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

[see colon]

@JVD
i'm pretty sure alot of it has to do with how much effort is put into the gamecube version of a title. just taking a texture and blindly running it through a compressor doesn't always give you the best resultes.

you mention having played ultimate spider-man on GC, did you play it on ps2? they look pretty close, but the characters are a bit blurrier.

in the case of RE4, you're taking a game built around the strenghts of the GC and porting it to the PS2. while it's a good case study of how the GC can fare vs the PS2 graphicly, it's also contrary to how most games are developed.

 

[fearsomepirate]

But swaaye let's be honest. The average "Xbox only" game crushed most Gamecube and PS2 only games. The Gamecube does have its exceptions, but on average the Xbox led the pack in graphics.

The average Gamecube exclusive was set in the Mario universe with the accompanying bright colors and simple graphics. Actually, come to think of it, the average Cube exclusive is a Mario Party title.

But when it comes to your average non-Mario Cube exclusives, I think they mostly look really, really sharp, if a cut below the premium Xbox exclusives (Chaos Theory, KUF, Riddick, etc)...but not "crushed." Also, the American-developed exclusives (Prime 1 & 2, Day of Reckoning, Rogue Squadron II & III) seem much more graphics-intensive than the Japanese ones (Star Fox Assault, GT Cube, Naruto). The notable exceptions here are F-Zero GX and RE4.

The vast, vast majority of the Cube's library is ported from the PS2. Only a handful of games specifically play to the strengths of the system (although arguably, the Jade engine plays to Cube's strengths over against the PS2's).

 

[jvd]

@JVD
i'm pretty sure alot of it has to do with how much effort is put into the gamecube version of a title. just taking a texture and blindly running it through a compressor doesn't always give you the best resultes.

you mention having played ultimate spider-man on GC, did you play it on ps2? they look pretty close, but the characters are a bit blurrier.

in the case of RE4, you're taking a game built around the strenghts of the GC and porting it to the PS2. while it's a good case study of how the GC can fare vs the PS2 graphicly, it's also contrary to how most games are developed.

and what system was spiderman designed for ?

THe ps2 has no usable compresion . The gamecube does

 

[Rodéric]

You do realize you're going off-topic and start behaving like kids right now, don't you ?

 

[see colon]

just to make sure i wasn't nuts i checked a review...
http://www.gamespot.com/gamecube/action/ultimatespiderman/review.html

The GameCube version doesn't look nearly as crisp as the other two games, with blurrier textures and draw lines.

admittedly i only played the game for about 10 minutes on PS2 and GC, but i did notice a difference.

THe ps2 has no usable compresion . The gamecube does

and the PS2 has 4-5x the storage capacity of GC and more useable memory for textures in a scene.

 

[Squeak]

seriously?
most cross platform games that are single disk have slightly blurrier textures than the other versions. the lord of the rings two towers is pretty good example. actualy most non-sports EA titles (recent need for speeds, MoH) are generaly pretty blurry on the GC compared to ps2 and xbox. and most activision titles (call of duty, tony hawk, gun, ultimate spider-man) also suffer from it.

I assure you, texture blurrynes has nothing to do with disc size on current consoles.
Even one thousand 512x512 4bit textures only takes up 128Mb. No current game is anyway near that kind of total texture pool.

THe ps2 has no usable compresion . The gamecube does

CLUT is very real and usable compression.
When we are talking spatial resolution of the texture it's just as good as S3TC.
Where it falls short is textures with high dynamic and colour range (only 16 colours in 4bit). But then again it does, unlike other current schemes, allow alpha and palette change/cycling.

 

[pc999]

jvd, Sony had an eyetoy when Nintendo and MS were sitting there with nothing as innovative.

Acctually I think Nintendo had did somethingh similar in GB, but I think it does not had sucess.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Obviously the Revolution's controller is going to get much more usage than the Eyetoy. I 'm surprised people would even debate this.

One is a standard controller, that represents an entirely new appraoch to gaming for the entire platform. The other is a peripheral. There's no comparison.

Just because they have the same potential in theory, doesn't mean it's realistic to expect them to be equally utilized.

 

[Joe DeFuria]

One is a standard controller, that represents an entirely new appraoch to gaming for the entire platform. The other is a peripheral. There's no comparison.

Agreed....there is much more potential for Nintendo's controller to have a pervasive impact vs. eye-toy. Doesn't mean eye-toy can't be cool or have its uses...but unless its standard it will have a much more limited role.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Agreed....there is much more potential for Nintendo's controller to have a pervasive impact vs. eye-toy. Doesn't mean eye-toy can't be cool or have its uses...but unless its standard it will have a much more limited role.

Even if it is included by default, eye toy would have a much more limited role. Revs controller is the primary user input. Eye toy, however they decide to package it, will not be.

 

[mckmas8808]

Obviously the Revolution's controller is going to get much more usage than the Eyetoy. I 'm surprised people would even debate this.

One is a standard controller, that represents an entirely new appraoch to gaming for the entire platform. The other is a peripheral. There's no comparison.

Just because they have the same potential in theory, doesn't mean it's realistic to expect them to be equally utilized.

We all know this scooby. I'm saying people should discredit the eyetoy and act as if Nintendo is the only company to bring a new style of gameplay to the table. That's all.

 

[Megadrive1988]

I'd like Dave's take on what he thinks Hollywood is:

-overclocked, beefed up Flipper

or

-an RV530 variant

 

[Fox5]

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.

People are already calling Xbox 360 "Xbox 1.5", if Rev is only double the power of Gamecube then there is no reason for Nintendo to even make new hardware, the difference is barely noticable to most people. Nintendo may as well just make Revolution be a controller that plugs into gamecube, continue with the flash card add on idea(s) they had for gamecube (IBM Microdrive plus SD card adapter), and actually make use of the online functionality that already exists for Gamecube.

- The GPU has been optimised significantly (more on that below)
- The graphics are not as bad as IGN might make them sound
- The Revolution's RAM, whilst being around 128MB, is highly optimised

What does 'optimised' mean? How can you optimize a gpu more than what it is on a PC, unless they mean cutting out unused transistors. Besides, if Rev is backwards compatible with GameCube then it probably has to have hardware compatible with GameCube, anything directly taken from ATI's PC line wouldn't be compatible.
And how the heck do you optimize ram, unless they mean fast ram?
Anyhow, typically graphics power needs to increase by a 4x or 5x before it becomes noticable to the average person, and 10x is considered a worthy generational leap. (dreamcast and gamecube are about 4 to 5x the power of dreamcast, dreamcast was at least 10x the power of n64, and lets say xbox is twice the power of ps2, though the hardwares are too different to directly compare them)

Although he acknowledged that Revolution will not be as powerful as 360 or PS3, he said that the optimisation level of Revolution is similar to that of the GameCube: although it did not have the highest hardware specification, it managed to churn out the best graphics in titles such as Resident Evil 4.

Uh no.

Gamecube's 'optimisations' had a serious transistor cost.
Anyhow, I'd say Resident Evil 4 had some of the best lighting last gen, along with some of the highest polygon counts, but texture quality was low, and good lighting and high polygon counts alone don't qualify for best graphics. (the ps2 strips out most of the things that make RE4 on gamecube a technical achievement...and yet doesn't look much worse, it could be that xbox is very capable of RE4 but that the power is better used to other, more noticable areas)

We have to remember this is how the DS specs were released.

Ah yes, when we were expecting nintendo's next handheld to be at a gamecube level of power and not their next console.

A double the power of gamecube Rev would be very disappointing, as a console released in 2002 could have beasted that. Imagine if Nintendo had released a console in 2000 that was less powerful than the 2 year old dreamcast. (just throwing that out there because I believe that almost happened)

However, it we're to use my logic introduced in this post (twice the jump in power in not noticable to most), and take into account that 480P is about 1/3rd the res of 720P, then a console 2-3x the power of Gamecube displayed on a 480i TV should look identicle to most when compared to an Xbox 360 displaying on a 480i TV.

As I was saying earlier at E3 Nintendo said that the Metroid Prime 3 video was only made on upgraded GameCube hardware, so it should not be judged as a Revolution video but just an early concept for the next game.

Is there a link to the video? I've only seen a screenshot of it, and it looked very much like something done on a higher clocked gamecube.

speaking of GB/GBC, has nintendo said anything about playing portable games through the virtual console?

I think it was a no, because hardware is still produced and sold that can run these old games.

i have a friend who's an absolute movie buff. he owns an impressive collection of indie films, has shot a few short features himself, and even like many hollywood blockbusters. but he hates the upcoming switch to HD. "i don't need to see actors zits and mole hairs" he always tells me. i can honestly relate to what nintendo is trying to do. it makes buisness sense for them because they've lost market share the previous 3 generations even when had a technology advantage. we're talking about how low nintendo's specs are, but i'm more interested in what nintendo's launch lineup is going to look like. assuming what we're hearing is correct, or even close, 360 and PS3 ports will be out of the question. how will EA support the system? and what will nintendo's killer app be to lure non-gamers to the console.

Umm...but we know graphics can be significantly better than Gamecube without reaching the individual hair strands point. PC games have graphics far beyond gamecube, and they still are nowhere near individual hair; heck many games don't even have individual fingers still.
For that matter, HD movies allow you to see current fidelity at a greater distance. Not every scene in a movie is a closeup.

Sony had an eyetoy when Nintendo and MS were sitting there with nothing as innovative. I could spin it and say that with Sony's experince with the eyetoy, now they will be able to muster better games for it than before. Kinda like the difference between a software developer making their 2nd generation of games on a new console.

Sony already had 2 generations of eyetoy software. First gen was nothing more than the kind of games that have come free with every webcam since 1996, the 2nd gen has been more in the line of the future of gaming displays you used to be able to see at museums. They still aren't at the level of arcade games like Police 911 and some boxing game. (and even if they are, those games are barely an improvement over concepts that are 2 decades old)

 

[Lycan]

Regrading the specs of the Revo, I thought that Reggie voiced out his confidence about the ability of the Revolution to host PS3 and Xbox360 productions !!! I read somewhere that he raised the issue in a conference that was held recently...

 

[see colon]

I assure you, texture blurrynes has nothing to do with disc size on current consoles.
Even one thousand 512x512 4bit textures only takes up 128Mb. No current game is anyway near that kind of total texture pool.

CLUT is very real and usable compression.
When we are talking spatial resolution of the texture it's just as good as S3TC.
Where it falls short is textures with high dynamic and colour range (only 16 colours in 4bit). But then again it does, unlike other current schemes, allow alpha and palette change/cycling.

disc capacity does affect texture quality on multiplatform games, just not for every game. textures aren't the only things that take up space on a disk, but along with FMV they are one of the easiest to shrink. if you've got a ps2 game (that is larger than 1.5GB) that uses alot of textures that aren't suitable for CLUT, compressing them to S3TC when you port to gamecube is a no brainer. but the compression isn't lossless, so textures are going to look blurrier.

in fact, anytime you're porting from PS2 to GC you'd be compressing the textures anyway to fit in the GC's texture cache. but like i said earlier, unless devs are spending some real time on the GC port, all they're going to do is feed the texture through a compresser and be done with it.

 

[pc999]

Just for the "DS argument" , DS is much less powerfull than PSP, but it is much more powerfull than GBA (much more than 2-3x).

 

[mckmas8808]

Just for the "DS argument" , DS is much less powerfull than PSP, but it is much more powerfull than GBA (much more than 2-3x).

Sorry not being rude, but what's the point?

 

[Megadrive1988]

Gamecube was something like 50 times more powerful than Nintendo 64 and as far as in-game, GCN games look way more than 10 times better than N64 games in my eyes.

a good 5x is the minimum to notice a significant difference - 10x is the minimum to be concidered a good generational leap. so I agree with some of the above comments.

I'm starting to hope Hollywood is based on RV530.... which would be at least a 5x leap over Gamecube

 

[pc999]

Sorry not being rude, but what's the point?

People say that because DS do well they dont want to jump gfx in Rev only that, but DS it is a great jump from GBA.

Megadrive1988

I agree but I think that because it is only more poligons , IMO effects like shadows/light, water, fur... does have a much bigger impact than poligons+tex it as it give a live and dinamic world, we should see much more from going to a 50Mpolys (3-5xmuch more than GC) SM3 card than a card campable of 1B poligons (80-100X GC) TnL card.(plus physics, animation etc...)

 

[Fafalada]

if you've got a ps2 game (that is larger than 1.5GB) that uses alot of textures that aren't suitable for CLUT

Those kind of games pretty much don't exist at all.
The percentage of textures in 'current'-gen games that wouldn't look very good in 8bit Clut is absolutely tiny (one notable exception are high-color maps like sky, but those can be compressed on PS2 very cheaply at 4/2bits/pixel), and besides, vast majority of PS2 games use ~90% 4bit cluts as well.
Not that in-game content usually takes majority of space on disc though (most cases it takes much much less then soundtracks and FMVs).

but the compression isn't lossless, so textures are going to look blurrier.

Nah, if the source-art is 24/32bit it will tend to look better then Clut stuff. Problem is when textures are authored in 4/8bit to begin with - recompressing that into S3TC will look pretty shitty (see MGS2 XBox for example).
Although unlike XBox, GCN actually supports Cluts, so it generally wouldn't need recompressing unless you're short on memory.