DCK

Well, since the Broadway info and the Metroid Prime screens news were fake I think this site is just posting BS. Also, there's not much use in putting the Radeon X1600XT chip in if they only use an 1 GHz CPU and if they only have so limited space. I don't think it's really suited either, the X1600 is not really a gaming chip and has fairly few texture units and low bandwidth to be a perfect choice for a game console. I'm thinking we're getting a GPU heavily based on the GameCube Flipper rather than a pure Radeon.

Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES games will own so much on the remote) That and Super Smash Bros. Rev will keep me entertained for quite a while

Yeah, the Revolution hardware will be very, very similar to the Cube's. It seems as though every component of the Revolution is its Cube component at 2-3x the speed. The Revolution could then just boot in Cube mode. 360 emulation works differently because it has to emulate the x86 processor in the Xbox on the 360's PowerPC processor, and also translate graphics operations and such. The Xbox is pretty much totally incompatible with the Xbox 360

That's the reason why these specs make people worry. It's not at all as if the graphics will suck or that Nintendois t3h doomed. But it's very likely the Revolution won't be able to run games such as Resident Evil 5 properly. If you believe the 'souped up Xbox' comment it can run the Doom 3 engine and the Half-Life 2 engine nicely but it ends there. It will be very difficult for developers to port games that they have developed for the extremely powerful 360 and PS3 and scale them down to fit them in the limited capacity the Revolution gives them. As a result we might see less third party games or see that those games look quite different from what they are on the other consoles.

I doubt they're going to superpower the Flipper design all that much because they haven't got very much space to work on (88 MB 1T-SRAM), but yeah, the Rev GPU should be more powerful than a double Flipper.

Broadway should do pretty well, especially if it's a dual-core 1+ GHz IBM Gekko - I'm worried about the GPU. The Xbox 360 uses the Radeon X1800XT, and the PlayStation 3 will use a GeForce 7800GTX, the highest end graphics chips there are today. If they double the Flipper like the rumours say it will be like the Radeon 9700 which was released in 2002, it'll be much weaker. Trust me on this one though - the Revolution will use hardware that resembles the GameCube exactly, only produced more cheaply. This means that a €99 price point is very possible.

OK, so IGN has released more info and we can draw up the specs to be the exact same as the Cube though as though it had an overclock round. CPU - IBM Gekko based @ 1 GHz with about 1 MB L2 cache | Cube had Gekko 485MHz GPU - Probably a Flipper 2 at about 300 MHz (Cube = 162 MHz) with the same memory as the Cube RAM - 88 MB 1T-SRAM, 16 MB ARAM (Cube = 24 SRAM) Man, this means that media size (1.5 GB -> 8.5 GB) is the biggest improve they're doing. The architecture seems to be the exact same as the GameCube, just faster. I'm so dissappointed that they couldn't make the step bigger. This is really all Cube hardware, just fired up a bit. It can nowhere hope to compete graphics wise - if we see 50% extra graphics performance over the Cube that's all we're going to get. This means no Resident Evil 5 (or any game other rumoured to be heading Rev) for the Revolution - it would be almost like porting Resident Evil 4 to the N64. The good news is that they can't possibly ask more than $150 for it, perhaps launching it at $99 is possible. Heh, I was hoping for a Rev Linux someday, but this means that it can't even run KDE properly

Do you know that all next-gens are running PowerPCs?

Well, all reactions like 'weak doesn't mean anything' and 2-3x powerful is pretty 1337 just seem sad to me. Everything is far from lost, we know that.

The point is I hate it when Nintendo isn't taken seriously, when they are not considered one of the big boys. They goddamn made the industry - and now they're back to making 'toys' again. That's why I'm so frustrated by this news. I want Nintendo to fight a console war.

Will you please stop calling it faith? That brings up wrong associations. I'm not worried about 2-3 times more powerful. It's been said many times and it doesn't mean sh*t. What I am worried about is the 'souped up Xbox' comment and the comment that it only has <128MB memory. This means that effectively it can't be considered next-gen but this gen because of its power. You don't understand quite what's happening - it's like the GameCube fighting up against the 360 and PS3 but now with a fantastic controller which every Nintendo fan or Japanese loves but you don't know how conservative US or EU will take. What worries me that any way you put it, there'll be no more direct competition between Sony Microsoft and Nintendo. It'll just be Sony and Microsoft fighting over the powerhouse multimedia device with HD capabilities market, and Nintendo having a cheap, small, quiet toy. This is all very black and white but this is what this news means to me. The GameCube wasn't even taken half seriously, and now this...

Nintendo doesn't know where to put their priorities it seems. Putting in 256MB of 533 MHz laptop RAM should cost them about $10-15 per console at launch, while they do put in 512 MB Flash ROM which costs about $20. It seems so strange to me People wake up here. Any PC you'll buy new today, any at all, will be more powerful than the Revolution. In comparison, you have to spend €1500 to outmatch the 360 in a PC. And it'll only be released next year. You're overestimating things here (so was I), but an any rate it won't possibly be able to compete graphics wise at all, and that's just so damn frustrating. I mean come on, the gap between launches Cube <> Rev is five years and they only double the power? That's just unbelievable.

Yeah, there's NDA violation here if true, but then again I seriously doubt IGN would give us a story of complete BS - especially considering they don't say exactly who told em. To be honest, I'm believing this almost 100%...

Oh, I realise pretty well what 2-3 times means. Look, the Xbox 360 is theoretically about 20 times more powerful than the Xbox, and due to it's efficiency problems it may be only 10-12x more powerful than the Xbox. Now look at the visual improvement. It's clearly visible, but it's not big is it? The power gap between Cube and Rev is four times smaller than that - in visuals it's not an improvement at all and I wonder if we could even see it. RAM amounts matter so much more than you say. There's a reason why modern gaming graphics cards have a minimum of 128 MB - and still need the PC's main memory - you know. Yeah, the latency and speed will matter but I'm not worried for that considering Nintendo's partnership with MoSys so they can use 1T-SRAM. Apparently you don't get the difference - the 360 and PS3 will have 4+ times as much RAM. 4 times! If developers want to port games they'd have to shrink down the texture resolution by four, but that doesn't matter, because the GPU can't take those resolutions anyway, and neither can it take the polygon count. This is getting worrying - the controller is just fantastic, but if the graphics on other consoles are so much better, what will happen to the mass, and what will happen to 3rd party plans? - Edit Before I make a wrong impression - it doesn't matter much to me that it's just plain weak. It's just worrying how Nintendo seem to be so far behind te competition it gets me upset sometimes

2 - 3x more powerful sucks. It's not two-three times Resi 4 - it's Resi 4 at 60 fps with a tad more anti-aliasing. 96 MB RAM sucks badly, very badly - Nintendo need at least 256 MB RAM to give developers a proper amount to scale their games on - high res textures (the only real visible improvement we're getting next-gen) are barely possible this way. I don't understand how Iwata can make a statement such as 'you won't see the difference' if this is true. Oh and the Metroid picture is so obviously fake, don't bother using that as proof. Positive about this is that it might cost so little (I'm talking current DS pricepoint here) that the graphics hungered people among us have enough money to spare for a 360. Yay.

That's just amazing how low power consumption that is. Even the Pentium M sucks up a good 25 watt. Hell, they could use it for the Game Boy 3 almost Anyway, considering this technology is so new, it probably won't be in the Revolution. It would be very, very perfect though.

Hehe that must be it Tiz

If they use 12 GB discs it would be a bit more than the standard 9 GB DVD-9 like in the Xbox 360, so that's pretty good. I wonder how Nick got this information though.

I don't think Valve would be a studio with priority to see the Revolution considering their lack of support for Nintendo since they exist. It's a shame though, because Valve mentioned back in 2004 that it was interested in porting Half-Life 2 to the next-gen consoles. Nintendo should present the Revolution well to Epic as well, the Unreal Engine 3 is very important.

You don't know half what Photoshop can do and can't. The lighting isn't that good - it's just standard lighting enhanced by some photoshop operations and the textures just aren't that crisp and alive enough to be convincing. I like the morph ball design though. It's a tunnel so it's full potential wouldn't be shown anyway, so the discussion won't get us anywhere. I think when taking a look at the second screen shot we can say that they aren't real.

Oh come on that water is so over the top. This one does look technologically much better than MP2 though, still it looks too plastic to me, not Retro (or professional) at all.

I still think the idea of VR as the future of gaming is too old and too naive. Look at Nintendo now, they simplified the controller design to attract new gamers, but they wouldn't throw that all away by requiring goggles for playing games? I'll tell you this: virtual reality is way too expensive and way too impractical to ever become succesful for a game console.

Don't you go attacking my knowledge of graphics. Remember that this is Metroid Prime 2: Look again. Except for the extra filters Photoshop adds to it, that is nothing the Metroid Prime engine or the Cube can't handle. This isn't next gen. It's fake anyway. How come the lights on the left and the morph ball trace look super sharp and that they have been anti-aliased for 32 times, while the ones on the right (underneath the wire) show rough pixels?

That's right, but Cassamina is talking about a big difference, and he's about the only one saying that - he's making it sound worse than it'll end up like. The reason the Xbox 360 costs so much is because they launched it six months too early and the PS3 costs so much because of the Cell chip, which is an excellent server chip but isn't a very good games processor. Anyway on-topic again: I'm sure the artists they sre asking for are there to help upgrading the version they made on Cube devkits to a proper Rev game. The actual programming should be 95% done about now, the graphics just need to be done well.

Considering the Xbox is actually quite a bit more powerful than the PS2 I expect the PS2 <> Xbox gap bigger than Rev <> PS3, simply because it seems you can build a system a bit less powerful for a lot less money and component space, especially considering the half year+ gap. If they do use an ATI Mobility Radeon GPU (one in the R500 series), it should be able to make at least 70% performance of the Xbox 360 GPU.