Revolution specs - the good side

[Powderkeg]

Not a fair comparison.


MS deserves every little bit of bad press they've got from such blatantly retarded hype. Sony's no innocent either, what with 4D being their tagline. At least Nintendo is being realistic.

Sure it's a fair comparison. Just because you've got Nintendo reps doing pre-launch damage control doesn't mean the lack of next-gen graphics isn't the exact same issue as it is with the 360.

The only difference between them will be the 360 will have a lot more room to grow and improve. The Revolution won't.

 

[darkblu]

Sure it's a fair comparison. Just because you've got Nintendo reps doing pre-launch damage control doesn't mean the lack of next-gen graphics isn't the exact same issue as it is with the 360.

you can't be serious.. so according to you the public's expectations of the product have nothing to do with the acceptance of that product? how about the lack of coffee brewering abilities in the 360! darn, that's one doomed console there w/o a built-in coffee brewer!

The only difference between them will be the 360 will have a lot more room to grow and improve. The Revolution won't.

the difference between them is something you have close to zero idea of. but thanks for sharing your opinion anyway.

 

[Ragemare]

Why does any thread about Rev turn into an argument whether or not it will fail?

Hey, I just wanted to get people thinking about the advantages the Rev hardware could have to offset the seemingly disappointing specs.

The thread starter didn't say:

Do you think Rev will be a success?

or

Do you think the rev needs better specs

He/she, from my interpretation, appeared to be asking what are the good things about Rev's architecture from a technical point of view. Not whether you think it is powerfull enough.

 

[darkblu]

Why does any thread about Rev turn into an argument whether or not it will fail?

trolls.

 

[thundermonkey]

trolls.

Summed it up pretty good there.

The Revolution will have more then enough power for what Nintendo intends it to be used for. Just like the DS. And it should have more then enough power to make some truly beautiful games.

And Powderkeg, one last bit on your comments. How many aside from the truly hardcore gamers have been bitching about 360 games? How many people besides of the hardcore gamer even own the 360?

To most it's not even on the radar because of the price, not the graphics. Price is the defining factor of the mainstream, techies won't buy a $39.99 Coby DVD player, but the masses sure do love the things.

 

[see colon]

And Powderkeg, one last bit on your comments. How many aside from the truly hardcore gamers have been bitching about 360 games? How many people besides of the hardcore gamer even own the 360?

i've heard "it doesn't even look that much better on a regular TV" from quite a few non-hardcore gamers. but to be fair, i think they are just trying to justify not buying one.

 

[Guden Oden]

Why does any thread about Rev turn into an argument whether or not it will fail?

Because Powderkeg has a hard-on for bashing Nintendo and the Rev. I don't know if there's a single Rev-centric thread where he's not crapped on the console, frankly he's as bad as pc-engine or deadmeat when it comes to sony in that regard, and he started to sound like the proverbial broken record soon after last year's E3. His message isn't any newer nearly a year later either I might add!

We've heard it all already, many times! Give it a rest FFS!

He/she, from my interpretation, appeared to be asking what are the good things about Rev's architecture from a technical point of view. Not whether you think it is powerfull enough.

Most reasonable people would likely agree that Rev's rumored hardware might not be enough for games to look hot as long as the 360 and PS3 will, but then again, maybe it doesn't have to either. Or maybe it won't even matter, perhaps the new controller will mean games will simply be fun enough to play anyway, who can say for sure now. We should wait until the console's out until passing final judgement, methinks. Or at least wait before bashing the thing right into the ground.

 

[Legend]

Uhh... Actually, no.

It IS a good thing the system is so "under powered" (relative term; some claim the 360 is under powered. Are laptop computers under powered? What about palmtop? Compared to Blue Gene/L, everything's dog-ass slow). Since the Rev will be so 'under powered', we likely won't get crappy multiplatform ports of PS3 or 360 titles; titles that'll likely have lost most of their whiz-bang glory and thunder in the porting process. Look at it this way: you wanna play those games, you buy them on the PS3 or 360 and play them the way they're supposed to look. Not that hard to understand, right?

whether from a business standpoint or a gamer's one that doesn't make any sense at all. the games you call 'crappy' may still sell alot and some may enjoy them. combine all the 'crappy' game sales and you'll have a lrage library of games that have sold well. which do you think people will generally go for; having a system with 50 games or another with only 5? you can argue that those 5 are better than the 50 combined, but I would still go with the one that has 50 if only for the variety. plus, a game being 'crappy' is a personal opinion.

I am not refering to Rev, but to your point.

 

[thundermonkey]

i've heard "it doesn't even look that much better on a regular TV" from quite a few non-hardcore gamers. but to be fair, i think they are just trying to justify not buying one.

More then likely.

When it comes to the 360 on an HDTV the differences to the Xbox are apparent, on an SDTV not so much. Sony might just have it easier.

The PS2 on the whole didn't have games that looked like Xbox games, mainly on a technical level. The PS3 in that regard is a huge departure. PS3 games even on an SDTV should look almost two console generations better then PS2 games. The Xbox has shader capabilities, therefore the jump on an SDTV wasn't that big. For the PS3 it should be a huge jump.

Now I don't think the differences will be apparent between 360 and PS3 games, but coming from the PS2, Sony's made gigantic strides.

Nintendo has it easier, going for SD. I doubt given the specs anything that looks like a 360 or PS3 at SD, but given the few things we know, I know for certain it's too early to call the system out just yet.

Games might have a similar jump that MS had from Xbox to 360 at SD. Only this time, GCN to Revolution. It's an interesting take, and interesting design on Nintendo's part. They already had one of the easiest consoles to program for with the GCN, and instead of sacrificing ease of use for horsepower, they chose to sacrifice horsepower.

If enough people pick up the Revolution, you'd have to be an idiot not to develop for it. And as always software will be the deciding factor. God knows the PSX was far from a powerhouse, yet it sold quite well.

 

[pc999]

Most reasonable people would likely agree that Rev's rumored hardware might not be enough for games to look hot as long as the 360 and PS3 will, but then again, maybe it doesn't have to either. Or maybe it won't even matter, perhaps the new controller will mean games will simply be fun enough to play anyway, who can say for sure now. We should wait until the console's out until passing final judgement, methinks. Or at least wait before bashing the thing right into the ground.

I think that this really depends on the game, for some games it may be but for others it may be very limited ence limiting fun (at least some kind of) and that is a big downfall of the consoles specs (IGN ones).

I am not refering to Rev, but to your point.

I actualy think it is a good point, remember that it should be really easy/cheap to make games and that Rev does have a very good chance to have a big market so you can have both good games and lot if they have sucess.

The Xbox has shader capabilities, therefore the jump on an SDTV wasn't that big. For the PS3 it should be a huge jump.

I think it has more to do with power utilization and than anything else, personally the things that had impressed me more till today is good physics/animation that is why so much people had found KZ2/MS so impressive, althought I do agree that visuals alone in the case of PS2/GC can be a very good improvement.


The specs they say on IGN will allow for this kind of strategy so this is a a good point of the specs (althought I am pretty sure they could do it with higher (|= XB like) specs so there is a big downfall too IMO), so we should be able to get great games, lot of games, lot of variety and I think that a lot a cheap (original) games, just a few at "old prices".

 

[Bohdy]

He/she, from my interpretation, appeared to be asking what are the good things about Rev's architecture from a technical point of view. Not whether you think it is powerfull enough.

That was exactly the idea, and I tried to steer it back onto that a few times but I guess people just have something else they want to discuss much more...

 

[Rolf N]

remember PS2's slogan early on? The Third Place. what they hell does that mean? nobody I asked knew, but every one said it was 'cool'. mission accomplished.
these are PR statements not spec releases.

I think it's supposed to be something like ... err ... how do I explain this ... anchoring points in your life.
"Home", "work".
And the third place [you could go to] is then supposedly "Playstation".

 

[Rolf N]

Uhh... Actually, no.

It IS a good thing the system is so "under powered" (relative term; some claim the 360 is under powered. Are laptop computers under powered? What about palmtop? Compared to Blue Gene/L, everything's dog-ass slow). Since the Rev will be so 'under powered', we likely won't get crappy multiplatform ports of PS3 or 360 titles; titles that'll likely have lost most of their whiz-bang glory and thunder in the porting process. Look at it this way: you wanna play those games, you buy them on the PS3 or 360 and play them the way they're supposed to look. Not that hard to understand, right?

I'll have to make a drive-by-agreement to this.
I have a pretty huge rant building up in my chest about multi-platform development in general, but as that's an emotionally explosive matter for me atm I'll just say that IMO publishers should stick their ports where the sun don't shine. I'd rather have 10 proper console games than I'd have 10 proper console games plus 40 ... attempts.

 

[Rolf N]

On-topic

First off, we know that the Broadway CPU is compatible with Gekko code, but that doesn't mean it has the same architecture. It is entirely possible for the Broadway to be based of a more recent IBM chip with much more comprehensive Out of Order Execution. <...>

Highly, highly unlikely. As has been said by others, CPU-cycle exact compatibility with Gamecube code would break if you implement OOOE, widen the architecture, change pipeline length etc. If they really intend to deliver proper backwards compatiblity they just cannot go there. And no, it's not in the realm of possible to accurately emulate Gecko with a CPU in that performance ballpark. As a rough guess, they could try that when they had 3GHz or something, but definitely not at ~750MHz.

However, they could probably get away with some sort of instruction set extension (like Altivec or something better) and map these instructions to previously illegal opcodes (every CPU architecture has a few of these). This could break a handful of Gamecube titles that actually executed illegal opcodes, but as you can imagine this is not a very useful practice and most likely a bug in the code, or at worst a devious way to enter a specific exception handler.

The amount of problems would be similar to the "silver PS2" incident with what, <0.5% of all titles having some issue, and that's pretty acceptable IMO.

Secondly, there is the matter of 1T-SRAM. Even assuming that the Rev ram has the same performance characteristics as the Gamecube's, the Rev's main ram would have the SAME sustained latency as the PS3 Cell's L2 Cache, and more than 4 times better than its main ram! See the revent Sony GDC information for evidence of this: 32 cycles @ 3.2ghz = 10ns = latency of GC's main ram. This would make the Broadway, just as the Gekko before it, perform much closer to its peak and make cache misses and random access penalties not very significant.

I agree. That's totally nice. Kind of like working on a GBA where you can rely on function X to always take N clock cycles. Not as precisely, because there still is a cache in the CPU, but the low-latency memory should greatly reduce the gap between "hit" and "miss" accesses.

Predictable performance is good because if you can accurately predict costs you can go closer to your maximum

edited bits: removed "binary compatibility" and replaced with something more correct.

 

[Guden Oden]

Highly, highly unlikely. As has been said by others, binary compatibility with the Gamecube CPU would break if you implement OOOE, widen the architecture, change pipeline length etc.

That's totally, completely wrong.

Binary compatibility relies on wether the result of two different architectures are identical, not wether the architectures themselves are identical.

See it this way. Is the PPC750 binary compatible with all PPC Mac programs, despite it's got something like nine parallel execution units and very complex OoOE? Yes, actually it is.

Just think of all the changes in PC processors, and despite that they remain backwards compatible all the way to the crappy 8086.

This could break a handful of Gamecube titles that actually executed illegal opcodes

You're just speculating wildly. I know of no single PC program that fails specifically on PCs equipped with MMX or SSE or 3DNow extensions because they purposefully execute illegal instructions. Pretty much every new x86 generation have brought with it new instructions here and there I might add. Besides, with 32-bit instruction sizes, even though not all bits may be used for the actual instruction, the probability that some game purposefully doing illegal things would collide with a theoretical new extension is almost miniscule.

Besides, I'd expect Nintendo's quality control taking a dim view of such programming practices such as you describe. It simply isn't a realistic scenario IMO.

 

[Rolf N]

That's totally, completely wrong.

Binary compatibility relies on wether the result of two different architectures are identical, not wether the architectures themselves are identical.
<...>

Sorry. I wanted to refer to getting the exact same instruction timings (when downclocked to exact Gecko speeds).
Absolutely my bad. I shouldn't have used "binary compatibility" and will ninja-edit it away shortly. Sorry again.

You're just speculating wildly. I know of no single PC program that fails specifically on PCs equipped with MMX or SSE or 3DNow extensions because they purposefully execute illegal instructions. Pretty much every new x86 generation have brought with it new instructions here and there I might add. Besides, with 32-bit instruction sizes, even though not all bits may be used for the actual instruction, the probability that some game purposefully doing illegal things would collide with a theoretical new extension is almost miniscule.

Besides, I'd expect Nintendo's quality control taking a dim view of such programming practices such as you describe. It simply isn't a realistic scenario IMO.

I really didn't speculate, I know that this risk actually exists. It is of course "almost miniscule" as you said. We agree on that conclusion. I said it's safe enough, but as ~a software engineer, I take pride in being precise

 

[Duck Dodgers]

The next gen consoles are here for one thing, entertainment.
And when you want to entertain yourself you tend to have options in life.
For us then there will be choice as to how and with whom we do it, with hopefully more than two options on the table.

Since these consoles are inevitably heading towards providing "cinematic like" experiences to their audiences (according to the beloved mega corporate hype machines)
then just as you would step into a particular style of cinema to watch a particular style of movie, you too would make a hardware purchase based on the assumption that you would get a certain style of entertainment experience.
Usually these choices rest firmly on the knowledge and past experience of that company and its products.

What the REV is offering here is choice, and really I don't know why some people seem adamant in attacking that concept by perpetually trying to elevate it into a entertainment space that its clearly not designed for or aiming at, unless they are really just being bullies.

REV is not about "blockbuster movies", its about offering something niche, perhaps cute, certainly innovative to its audiences and we know that there is market that responds and consumes that because Nintendo is still here.

The REV will do nothing to detract from the gaming experience of PS3/360 owners other than perhaps providing, irksomely, similar entertainment value for a much less price for a lot of people.

Choice is the good side.

 

[Bohdy]

As Guden said, different hardware instruction scheduling will not affect backwards compatability with almost all games. Perhaps there are games that rely on such precise timing in an integral way that more aggressive reordering will break compatability, but they would be extemely rare if they exist at all (which I doubt, considering modern programming practices). A less than 1% compatability loss is quite acceptable for BC even so.

 

[darkblu]

ok, this is getting wild, so i'll be rather blunt in this post.

parallels between backward compatibility on desktops and backward compatibility on consoles are naive at best. the two environemnts are _largely_ different from the POV of the software. when was the last time you saw a desktop application that had requirements for a _particular_ cpu id, _particular_ gpu, _particular_ north & south bridges, all running at _particular_ clocks. guess what, the majority of the console software _has_ those requirementas inherently (possibly with the exception of those loathed desktop-originated and heavily mutiplatform ports). in contrast to that, all desktop software is largely _portable_ - even that which runs on one platform and one os only - all it cares about is certain OS services and a cpu instruction set - but timings are carefully taken care of (explicitly or implicitly). ask microsoft how easy it is to be backward compatible on an arbitrarily-deviating console - they could've gone for static re-compilation and device-access patching and be done with it - they went for a full sw emulator for a reason. ask nintendo why the DS hw mimics the GBA at 101% when running latter's titles. ask sony how the ps is emualted. and refrain from making bold backward compatibility statements unless you have sufficient sw experience (i'm looking at you, oden)

 

[Guden Oden]

Sorry. I wanted to refer to getting the exact same instruction timings (when downclocked to exact Gecko speeds).

Well, that certainly changes a couple things, yes. Anyway, I think you worry over nothing. Why would anyone in their sane mind count cycles when programming for a multi-ahundred megahertz re-ordering CPU, where you can't really REALLY depend on getting data for a particular instruction on any particular clock cycle?

It's been a really REALLY long time since CPUs were synched to the video beam, frankly I don't think even the N64 was, and that was a friggin decade ago!

Since most code will be written in a high-level language anyway, instruction timings won't matter at all since as a programmer you don't have explicit control over what code the compiler generates anyway. I suppose a few time-critical snippets will be hand-coded (such as character skinning on GC for example since Gekko lacks vertex shading), but even so, why would a programmer do it so his function breaks if it runs FASTER? That'd make no sense. If I was to make a stab at guessing what a real-world outcome in an actual game would be, at best the game would run smoother with fewer dropped frames. At worst, it'd sit in a timing busy-loop for a little longer before continuing execution...

I really didn't speculate, I know that this risk actually exists.

Yes, it actually exists, I agree with that (though the risk of collision should be very remote). But I expect such code to immediately hit a snag in Nintendo's debugger when they quality-check the game before certification, since purposefully running illegal opcodes is almost without a doubt at all not permitted according to programming guidelines. By definition you're not supposed to use undefined values because things may change when hardware versions are revised, thus breaking even on current-gen systems if for example the CPU and GPU are cost-reduced without actually speeding either of them up.