Qroach said:
There is simply no way revoloution is launching in June next year. they don't even have devkits available yet. I had one of my guys out at nintendo on wednesday showing them some stuff we're working on. We asked about revoloution and they said "nobody is getting devkits for it yet, you'd be best to protytpe any games on the gamecube hardware". We asked about information on the new hardware and they said "All nitnendo is willing to release is the same information already on the internet"
Another friend of mine is flying to Japan to discuss a new game with Nintendo, and he already told me nintnedo doesn't have the hardware yet. he seemed to think the hardware specs weren't settled on yet. so I wouldn't expect any sort of miracle launch in june next year. I think the earliest we can see it is the fall 2006.
the fact nobody has devkits yet, makes me certain that they aren't launching in June.
Actually, that's not
entirely true. Japanese & a few western developers close to Nintendo (Namco, Konami recently, Capcom, Square-Enix, Ubi Soft, EA, amongst a few others) are/or have been privy to alpha kits with unfinalized specifications.
(two seperate sets are said to still be floating & undecided upon by Takeda, Miyamoto, & ultimately Iwata but the developers are supposedly aware) That is why they are telling developers to start building off of pre-existing GC toolkits, the Nintendo Revolution's internal architecture one can only assume will mirror the GC's enough to have visual enhancements (handled primarly in-hardware) to be added/coded easily enough by the developers with minimal time due to the dedicated GPU instead of the laborious & time consuming handcoding needed for the
TEV this time.
(If they are indeed still targeting 480P instead of 720P that's 1/3 the number of the pixels so they could produce comparable imagery albeit at a lower native resolution of course)
In fact I remember in an older interview Iwata saying that many aspects they found to be advantageous, innovative, efficient, powerful, etc. within the Flipper/Gekko chipsets would also be making appearances within both the Rev's Broadway & Hollywood counterparts. What those aspects are however are anyone's guess, but I compiled an older GC list I made for possible attributes, of course there will be alterations & resource increases in areas:
:
-Mosys 1-TSRAM with a refresh/latency rate equivalent to, though not surpassing those of conventional SRAM. Main memory system bandwidth: Approximately 10ns Sustainable Latency
-2mb of on-chip embedded RAM Z and framebuffer with 7.5gb dedicated bandwidth. This on-die Z-buffer completely removes all of those accesses from hogging the limited amount of main memory bandwidth the Flipper GPU is granted. 6.2ns suistainable latency (1T-SRAM)
-1mb texture cache with 10.5gb dedicated bandwidth which can hold compressed textures & assists with texture load performance
-Early Z check HSR
-Texture Environment (TEV) which is essentially a pixel shader with extremely flexible texture reads (more so than even the NV2A's) but slightly less flexible combines than the NV2A. (think indirect texturing effects like heat distortion)
-Half the L1 data is locked to keep needed information without wasting reads to L2 cache, and ultimately main memory. The rest of the chip isn't penalized for accesses to the L2 data cache due to the non-blocking cache arrangement. Also, after all the data is transferred, it has to travel back through the L1 and L2 data caches while it makes its way back to the system bus.
So the 64 bit data bus to the processor from the L1 data cache is still 5.6 GB/s, and it is written back to the L2 cache using the remaining bandwidth of the 256-bit connection.
-A 128-byte FIFO write gather pipe accumulates data to be sent in 32-byte bursts to the graphics chip.
-32 byte fill buffer rests between the L2 cache and the L1 cache, and between the L1 cache and the FIFO write gather pipe.
-4:1 vertex compression can be held in the L1 cache, with a small but effective amount still left remaining for decompression.
-Seperate FIFO write gather pipe for bursts of graphics data to main memory while the bus is not busy.
-8 layer multi-texturing per single pass (however extremely fillrate intensive)
-8 hardware lights (global) offered at no computational penalty as they are performed in parallel to other functions
-Flipper does support virtual texturing, which is a fetch on demand for textures
-PPC 750CXE Cpu with additional SIMD functionality. (40 instructions total) Data quantisation inclusive, which simplifies the use of compressed data and in effect ties in with the Gekko when needed for dynamic geometry processing in the system.
-Compresses textures at a 6:1 ratio via S3TC
-EMBM & per-pixel lighting supported in hw
-Trilinear filtering comes at no cost to the Gamecube's texel fillrate
-Gekko utilizes paired single capability
-A few of its features were added in dynamically, like self-shadowing and color tinting to be performed simultaneously with global & local lighting variants
-A FSB frequency that results in a 1.3GB/s connection between Gekko and the North Bridge
-All bus clocks operate in synch with one another, which lends itself to a much lower latency operation (the memory bus is synchronized to the Gekko's FSB and Flipper's operating frequency (162MHz x 2)
That being done I believe Nintendo knows that it needs more continual 3rd party support than the GC ever had,
(as they alone cannot support the Rev, even w/lmited exclusives esp. with this new interface) but in order to secure this for the major big budget cross-platform titles that a higher minimum spec. is needed which imo may be leading to the actual hw delays, (deciding upon these exact specifications & even HD considerations) as well as chipset modifications. Getting western devs behind the new controller interface & to create sw for it as well.
(at least Molyneux & fpser studios are on-board) Conversely, this doesn't seem to be a deterrant for japanese developers, & I suppose the west wasn't aware of this interview with Miyamoto:
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000297061506/
Miyamoto: From our perspective the Revolution controller is the new controller, everything else is now the classic controller. And with this expansion, you’ll be able to have a classic controller that expands the functionality of the core unit. And to be honest, we’ve already—
Engadget: It’ll have that more traditional form factor?
Miyamoto: Exactly. We’ve got something that would be very similar in style and form to the Wave Bird already complete. What that allows us to do is that we have all of these new features. We have the new functionality of the Wave Bird controller and we have new ways that players will be able to interact with games. But at the same time, we’ve retained all the functionality of the classic-style controller, so that people who are familiar with games and familiar with that style of game play are going to be able to have the types of experiences that they’re expecting, on top of all of these new experiences that they’ve never imagined before.
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