Should Nintendo have made Rev with the new control + as much/more power than PS3/360?

[liolio]

May be my question is dumb...
But it be possible that as Devs tools matures, MS and Sony devs can put out Games that are optimized for both HD and SD resolution (especialy if when XNA come out is has good as MS claims). Something like a lot more AA really AF or two time the frame per second (likely 60 fps) for Narrow the gap in IQ.
What could be the bottleneck for games coherency (number of NPC, PArticles, etc...), and what kinds of workload stay the same no matter the resolution?
edit : I've some clue like AI,

 

[pc999]

Well I was thinking of the power that most people have, xbox1/ps2/average pc, I guess, and thinking of my first encounter with ThiefII last week which is a 6? year old game.

Why especially in the Rev case? Is the controller cpu intensive or do you have a certain usage in mind or something?

I was thinking specially in Rev case because it can be very intensive in some cases, for eg it should be the best control for physics but this is a very intensive task, it should also be very intensive in animation.

I used a simple eg that althought it is probably the one who would require less power it can make us see why it needs power, think in a tennis games it only makes sense such a game for Rev if you can really control the arm of the player and the ball, controling his arm will mean that you need:

1) a much better animation system or the guy will make some very strange things;

2) a physic system at least for for the ball, racket, floor so you can really "control/predict" the ball;

3) much better AI so it can act/react in a much more complex environment.

This is a very simple case here you would already need much more power, but think in a sword fightingh games, or a FPS with a lot of new physics (here you can easly pick a enemy a make him "dance in the air" to kill his friends) and movements, or a Serios Sam: Melle with real time controlled destruction of the enemys in parts, or use physics to build srtuctures (and it should be able to have such a control), it is very easy to think in new forms of gameplay that are only possible with the Rev control that easly require much more powerfull specs (I am not talking in 1.000.000 polys caracthers instead of of 10.000 ones, but things that are only possible with higher specs and that affect gamepaly).

Plus I do have some personal hopes for Rev (see my sig), than in fact I think it may happens.

Not if they want to follow their current strategy, which requires cheap hardware, no.

A "Moore´s Law like update" to the specs would easly buy them a (eg) X1600+ Edram to the gf card and a very upgraded 970FX CPU and keep it at under 99$ (current GC price) even with the controler and a few additions they should be able to sell it at 150$, at least I guess so.

 

[pc999]

and what kinds of workload stay the same no matter the resolution?

CPU work is very little affected by resolution, at least in must cases if it will be doing processural works, decompression it may affect more.

For the rest just think in what happens when you go from a HQ PC game to a LQ PC game (the same of curse) this is probably the kind of difference it is allowed betwen games to keep the same game play (and think also in the massive performance needed to play one or anouther).

 

[fearsomepirate]

a) DS is much cheaper to develop for than any console from PS2 to Xbox 360.

b) How are people talking about Revo's graphics without even seeing a screenshot? The only problem I'm really seeing is the 640x480 resolution (which will be a problem for me anyway, since I'm not buying a $600+ TV), which makes distance headshots hard. But this can be easily overcome by a limited zoom capability, much like Goldeneye and Timesplitters used.

c) The graphics of a console the company broke the bank on are great when it launches, pretty good a year later, okay two years later, and bad 3 years later. Talking about having the most powerful console is like bragging about owning the fastest moped in town. If all you like are pretty pictures, buy a pair of $600 gfx cards for your PC and play the same 2 games over and over as various new HDR patches come out. Don't even waste your time with consoles.

d) If you like PC FPS's, you'll probably hate dual thumbstick-controlled console FPS's, regardless of how many dot products it takes to produce the image on screen. As much as you guys talk about graphics chips, I'm betting most of you would still rather play your friends in Quake III or UT2K3 than Perfect Dark Zero.

e) I'm not buying a $400 console. Ever. And with Gamecube drying up, I don't want to wait 3 years to get a new one.

 

[pc999]

e) I'm not buying a $400 console. Ever. And with Gamecube drying up, I don't want to wait 3 years to get a new one.

Just what I feel.

 

[function]

A "Moore´s Law like update" to the specs would easly buy them a (eg) X1600+ Edram to the gf card and a very upgraded 970FX CPU and keep it at under 99$ (current GC price) even with the controler and a few additions they should be able to sell it at 150$, at least I guess so.

Not sure where you get those cost figures from, and I have none of my own (so I can't argue for or against them being accurate) but what's to say Nintendo don't want to make a profit on the Revolution hardware? The DS Lite has seen a price hike, so no reason to assume Nintendo don't like the idea of profitable hardware.

It would be interesting to see how a $150 Revolution performed compared to a $250 360.

 

[pc999]

A GC CPU does have 21M transistores and the GPU does have 50M both at 180nm, at 90nm you can have X4 the transistores at the same die size/price and a X1600 (not that I think it will be one, it is just to give you a idea) with 5Mgs of edram should be ~200M and a 970FX is 58M (26M less than the 84M possible, it even fits one more core, althought the cache may be to little?), so if you dont think in the rest of the things you do have an equal priced console, so chace the controller +flash+ wifi and you probably end up with a 150$, or at the max and with good proffit a 200$, console (personally I think it would be wiser to have the console priced as low as they can).

 

[function]

Excuse me for being ignorant on this matter, but does a new chip of a given size cost the same to have manufactured as a chip of the same size on a much older process? I assumed chip fabricators charged more for people to use their new, more advanced lines and that yields would be less favourable on the newer processes.

Also, do we know that the lisencing costs for the chip IPs are going to be the same as for the GC? Would more advanced chips cost more to lisence for use in Revolution?

To add a small point to this general discussion, I'd just like to say that even with 1/3 of the pixel shading power of the 360, you wouldn't get "360 but at SD resolution" graphics without giving it a comparable amount of memory. I understand that some textures may not need to be as high resolution for lower screen resolutions, but how much does this really affect memory requirements and how much does it apply to other things such as model detail, working memory etc

 

[fearsomepirate]

I don't think RAM is that incredibly huge of an issue when it comes to texture resolution. Your typical scene this gen didn't have more than a couple megabytes of compressed textures. Didn't Flipper have only 1MB of texture cache with 6x compression? If so, 6 megs effective of textures was plenty to make games like Metroid Prime 2 look quite competitive.

I think the big issue is with how big worlds can be. You might only need a few megs for a single scene, but if you don't have a really high data transfer rate from the mass storage, you're either going to have a world with very little variation or frequent loading or very controlled paths (a la Metroid Prime).

 

[pc999]

Excuse me for being ignorant on this matter, but does a new chip of a given size cost the same to have manufactured as a chip of the same size on a much older process? I assumed chip fabricators charged more for people to use their new, more advanced lines and that yields would be less favourable on the newer processes.

Meybe they charge more only at the begining, but I doubt as trying a new process is already a risck for the fabeless company, other wise we all still using 486 CPUs the goal of newer process is always getting cheaper or at equal price but with 2x the transitores (ence a better performer).

Also, do we know that the lisencing costs for the chip IPs are going to be the same as for the GC? Would more advanced chips cost more to lisence for use in Revolution?

Why would they, it is "only more modern" because it is made on a newer process.

If those things happens they would stop innovation and being a easy target for competitors.

 

[function]

Meybe they charge more only at the begining, but I doubt as trying a new process is already a risck for the fabeless company, other wise we all still using 486 CPUs the goal of newer process is always getting cheaper or at equal price but with 2x the transitores (ence a better performer).

So people like TSMC charge the same for using a brand new line that they've invested billions in and that can produce expensive, cutting edge chips as for using a five or six year old process that's paid for itself several times over? I was thinking that using smaller chips than were in the GC might be one way to save on manufacturing costs right from the off, and that just because the GC chips cost $XX to manufacture *now* doesn't mean that making a new system with the same size chips on a bang up to date process would cost the same.

Can anyone comment on this?

Why would they, it is "only more modern" because it is made on a newer process.

And because, presumeably, it's a more sophisticated chip. Wouldn't a more sophisticated chip cost more to lisence than a less sophisticated chip? Wouldn't Xenos cost more to lisence than, say, PowerVR MBX Lite?

I was wondering whether, if Nintendo wanted to spend less money making Revolution, they could lisence a less sophisticated chip (relatively) than they did for the GC. Wouldn't there be a greater premium attached to more powerful/sophisticated technology?

There seems to be less choice in the graphics chip market than 5 years ago; I wonder if it's becoming harder to get a good deal for console vendors..

 

[pc999]

At the begining meybe, but over time it will have the same price and older process disapear, but it cant be a big difference or it wouldnt make sense from a econominc POV but it makes and that is the reason why Nv and ATI ussualy puts their low end chips on newer process, anyway at the end of 2006 the 90nm process will have at least 1 year in both IBM and Nec. Plus ther is others way of getting a GPU relatevely cheap, like the use of Fast14.


Meybe you can get old and outdated chips at discunt but that dont mean that a modern 2006 chip will have a bigger licence cost than a modern (in) 2000 chip (althought a old 2000 chip may/probably be cheaper than a modern 2006 chips).