 and 360 launched with a decent amount of RAM for the time, and are probably the most ambitious consoles ever made -more than the Neo Geo, for instance-, :smile: and the results are there. I mean that, while they show signs of aging, we can play these consoles until 2014 without being in a boring perpetual state of feeling that we need a new generation the next week or so.
4 years has been the age of death for the Wii.
Nintendo accomplished a lot, selling hardware at a huge profit, bringing new people to gaming, and it's funny, and great. But it feels like an entry level game console which wasn't ambitious enough and it paid the consequences.
Ageing so soon for a console is a bad sign really. For people, well, your looks go downhill. Your figure. Your youth. And you can't go into clubs full of early 20 somethings without feeling icky. But when it's about hardware, innovation, processing power, etc, makes time to be on your side, and helps you to keep abreast of the times. :smile:
Wii missed a lot of software because developers can't squeeze anything more out of the system, I think, and Nintendo had to reassess the situation of the console. It will be interesting to know the success of the new Wii U but I believe they will fare as well as the Wii -I expect 100% backwards compatibility- and they will have all developers and traditional gamers on board too.
I don't see adding at least 4GB of RAM as any sort of problem, so see no reason to even contemplate changing the natural progress of hardware it if I were given the option.
