Revolution Tech Details Emerge ( Xbox1+ performance, 128 MB RAM )

[Joe DeFuria]

Again how can this be spun into a positive light? Lack of 3rd party games are not a good thing.

Read it again...Lack of 3rd party ports is not necessarily a bad thing.

 

[mckmas8808]

A top of the line 3+Ghz dual core p4 struggles delivering far less than a ppu which appears weaker than cell, IIRC, IMO...

And that's another point of mine. The extra power that the PS3 and Xbox 360 has will give us more than just better graphics. Heavly based physic games will not be possible either.

Oh and A.I. that will probably not be up to snuff either compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360.

 

[Farid]

About the Unreal Engine, if the rumor about the CPU is true, you can forget about it. At least in its actual form. The UE3.0 engine should be heavy on the CPU, considering the (some would say blaoted, other praticle to use) scripting language it uses. I'm not even talking about the middle layers most UE3 game will use like the Physic, the procedural Animation or the AI.
A UE3 light, maybe...

 

[jvd]

First of all, costs aren't linear. They go up exponentially as die space increases IIRC.

Second, recall that 360 and PS3 will be taking a substantial loss in terms of hardware sales. 360 premium might be prices at $400, but it's rumored to cost closer to $525.

If nintendo keeps with tradition, the Revolution will be targetted to launch pretty close in price to what it actually costs.

In other words, MS has a $525 machine to play UE3...and nintend wants a $150 machine....

But that is assuming we are targeting the same res .


The xbox 360 will have to render 3 times the pixels . Which means 3 times the power roughly .

Also that is assuming the same time frame. However the xbox 360 will be out for almost a year it looks

Your also forgeting that the xbox 360 premium has a hardrive .

So i really don't see the problem.

I will go out on a limb and say that a 3ghz athlon 64 and a x1600 card should run unreal 2k7 fine at 640x480

 

[Joe DeFuria]

Just a side note...

I know I'm on the right track since I'm getting flack from Sony, Nintendo AND MS fans.

 

[mckmas8808]

Read it again...Lack of 3rd party ports is not necessarily a bad thing.

So losing lots of perfectly great 3rd party games that the PS3 and Xbox 360 will have that will sell millions is not a bad thing? Of course it is. Now the question is will the games that 3rd parties make for Nintendo be better than the games that come out for the PS3 and 360?

 

[Ty]

Joe respectfully saying please stop the craziness man. The extra power coming from the PS3 and Xbox 360 will give us WAY more than just graphics.

Dude you need to relax because you seem to be completely misreading statements.

NO WHERE in his post did he say that the PS3/X360 was ONLY going to give you next gen graphics. All he said was that IF you want next gen graphics, get an X360/PS3.

Again how can this be spun into a positive light? Lack of 3rd party games are not a good thing.

And he's NEVER spun the low specs as a positive.

 

[Ty]

About the Unreal Engine, if the rumor about the CPU is true, you can forget about it. At least in its actual form. The UE3.0 engine should be heavy on the CPU, considering the (some would say blaoted, other praticle to use) scripting language it uses. I'm not even talking about the middle layers most UE3 game will use like the Physic, the procedural Animation or the AI.
A UE3 light, maybe...

Yea, I've been asked to join a project here that will be using UE3 and I HIGHLY doubt it's low power console friendly.

 

[Joe DeFuria]

The xbox 360 will have to render 3 times the pixels . Which means 3 times the power roughly .

Including 3 times the memory footprint, 3 times the memory bandwidth.....

Also that is assuming the same time frame. However the xbox 360 will be out for almost a year it looks

Yes, but indications are that it is still targetted on the same process node (90 nm).

Your also forgeting that the xbox 360 premium has a hardrive .[/qupte]

Fine...take the "cost" of the 360 down to $500.

So i really don't see the problem.

Then design the console yourself.

I will go out on a limb and say that a 3ghz athlon 64 and a x1600 card should run unreal 2k7 fine at 640x480

With how much memory on that card? Throw in flash memory, next-gen controller, and the rest of the hardware...

What you are basically saying is that $99-$149 is too high a cost for what the specs of revolution are?

 

[Joe DeFuria]

So losing lots of perfectly great 3rd party games that the PS3 and Xbox 360 will have that will sell millions is not a bad thing? Of course it is.

Disagree. It's not necessarily a bad thing!

Not if it means you have to raise the cost and price of your console to do it.

I am the perfect case in point: if Revolution were ANOTHER $300-$400 console that ran the "next gen graphics" games on par with 360 and PS3, I would not consider buying one! That price would be too steep for me.

You are all hoping / wishing / thinking that Nintendo needs to compete with Sony and MS with power. It's about the games.

Now the question is will the games that 3rd parties make for Nintendo be better than the games that come out for the PS3 and 360?

Correct. The other question is....if you already own a PS3 / 360 to play all of those "me too" titles / ports, and there are in fact good unique games for the Revolution...would you consider buying one for $300? Or more inclined at $99-$149?

I don't want to buy two consoles where there is a huge overlap in terms of functionality. That's called a waste of money.

 

[Branduil]

I still think these rumors are crap until we actually get someone legitimate to substantiate them. I doubt the hardware is even finalized yet. I certainly don't believe that Nintendo paid ATI millions of dollars to just double the clockrate of Flipper.

 

[jvd]

Including 3 times the memory footprint, 3 times the memory bandwidth.....

That is what the xbox would need to render ue3 at 720p . The rev will need much less to do it at 480p

Yes, but indications are that it is still targetted on the same process node (90 nm).

Perhaps . It may find its first life on 80nm however . Though i'm pretty sure this is just an optical shrink (if i got that term correct)

The gpu will also have to drive less pixels . The only major problem would be a cpu . But then again how would a cpu with double the power of the gekko compare to a athlon 64 3000+ lvl cpu ?

Then design the console yourself.

Oh if i designed a console it be a neo geo price point type toy . Launch it at 1k

With how much memory on that card? Throw in flash memory, next-gen controller, and the rest of the hardware...

The x1600 should have 128-256 meg i would think. I think the 128 version would be fine also. Esp if the game took advantage of 3Dc and its other texture compresions which the pc version will most likely not take adavantage of .

As for the flash memory that hsould be dirt cheap. I can get a sd disc for 30$ 1 gig . Even a memory stick pro duo is down to 80 for a 1 gig online . The mini sd 1 gig is at 60$ .

I can't see 512megs of it costing an arm and a leg. Mabye 20ish depending on the type ? That leaves 130ish left on a 150$ price tag . THe controller also shouldn't be to expensive .

So really how muich are we looking at .

How much would a x1600 chip cost ? Just the chip itself ? 30ish ? 40ish ? The boards are already 180$ with 256 megs of ram i believe .

I'm not expecting xbox 360 power now . But i do expect something much closer to xbox 360 than it is to gamecube or xbox 1 .

 

[AlphaWolf]

Disagree. It's not necessarily a bad thing!

Not if it means you have to raise the cost and price of your console to do it.

I am the perfect case in point: if Revolution were ANOTHER $300-$400 console that ran the "next gen graphics" games on par with 360 and PS3, I would not consider buying one! That price would be too steep for me.

You are all hoping / wishing / thinking that Nintendo needs to compete with Sony and MS with power. It's about the games.



Correct. The other question is....if you already own a PS3 / 360 to play all of those "me too" titles / ports, and there are in fact good unique games for the Revolution...would you consider buying one for $300? Or more inclined at $99-$149?

I don't want to buy two consoles where there is a huge overlap in terms of functionality. That's called a waste of money.

If nintendo wants to be the 2nd console in peoples homes, 3rd party ports are meaningless. If you have an xbox360 and/or ps3 you probably won't be buying the lesser version for rev.

Obviously you'd rather have more software rather than less, but a strong lineup of 1st party titles at a reasonable price, with a much cheaper console could make rev a very interesting option for a lot of people.

 

[lip2lip]

so... no OOOe?

 

[Joe DeFuria]

Trying to guess at console BOM from PC parts that may or may not even be relevant is a bit futile.

I'll ask again...do you think a cost (not price) of say $149 is too high for the specs as we know them?

 

[Joe DeFuria]

If nintendo wants to be the 2nd console in peoples homes, 3rd party ports are meaningless. If you have an xbox360 and/or ps3 you probably won't be buying the lesser version for rev.

Obviously you'd rather have more software rather than less, but a strong lineup of 1st party titles at a reasonable price, with a much cheaper console could make rev a very interesting option for a lot of people.

Exactly.

To be clear, I wouldn't say that Nintendo only wants to be the 2nd console in people's homes. (I know you didn't say "only", but I'm just explaining myself here.) They want to be the second console in PS3/360 homes, AND the only console in people's homes who

1) Don't want to pay $300+ for a console
2) Relate better to Revolution games. (Similar approach to DS vs. PSP...see nintendogs....)

 

[fearsomepirate]

Thank you ERP. God bless you man. This is what I've been thinking for the past hour. How will Madden 2007 look on the Rev? How will games like Splinter Cell 5 look on the Rev? How will games like Resident Evil 5 look on the Rev?

That's my main concern.

They won't look at all. Flipper doesn't have the architecture to pull it off, not with a fixed-function T&L engine. Not with the TEV. They'd basically have to have different engines. You know , kind of souped-up DX7 engines. You won't have UE3 at all, not without vertex shaders.

This ruined my evening. It's like they're going out of their way to make this thing suck as much as possible on a silicon front. Almost like they went to their engineers and said "Make us a faster Gamecube for $150!" even when the engineers were like "But we could build something that has some serious features for the same price!" and then mgmt was like "No! Graphics are at their peak! Gamecube is great! Faster Gamecube will be fine!"

You know, kind of like how Sega is stubbornly using resources and graphics engines from Dreamcast-era Sonic.

 

[Farid]

Or this Flipper 2 could employ tiling a la Xenos.

I thought about it, but after reading the whole thing I wrote off any complex archtecture.
I just pictured a 300MHz R200 with SM2/3.0 capabilities intead of SM1.4...

I do remember some smart dude posting about such a possible Rev CPU candidate back in August.....

My hat goes off to this smart dude, indeed.

Well, if the CPU is indeed 750 based, that is.

That said, I too didn't expect anything powerful could be cram in that case they show last E3, but I at least expected something else for the CPU.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Exactly.

To be clear, I wouldn't say that Nintendo only wants to be the 2nd console in people's homes. (I know you didn't say "only", but I'm just explaining myself here.) They want to be the second console in PS3/360 homes, AND the only console in people's homes who

1) Don't want to pay $300+ for a console
2) Relate better to Revolution games. (Similar approach to DS vs. PSP...see nintendogs....)

Right, I never meant only.

 

[Bill]

I dont know what the base 360 costs but I suspect it's way less than $500.

I've seen estimates from 375 to 525..but I believe the 525 estimate was pretty shoddy when you examined the component costs they used (they appeared to be using almost retail prices on some components).

So if you're building your theory on the X360 costing 525 it might sound better, but I believe that's a house of cards. Of course MS will remain mum on the true cost but they're not stupid, it's probably much lower than 525.

Here's an estimate of Xbox360 core at $310

http://www.quote.com/qc/news/story.aspx?symbols=BWIRE:100&story=200511232325_BWR__BW5533

Now that sounds low to me, but there you go.

Even isuppli., the highest analysis I've seen, reckoned the 525 for the premium, and said the cost should drop $50 within a year..so $475 for a $400 console isn't that bad..

Also as a side note..while digging for cost estimates I found a nice pic of Xenos..http://www.chipworks.com/news/2005_xbox360.asp

Here's another cost breakdown (last one) that pegs the Xbox at 340..and seems about right to me

http://www.xboxtoday.ca/11142005/09/ps3_may_cost_twice_as_much_as_the_xbox_360