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

[fearsomepirate]

I think it's time for everyone to Acknowledge that Rev will NOT be on par with X360 and PS3 on GFX, just let it go and consentrate on the good qualities that Rev actually has.

Everyone has acknowledged this, to my knowledge. You don't need to convince me on Kameo, either. Just looking at screens, it looks very DX9. Some of the other games (COD2 comes to mind) look very DX7-on-steroids. Some games just look very "Stuff we've seen, but more of it," like PD Zero. As more devs license UE3 and create genuine next-gen engines, we'll see less and less of the latter two sorts of games.

That doesn't mean that Revo will be making ugly games. Even just Gamecube architecture with double the throughput will be able to output aesthetically pleasing graphics, just not laden with shader effects.

 

[dubyateeeff]

Quote:
Originally Posted by swaaye
I think N is trying to create a new paradigm with their controller, because they know graphics are leveling out in improvement. They just need the games now.

Something we have to take into consideration is that procesing power just doesnt mean "better-pretty" graphics. Theres alot more to that, not to mention you can achieve new gameplay posibilities with more procesing power and current input devices.

I think Nintendo is dead wrong (if these specs are true). Graphics are and will continue to improve. The difference between Rev games and PS3/X2 games in 5 years will be huge! Cloth animation, realistic hair, physics, nice forests, grass, water, reflections, specularity, lightning and shadows havent been done extensively and good in last gen. In this gen we will see much more of that and if Nintendo thinks they can do the same thing with a crappy processor they are very wrong. Just like Half Life 2 gave us a glimps of how fun physics can be, Nintendo showed us how fun their controller can be. Unfortunelty Nintendo will only get the controller oh and (comparably) crappy graphics.

I think a lot of stuff havent been implemented because of the lack of hardware power. These are just algorithms and shaders! After creating a game-engine you can reuse it to your hearts content. There will be more middle-wear options and more game-engines to choose from. It is inevitable. You just need to do it right once to be able to implement it pain free (erm) in the rest of your games.

My one hope is that Nintendo will for once have cheap games, now that they use DVDs.

 

[Branduil]

And just when you thought he couldn't get worse, Pkeg decides to insult everyone who doesn't buy a high-priced TV. Bottom feeders, indeed.

Anyways, the more I think about it the more convinced I am that the GPU at least is not going to be that far behind. Nintendo is not paying ATI to double the speed of the Gecko. I think the GPU will be capable of doing all the same effects that the other systems can do, just not on as large of a scale. And at 480p, that may be good enough to compare reasonably well with the other systems.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Xbox outsold Nintendo by a whopping 16% (Sony spanked them both by a differential of over 325%) , and they flushed $4 billion in the process. 22 million to 19+ million. Kidtendo = teh d00m3d.

Did you know the tie ratio for Playstations went down in Japan this gen? It's currently at 8.38. PSx's tie ratio was 13.488.

I sure enjoy my $35 Apex DVD player and my then-$250 24" RCA TV with no component inputs.

And FWIW, current-gen games look nice, and what I mean by "nice" is that they don't hurt your eyes. Most PSx/N64 games made me physically ill (Conker had me sick for a whole weekend) and/or required a significant amount of imagination to enjoy the game's world. By contrast, when I play Prince of Persia, I don't have to imagine a cool-looking castle. I can see one. I don't have to think "Gee, I'll bet the monster that blobby shape represents would be really creepy-looking," because those freakin' Regenerators really <i>were</i> freakish-looking. And yes, I've played some of the latest and greatest DX9 games on high-end PCs. They look really, really nice. I would say this is the first generation that provided truly aesthetically pleasing 3D graphics, kind of like the SNES was capable of truly nice-looking 2D graphics. Even after playing the awesomeness of Symphony of the Night, Super Mario World still looks beautiful.

Now I'm just rambling. I still think a 2x-clocked Flipper would be the Worst Idea Ever. It wouldn't make me stab out my eyes the way a 2x-clocked Jaguar would, though.

 

[Joe DeFuria]

And if we're really arguing appearance of difficulty here, why is the wand exempt? You think the average person is not reticent to play games with that, just based on appearance?

As I said, yes...and Just a little more (timely) color:

http://revolution.ign.com/articles/673/673900p1.html

The Revolution's officially nicknamed "free-hand style" controller has been designed to look like a stylish television remote so that it is immediately attractive to non-gamers. The Big N hopes that people normally put off by conventional videogame controllers will in contrast find the Revolution's pointer unthreatening and intuitive.

As I've been saying, this is exactly Nintendo's plan. Whether or not they are successful...only time will tell. I give Nintendo props for giving it a go though.

 

[Readykilowatt]

It boggles the mind that some people here are actually responding to Powderkeg. BTW, I will not comment on rumored specs. I'll wait until I see the official, final specs of the Revolution.

 

[Joe DeFuria]

It boggles the mind that some people here are actually responding to Powderkeg.

Sometimes, you have to learn the lesson the hard way, I guess...

 

[jvd]

If they don't include the shell and nunchaka add-ons with the system then developers can't count on people having them. If developers can only count on an 8 way movement with 2 button controller that will massively limit what type of games can be put on the system.

Nintendo has stated they will go with the sell in route in which they put the shell or attachment in with the game for a small increase in price ala donkey konga . You could get the game for 50$ or the game and konga for 60$

THey will go the same route with thier titles .

 

[ERP]

If Nintendo is intending to compete for the low pricepoint PS2 buyer which is an interesting strategy, they are likely going to have to compete with lower priced softwae, I wonder how practical that really makes pack in controller add ons.

And it's never historically been a practical model for 3rd party devs.

 

[jvd]

I agree the good ones, but most? That makes me think 12 out of 15 will sell a million or more.

Well aside from sports games (which will be replaced before they can drop in price) You have kameo , doa4 , pdz , condemend , Pgr3 , call of duty 2 ,That snowboard game(hey its alot of fun), quake 4 ? So thats what8 out of 10 or so that launched and aren't sports games ?


Launch games ( amped , , pdz , king kong , ridge racer , cod2 , condemned , gun , tony hawk , need for speed , pgr3 , kameo all non sports games ) so 8 good ones out of 11 . Not bad . Of course other games will be million sellers . I doubt gow wont be a million seller by that holiday

 

[Branduil]

Nintendo has stated they will go with the sell in route in which they put the shell or attachment in with the game for a small increase in price ala donkey konga . You could get the game for 50$ or the game and konga for 60$

THey will go the same route with thier titles .

And they also said they will probably package the analog attachment with the remote.

Don't worry about it, though, P-Keggy isn't one to let facts get in the way of a good argument. Or a bad one.

No one answered my question earlier, so I'll ask it again: how powerful were the initial 360 dev kits compared to the final hardware?

 

[Joe DeFuria]

No one answered my question earlier, so I'll ask it again: how powerful were the initial 360 dev kits compared to the final hardware?

They were considerably less powerful in the CPU department...a bit less "powerful" in the GPU department, but the characteristics of the production GPU are different than the alpha GPU.

That being said, I don't think developers are commenting on predicted Revolution power based on the alpha kit power, so I'm not sure why you're asking the question. Devs are guessing power by taking the specs that Nintendo has given them guidance on with respect to final hardware.

Devs need to know approximate power of the final console...despite whatever power the alpha/beta kits have.

 

[jvd]

No one answered my question earlier, so I'll ask it again: how powerful were the initial 360 dev kits compared to the final hardware?

The original dev kits were I believe 9800pros and dual g4s . Later they moved to x800s and then finaly lower locked xenos and xenons

 

[Branduil]

They were considerably less powerful in the CPU department...a bit less "powerful" in the GPU department, but the characteristics of the production GPU are different than the alpha GPU.

That being said, I don't think developers are commenting on predicted Revolution power based on the alpha kit power, so I'm not sure why you're asking the question. Devs are guessing power by taking the specs that Nintendo has given them guidance on with respect to final hardware.

Devs need to know approximate power of the final console...despite whatever power the alpha/beta kits have.

That is true. However, given Nintendo's pencheant for secrecy, I wonder if they have given all the developers that information. I mean, it sounds like devs still don't know exactly what the GPU will be like. And Nintendo has made it sound like the hardware isn't quite finalized, and they've just been giving devs souped-up GC dev kits. It makes me wonder how much of the final picture we actually have right now.

 

[Joe DeFuria]

That is true. However, given Nintendo's pencheant for secrecy, I wonder if they have given all the developers that information.

Nintendo would be silly not too. Devs have to make games to spec!

Now, this doesn't mean that there's not a chance that some of the specs could ultimately change if Nintendo does some repositioning....but you can be sure that Nintendo will give as accurate a spec representation that they can to devs.

I mean, it sounds like devs still don't know exactly what the GPU will be like.

Likely, the architecture is different and not something they can directly extrapolate. Kind like trying to figure out exactly what exactly the Xbox 360 gpu would be like while only running a DX8 card.

It makes me wonder how much of the final picture we actually have right now.

We are less than a year from launch...Nintendo will have a good idea of the final specs they want to hit.

 

[Fox5]

I'm actually both somewhat relieved and disappointed. I was actually worried that the GPU would be an overclocked Flipper, meaning another fixed-function T&L pipeline. The "souped-up Xbox" bit would seem to indicate that it has actual vertex shaders, so we could see some variant of the Doom 3 engine on it. I was predicting between 128 MB and 256 MB of RAM. I sure as heck hope it doesn't end up being less than 128 MB. I'm also wondering what shader model they'll be using (assuming I understood those comments correctly).

This would also substantiate a rumor I heard earlier that Rev predev kits were GC kits with 128 MB of RAM.

Wasn't the triforce arcade hardware also a GC with 128MB of ram?

 

[Reznor007]

Wasn't the triforce arcade hardware also a GC with 128MB of ram?

I think it only had 48MB of 1TSRAM instead of 24MB in Gamecube. It was also retrofitted to support GDROM drives(for whatever reason).

 

[Fox5]

I think it only had 48MB of 1TSRAM instead of 24MB in Gamecube. It was also retrofitted to support GDROM drives(for whatever reason).

Well, I'm guessing the GDROM drives were already readily available and still being produced for Naomi based systems.

BTW, there were rumors that Triforce had a higher clock speed. If that's true, I doubt it would have been substantially higher but a 600mhz cpu/200mhz gpu may have been possible. (don't need yields quite as high for the arcade market, or if a more advanced process was used)

 

[fearsomepirate]

Nintendo would be silly not too. Devs have to make games to spec!

Now, this doesn't mean that there's not a chance that some of the specs could ultimately change if Nintendo does some repositioning....but you can be sure that Nintendo will give as accurate a spec representation that they can to devs.

Likely, the architecture is different and not something they can directly extrapolate. Kind like trying to figure out exactly what exactly the Xbox 360 gpu would be like while only running a DX8 card.

We are less than a year from launch...Nintendo will have a good idea of the final specs they want to hit.

In the most optimistic scenario, Hollywood will essentially be a DX9-ish, SM2.5 (I know there's no real SM2.5) part fully compatible with Flipper's feature set. Now suppose that Nintendo is currently telling devs "Just use Flipper with double throughput." For launch, that means we should have games with Flipper-targeted graphics engines and assets. Finding out the full feature set maybe 4 months before launch would allow them to throw in a few extra layers of shine (fur shading? HDR? More stenciled shadows and normal maps? Beats me) giving some very nice-looking games at launch, even if nothing nearly as technically marvelous as the creme-de-la-creme on the X360.

In the most pessimistic scenario, it really is a double-clocked Flipper, in which case expect Jade engine games with 3x the polygons as the Prince of Persia games, some extra effects layers here and there, and a couple more moving vertex lights.

 

[JF_Aidan_Pryde]

I like the way Nintendo is playing this generation.

Clearly they can't compete with Sony and Microsoft head on in terms of big R&D budgets and big chips. To win, they need to play on their strenghts, and that's innovating the controller and gameplay. They are doing just that, and taking advantage of the fact that graphics is indeed reaching the point of diminishing returns. Selling at a fraction the price of the competition is a complete new model. Very bold, and necessary if Nintendo is to survive the 'console wars'.