What if lower end hardware was targeted last generation? *spawn*
- Thread starter MrFox
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Bingo. And what would have being the biggest problem on this machine ? Meaning this machine wouldn't have being able to run some big games without a time consuming and specific port for this machine ?
Last gen the initial target resolutions were different, so the hardware resource ratios need to be different.
I don't think it would have had any issue if the following approach was taken:
- Develop for high end console at Resolution X
- Perform a second pass at specific low-end platform optimizations running at 25% of Resolution X
I think the best consideration for this gen would be a game that targets current-gen consoles, and how it runs on a PC at lower spec. If discussing the LH : XBSX ratio, something like 3 : 1 (speculative), that'd be something like a 0.5 GF GPU (split the difference on the console GPUs), similar level CPU. We can up-adjust those virtual PC specs to account for a little API+OS overhead too. The CPU would need a little guesswork.
So its a home console then. Which doesn't share the same feature set of either of the other consoles that generation. The wii u also released in 2012 which was a year before the one and ps4.
The wii u specs
CPU
8th Gen Octa Core 1.23 GHz IBM PowerPC
GPU
AMD Radeon @0.55 GHz
RAM
2GB DDR3
Storage
8GB, 32GB SDHC
I don't believe either the ps4 or xbox one were held back by it. its even more of a split than the rumors of whats going to happen this generation. You had a quad core cpu running at lower clocks than the octa-core jaguar in the xbox /ps4. It had a 4th of the ram and its gpu was extremely outdated. The current rumors for this gen list the same cpu with same core clocks and clock speeds. Same generation of GPU just with less CU and clock speeds. Ram is reduced but it may be 4-6 gigs les still giving more ram than previous geneartion.
Xbox one would target 1080p so a 4th of the resolution would be ??
1080p is 2,073,600
720p is 921,600 pixels
640p is 307,200 pixels
That could have driven some nice 720p titles. Would it have still had the esram. That would really make the games at 720p pop.
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you have other systems to factor into it also. There are two announced next gen systems one is 12tflop and one is 10tflop. But one has a variable performance. I would think if lockhart exists you would develop for that middle console if your targeting multiplatform. Scale up for the more powerful system and scale down for the low end system (lockhart)
It will be interesting to see what games look like when all the cards are on the table
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The Switch will be a baseline for next-gen in the same way the Wii was a baseline for PS360 multiplatforms.
I.e. it won't be.
As great it is that some 8th-gen games could handle massive scale downs to fit 2015 mobile hardware, nothing of substantial scale/volume was ever made for the Switch first and then scaled up.
Come next-gen, we'll be looking at >20x more powerful hardware. At some point you just can't make the same game anymore.
Games will come out for both XSX and switch. The switch user base keeps growing and we may even see the rumored switch plus which will just spur more sales at this point.
You missed the elephant in the room (like most of Internet folks). We are talking about 3GB of available ram instead of 5GB. Do you think reducing the resolution from 720p - 900p to something lower would have being enough for that 2GB of difference ? And some games do use all the memory available. I can't wait to know how they would have easily ported (with a XDK toggle) MHW on a 3GB machine (instead of 5GB), considering the game is already 900p on XB1.
That's possibly why such hardware wasn't created last-gen because the speed of the physical storage. If it had an SSD to be able to fill that memory, then it might not matter, as I already indicated.
That is to say I don't think it's appropriate to compare the two situations one bit because of situational differences (Speed of Storage and Resolution differences between 4K and 1080p/1296p). That is why I said the hardware resource ratios need to be adjusted for a theoretical lower-end console.
So no, I did not ignore the elephant. I addressed it. You didn't even bother to read what was written (like most of internet folks).
Because of those differences, the results of one situation has no impact on the other. So this topic is entirely academic at best.
D
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The Wii sold over 100 million, that's 20 million more than either the PS3 or X360. It didn't get a GTA or Red Dead Redemption, an Assassin's Creed, Elder Scrolls Skyrim or Oblivion, Batman Arkham, Final Fantasy 13, Metal Gear Solid 4, or Dragon Age or Mass Effect. None of the games that defined the 7th generation of consoles in technical feats.There was FIFA using the old PS2 engine and a CoD: Black Ops that is barely recognizable as such.
It's not reasonable to expect the Switch to dictate the technical baseline for the next gen consoles, considering it's not even dictating the baseline for the current gen. The Switch could sell 200 million consoles and it still wouldn't dictate how Cyberpunk 2077, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, GTA 6, Starfield, Project Athia, etc. get made.
Besides, Nintendo consoles are still mostly self-serving to Nintendo as a software publisher.
Except the switch is seeing high profile ports , bethesda/ id are big believers in it , outer worlds was ported as a big rpg this year. They were still managing to port new high end games to the switch despite the vast differences in hardware
But speed of storage is also available on the big machine. It would work only if it was only available on the small box, not the big one. And we are not talking PS5 SSD speed here. They won't be able to load the next 1sec game data or the data just behind the camera.
VRAM capacity has to be taken into account in such a price comparison. The GPU's you refer to were 1GB or 2GB parts, one eighth to one quarter the total memory size available on the consoles of the day. In the XBO comparison the memory bandwidth was also much lower on the $99 PC card so it wasn't directly comparable.
Granted a 10TF GPU on the market when the next gen launches won't be anything like $99, but it will very likely sport at least 6-8GB VRAM.
There's no doubt that the next gen fairs much better on the general GPU performance front though. Tahiti launched almost 2 years before the PS4 with a very similar feature set and more than double the FLOPS! That's like us having a 25 TFLOP RDNA2 based GPU from AMD 18 months ago!
The CPU comparison is an interesting one. The new consoles will certainly be more performant than a higher percentage of the PC market than they were last generation. But the current CPU market on the PC see's a much higher differential between mainstream and enthusiast than it did in 2013. So someone with say a 16 core Zen 3 based 4950X or Intel Rocketlake equivalent might be further ahead of the new consoles this generation than they could have been last generation at the same point. But very very few PC gamers will have anything like that level of performance compared with most being within 20% of the absolute highest end back in 2013.
I/O wise there's no question, this generation fairs much better than the last.
Memory capacity there's also no question, but in the opposite direction with high end GPU's this generation sporting 1/2-3/4 (at least) the total memory capacity of the new consoles compared with 1/4-3/8 last generation.
