Revolution Tech Details Emerge ( Xbox1+ performance, 128 MB RAM )
- Thread starter Megadrive1988
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DeanoC said:
Along that lines, just what exactly could a doubleclocked Flipper do? I figure there are a few people on this forum who have actually programmed the thing, and maybe they could give us some ideas. I think sometimes we also forget that the majority of games on both Xbox and Cube this gen were ported over from the PS2, which was comparitively limited in the kinds of pixel and texture level effects one could pull off. Remember, Crytek lists Gamecube as being one of the target platforms of Polybump, but I don't recall any games actually using it.
So what could you do with double the throughput and clever programming on a Flipper? If you had twice as much stuff to work with, what could be added to game like Metroid Prime 2, Rebel Strike, RE4, or WWE: DOR2?
mckmas8808
Legend
fearsomepirate said:
Now that's probably one of the best questions asked in this whole thread. Hopefully a developer can answer this. Because seriously my feeling are the Xbox was never really pushed the way it should have been. People here still think that the Xbox wasn't that much more powerful than it's competitors.
But if you ask me had the Xbox had the bigger mindshare this gen and more games were created for it rather than the PS2; we would have seen its games look even better.
Now that this thread has slowed down, I'm going to post something I sent to IGN's mailbox:
Dear Matt,
While I do believe you have the best information available, simple logic would dictate that the revolution be more than twice as powerful as an XBox. I'm not expecting it to be in the same league as the PS3 and 360, and don't really care. A couple of weeks ago I dug F-Zero GX out and had another spin on it. I live in Japan and was playing through the D-terminal cable on a standard definition set (though with scanline compression to 16:9) and thinking, damn this still blows me away. At that point I realized I agreed with Nintendo's strategy. I don't need another fidelity jump the likes of N64 to Gamecube, that won't be enough to make me buy a new system. That being said, I expect more than 2 times a Gamecube. 3 times a Gamecube or higher and I'll be happy. By my reasoning, that should be very simple for Nintendo to reach without architecturally changing a single aspect of the gamecube... through a process shrink.
Gekko has roughly 20 million transistors and flipper around 26 million (or so google tells me). Gamecube never had a process shrink so those chips are still produced on 180nm. The fact that flipper and gekko are so simple makes them extremely good candidates for 65nm. That would put you at about 13% of the original core size. Meaning you could make almost 8 cores with the same amount of silicone. So the 'brains' of the Revolution should be significantly cheaper than the 'brains' of the Gamecube. Another serendipitous effect of the die shrink would be the ability to clock higher. It would be baffling if IBM couldn't at least tripple Gekko's core clock on a modern process. Three times Gekko's 485Mhz gives you about 1.45Ghz. 1.45Ghz on a 90nm process (let alone a 60nm one) with a 20 million transistor chip shouldn't be too challenging... Ditto on Flipper. 2 or 3 times flipper on a modern process is absurd. If you triple the clocks of Flipper you have a <i>scorching...</i> 486Mhz. Yep, 486Mhz and this on a chip that is a quarter as complicated as the simplest chip ATI is currently producing (RadeonX1300 is 105 million transistors and is clocked upto 600mhz).
So with the exception of the RAM performance is therefore easily tripled across the board just by a die shrink... The thing is Nintendo has invested a good chunk of cash in R&D. I'm expecting a die shrink and somewhat substantial enhancements. Between the two it seems Nintendo would almost have to TRY to artificially limit performance not to at least triple the specs of the Gamecube.
So with the logic above, doesn't it seem safe to believe that once the developers get their final dev kits and info on the graphics system we will have a system that, with the exception of RAM is over 3 times more powerful than the gamecube? Being a tech nut, particularly in regard to GPU's it boggled my mind to read,
Thanks for reading this,
-Kevin
My mind was boiling at the idea of releasing a 'souped up XBox' today. In fact if you read all of this thread you'd have seen my post saying pretty much the same stuff I said above several pages ago. I've since made my peace and decided not to believe the IGN specs.... again not because I'm a ******, but because the progress of technology does not support their claims.
Dear Matt,
While I do believe you have the best information available, simple logic would dictate that the revolution be more than twice as powerful as an XBox. I'm not expecting it to be in the same league as the PS3 and 360, and don't really care. A couple of weeks ago I dug F-Zero GX out and had another spin on it. I live in Japan and was playing through the D-terminal cable on a standard definition set (though with scanline compression to 16:9) and thinking, damn this still blows me away. At that point I realized I agreed with Nintendo's strategy. I don't need another fidelity jump the likes of N64 to Gamecube, that won't be enough to make me buy a new system. That being said, I expect more than 2 times a Gamecube. 3 times a Gamecube or higher and I'll be happy. By my reasoning, that should be very simple for Nintendo to reach without architecturally changing a single aspect of the gamecube... through a process shrink.
Gekko has roughly 20 million transistors and flipper around 26 million (or so google tells me). Gamecube never had a process shrink so those chips are still produced on 180nm. The fact that flipper and gekko are so simple makes them extremely good candidates for 65nm. That would put you at about 13% of the original core size. Meaning you could make almost 8 cores with the same amount of silicone. So the 'brains' of the Revolution should be significantly cheaper than the 'brains' of the Gamecube. Another serendipitous effect of the die shrink would be the ability to clock higher. It would be baffling if IBM couldn't at least tripple Gekko's core clock on a modern process. Three times Gekko's 485Mhz gives you about 1.45Ghz. 1.45Ghz on a 90nm process (let alone a 60nm one) with a 20 million transistor chip shouldn't be too challenging... Ditto on Flipper. 2 or 3 times flipper on a modern process is absurd. If you triple the clocks of Flipper you have a <i>scorching...</i> 486Mhz. Yep, 486Mhz and this on a chip that is a quarter as complicated as the simplest chip ATI is currently producing (RadeonX1300 is 105 million transistors and is clocked upto 600mhz).
So with the exception of the RAM performance is therefore easily tripled across the board just by a die shrink... The thing is Nintendo has invested a good chunk of cash in R&D. I'm expecting a die shrink and somewhat substantial enhancements. Between the two it seems Nintendo would almost have to TRY to artificially limit performance not to at least triple the specs of the Gamecube.
So with the logic above, doesn't it seem safe to believe that once the developers get their final dev kits and info on the graphics system we will have a system that, with the exception of RAM is over 3 times more powerful than the gamecube? Being a tech nut, particularly in regard to GPU's it boggled my mind to read,
I was boggled not because I'm a ****** who expected XBox360 performance in the space of a few DVD cases, but because process shrinks alone should do much, much more than just double the clock speed.
Thanks for reading this,
-Kevin
My mind was boiling at the idea of releasing a 'souped up XBox' today. In fact if you read all of this thread you'd have seen my post saying pretty much the same stuff I said above several pages ago. I've since made my peace and decided not to believe the IGN specs.... again not because I'm a ******, but because the progress of technology does not support their claims.
Ooh-videogames
Regular
fearsomepirate said:
If Nintendo can keep the GC on the market longer and pick up some Indie support we may just see more technically impressive titles.
Third party devs don't know much about the Revolution(GPU), there guessing Mhz.
RV530
# 157 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process
# Twelve pixel shader processors
# Five vertex shader processors
4 TMU
How does the TEV fit in the scheme? Can these specifications be added to the Flipper?
fearsomepirate said:
As usual, everyone's thinking a bit too simplistic here. It's not going to be a doubleclocked gecko/flipper console. That would be stupid, and impossible, since you can't just magically throw an existing chip design on a new process without more R&D.
You guys sure as hell shouldn't want a double clocked Flipper anyway lol. The thing can't even do more than 16-bit color when the effects get fancy (look at RE4 again). And the texture aliasing due to, I believe, insufficient eDRAM for mipmaps (possibly why it's fake widescreen too).
The system absolutely undoubtedly will be a new design with new custom chips. RV530 is amazingly superior to Flipper, in every way. A chip like RV530 deserves some excitement in the console environment, where its strengths can be leveraged. It's a pixel shading monster without a lot of texture fillrate. What can they do with that? Certainly something amazing, if unique. (Assuming they are even using a chip like RV530).
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There are enough Cube games that do use sufficient mipmapping to disprove your claim. It's probably more a matter of not having enough main RAM in RE4; either that, or Capcom is so used to making PS2 games that getting rid of jaggies and sparklies just wasn't high on the agenda (IMO, Prime 2 is much more impressive than RE4).
Like I said before, and I'll ask again...what could be done with a doubleclocked Flipper and 64 MB of extra RAM? I'm taking that spec as a bare minimum, so I'm curious as to what exactly that minimum is. It's not helpful to say "Oh, it'll be more powerful than that," because I don't even know what that could accomplish right now. Tell me what the minimum is and speculate from there.
Like I said before, and I'll ask again...what could be done with a doubleclocked Flipper and 64 MB of extra RAM? I'm taking that spec as a bare minimum, so I'm curious as to what exactly that minimum is. It's not helpful to say "Oh, it'll be more powerful than that," because I don't even know what that could accomplish right now. Tell me what the minimum is and speculate from there.
Shogmaster said:
Maybe he meant how on PCs, a graphics card can be cpu limited, so the Rev will probably be balanced so it's not significantly cpu or graphics card limited in most cases. Of course, 1 ghz G4 would probably cpu limit anything faster than a geforce 3.
So same design as the X360 chip then, but less power? Cause the x360 has a comparatively high pixel shading ability compared to its fill rate. (compared to what has been standard in the PC realm anyways)
Megadrive1988
Veteran
Fox5 said:
no, RV530 is not a design like Xenos but with less power - the RV530 is more like a R580 but with a fraction of the power. RV530 does not have unified shader architecture like Xenos does.
I think I would be pleased if Hollywood was a custom RV530 with Flipper functions for compatibility. If Hollywood retained the RV530's five vertex processors, that would mean alot of polygon pushing power for Revolution. With 4 pixel pipelines, 12 pixel shader units and 4 texture units, that would give Revolution a modest but reasonable fillrate for SDTV resolutions, plus quite alot of pixel shader performance.
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Megadrive1988 said:
I didn't mean it had a unified shaders architecture, just that the shading ability was high and the fillrate was low. Xenos has a lower fillrate than ATI's top cards in the X800 series.
BTW, why the interest in the RV530? If it's just a low end R580, what's the big deal? Or has ATI done something different with it, like how the 6600GT had its pipelines decoupled from its texturing units? (didn't Flipper have the same thing?)
OIC as has been stated several times if you have a die shrink and a process shrink do not thing that you can increase clockspeed.
Intel had to redesign the Northwood core and extra pipelines to further clock the Penitum 4 architecture. Not only that but when they moved to 90nm there were problems with heat, as leakage occurred. Even with a die shrink and a process shrink Intel had problems (now resolved to a limited degree by 65nm and better management of leakage).
A die shrink from 180nm to 90nm may not buy Nintendo 3x the clockspeed. A more sensible approach would be to increase complexity and clockspeed. Where else would the R&D money be spent?
I, for one, do not believe Nintendo is recyclying Gamecube technology on a smaller process.
Anyone else agree?
Intel had to redesign the Northwood core and extra pipelines to further clock the Penitum 4 architecture. Not only that but when they moved to 90nm there were problems with heat, as leakage occurred. Even with a die shrink and a process shrink Intel had problems (now resolved to a limited degree by 65nm and better management of leakage).
A die shrink from 180nm to 90nm may not buy Nintendo 3x the clockspeed. A more sensible approach would be to increase complexity and clockspeed. Where else would the R&D money be spent?
I, for one, do not believe Nintendo is recyclying Gamecube technology on a smaller process.
Anyone else agree?
Fox5 said:
http://www.beyond3d.com/misc/chipco...d=104&orderby=release_date&order=Order&cname=
It seems that is comparable to the ATI X800 Mobile in power or in other words ATI X800 with 12 pipes.
RV530 is a chip designed for a small form factor, low power environment. It's obviously tailored to be a mobile notebook chip. Yeah it's probably similar in power usage to a X600.
Obviously, relative to that PS3 and 360 have, it's a lot less capable in pure brute force. But it does have all the features, and still a lot of power. It's a very efficient little chip with similar texturing power to X600 but WAY more pixel & vertex shading power. Even X600 is a lot faster and more capable than Flipper. Gamecube uses about 30W at the outlet, whereas Xbox uses ~70-80W. Both get the job done about equally in quality perception.
It's easier to get the maximum out of Flipper/Gecko than XGPU/thatCeleron. Assuming it's similar with Revolution I'm sure it will be more than enough to seriously compete. Obviously PS3 and 360 are by FAR the hardest to develop for out there period.
Nintendo is just going a different way with their system. Good for them. Will it work out? Who knows!
Obviously, relative to that PS3 and 360 have, it's a lot less capable in pure brute force. But it does have all the features, and still a lot of power. It's a very efficient little chip with similar texturing power to X600 but WAY more pixel & vertex shading power. Even X600 is a lot faster and more capable than Flipper. Gamecube uses about 30W at the outlet, whereas Xbox uses ~70-80W. Both get the job done about equally in quality perception.
It's easier to get the maximum out of Flipper/Gecko than XGPU/thatCeleron. Assuming it's similar with Revolution I'm sure it will be more than enough to seriously compete. Obviously PS3 and 360 are by FAR the hardest to develop for out there period.
Nintendo is just going a different way with their system. Good for them. Will it work out? Who knows!
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a rv530 would be able to put up similar images compared to a xenos or rsx esp when it renders at 480p instead of 720p that is a third less pixelsswaaye said:RV530 is a chip designed for a small form factor, low power environment. It's obviously tailored to be a mobile notebook chip. Yeah it's probably similar in power usage to a X600.
Obviously, relative to that PS3 and 360 have, it's a lot less capable in pure brute force. But it does have all the features, and still a lot of power. It's a very efficient little chip with similar texturing power to X600 but WAY more pixel & vertex shading power. Gamecube uses about 30W at the outlet, whereas Xbox uses ~70-80W. Both get the job done about equally in quality perception.
Nintendo is just going a different way with their system. Good for them. Will it work out? Who knows!
Megadrive1988
Veteran
Tahir2 said:
I agree that it wouldn't make sense to rely only on a recycled Gamecube chipset for Revolution.
Once again, remember a few things, if the machine has a >1GHz CPU based on the 750 familly and 108MB of RAM (including 16MB of slow DRAM), you cannot expect a GPU that is not on par with thoses.
Also even if the GPU is solid, the 3MB eDRAM, if no tiling technology is supported, will mean that the console will have to render 24bits framebuffers, without AA, or 16bits one with 2XMSAA and it will have to deal with the 1MB of texture cache...
Also even if the GPU is solid, the 3MB eDRAM, if no tiling technology is supported, will mean that the console will have to render 24bits framebuffers, without AA, or 16bits one with 2XMSAA and it will have to deal with the 1MB of texture cache...
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