2-3 times more powerful than Gamecube, now basically confirmed

[Myke Greywolf]

I am not saying Revolution is a bad console or anything - I want one myself but concerning profit it is not the best idea to heavily rely on your own games because on the GC I did not see sooo many Nintendo games which could compete against Halo, GTA, Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy, ...

 

Well, if you don't think Zelda, Mario, Smash Bros., F-Zero et al can "compete" against those games (whatever "compete" means in your context), why do you want a Revolution anyway?

 

"Competing" is not Nintendo's game. "Competing", in the current generation, resulted in:

 

- Several publishing houses and developers going under.

- Only a handful of games a year get to make a profit.

- Licences and sequels galore.

- Only a limited amount of genres get any attention.

- Game development budgets go towards making shiny graphics instead of improving playability and AI.

- ...

 

Are you sure that this is the "competition" Nintendo should get into?

[system_error]

By "compete" I mean that Nintendo makes money with:

 

 

1. Their own games (Smash Brothers is still their best selling game this generation)

 

and

 

2. Get a faire share of the third party game cash

 

 

And to achieve point 2 Nintendo needs third party games ported to the Revolution in a way they don't feel inferior to the 360 or PS3 version. That either means use of the controller or same graphics on standard TV. Do you remember the ports this generation? Why do most of them sell like non alcoholic beer? Because they are not as good as their counterparts. The GC versions of many games have frame rate issues, lack features even though the PS2 version with less powerfull hardware can pull it off nice.

 

I just want that Nintendo makes enough money to make a new console in 5 years thats all...

[Dilli Gee]

If those are the specs of a cell CPU they're rubbish. Who cares about multicore cpus etc when it's got a frankly laughable 512kb of L2 cache shared between all of them.

Each sub-processor has a '128b 128 SIMD GPR' and a '256KB SRAM for SPE', as well as the central cache.

 

Anyway, Darv, it's still more than Nintendo's supposed "GameCube + 64KB".

[Dilli Gee]

"Competing" is not Nintendo's game. "Competing", in the current generation, resulted in:

 

- Several publishing houses and developers going under.

- Only a handful of games a year get to make a profit.

- Licences and sequels galore.

- Only a limited amount of genres get any attention.

- Game development budgets go towards making shiny graphics instead of improving playability and AI.

Who cares? There are still many game companies left, and many who make quality games.

 

Nintendo lost its main second party developer (Rare), lost is Factor 5 developers, lost its 5-game contractual partnership with Capcom, lost a huge potential audience, all because it wasn't competitive.

 

They didn't want to push the barrier of online gaming, they didn't want GTA on their system (they refused to licence the game), they didn't believe in DVDs. And although Nintendo may have "won because they had the most profits", they lost because they have the smallest audience.

I think as a second system, Revolution is fine. But still, not many people are going to buy it as a second console, as only a small handful get second systems. I personally, taking all this IGN info is true, will probably get a Revolution once Zelda comes out, or when it's really cheap-and-cheerful.

[Innovance]

By "compete" I mean that Nintendo makes money with:

 

 

1. Their own games (Smash Brothers is still their best selling game this generation)

 

and

 

2. Get a faire share of the third party game cash

 

 

And to achieve point 2 Nintendo needs third party games ported to the Revolution in a way they don't feel inferior to the 360 or PS3 version. That either means use of the controller or same graphics on standard TV. Do you remember the ports this generation? Why do most of them sell like non alcoholic beer? Because they are not as good as their counterparts. The GC versions of many games have frame rate issues, lack features even though the PS2 version with less powerfull hardware can pull it off nice.

 

I just want that Nintendo makes enough money to make a new console in 5 years thats all...

 

 

Let me just say with your very post you've pointed out the real issue with ports. Its nothing to do with the system capabiliteis its all in how much effort the developers puts in. Frankly given how much alike rev and GC are i dont think there should be any problems with ports where the developer puts in the effort. And we might end up being better off if porting the game means they have to start from scratch.

 

If the argument being made for difficult ports on rev were really true, then we wouldnt have seen as many ports last generation and we wont see many ports next generation either.

 

Porting games from PS3/360 to the other wont be easy either or cheap (for good ports anyway), even if they are closer in power

[Hellfire]

This is really a matter of choice. Nintendo chose to make an affordable console that more people can buy, with cheaper games (possibly) and probably a wider range of them. They could have gone for more power. Would it make a difference? We've seen it with GC and N64, this does not translate success. If we saw GC do what XBOX could or more, we can see great looking games with Revolution, compared to PS3 and 360 games without HD. People who own HDTVs might see a big difference though. Still, this was to be expected, but everyone just kept hoping for a miracle to happen when everything pointed for Revolution to be weaker. Don't forget none of this is official, but I expect the final machine to be just a little more powerful than this.

Just show us some games.

[pedrocasilva]

Each sub-processor has a '128b 128 SIMD GPR' and a '256KB SRAM for SPE', as well as the central cache.

 

Anyway, Darv, it's still more than Nintendo's supposed "GameCube + 64KB".

didn I tell you this?

 

No, the cell processor is a new chip designed by Sony/Toshiba/IBM and is a microprocessor that consists of a:

 

PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz

1 VMX vector unit per core

512KB L2 cache

7 x SPE @3.2GHz

7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs

7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE

* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy

total floating point performance : 218

GFLOPS

 

Therefore it's not a PowerPC, but rather contains one, connected to eight more special-purpose DSP cores.

 

PC Stats (http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1727) concludes that the new Cell-processor could potentially "excel at the kind of applications we buy high-end PCs for today: graphics, video, audio and games".

still that's not a argument, did you knew CELL doesn't even have cache coherency in the SPE's? those 256KB of them for each SPE simply don't exist, it's virtual cache, it's coherency has to be done by software, try that on a PC, it's desastrous for performance, we all here know more about that matter than you, clearly.

I'd rather have 64 KB of real cache than having to check for it's coherency, also I'd even rather have 64 KB of cache on the SPE's, yes more limited, but the PowerPC core would be free for other tasks other than checking the integrity of the data... it's what I said yesterday, either you don't read what we write or you simply don't wanna know.

 

you can't compare numbers direcly, everyone knows that, how do you compare a PowerPC G5 2,5 GHz versus a Pentium 4 3,8 GHz or even to a AMD 64 2, 8 GHz? it's simply not comparable direcly...

 

I can do more with the same physical amount of memory if the memory is faster or features no Handycaps for example, and no coherency is a very big handycap, if you don't check for that you can get corrupted data, and if it comes corrupted you have a penalty of a few cycles, it would be disastrous on a home computer performance.

Who cares? There are still many game companies left, and many who make quality games.

 

Nintendo lost its main second party developer (Rare), lost is Factor 5 developers, lost its 5-game contractual partnership with Capcom, lost a huge potential audience, all because it wasn't competitive.

 

They didn't want to push the barrier of online gaming, they didn't want GTA on their system (they refused to licence the game), they didn't believe in DVDs. And although Nintendo may have "won because they had the most profits", they lost because they have the smallest audience.

I think as a second system, Revolution is fine. But still, not many people are going to buy it as a second console, as only a small handful get second systems. I personally, taking all this IGN info is true, will probably get a Revolution once Zelda comes out, or when it's really cheap-and-cheerful.

who said nintendo lost Factor 5? they never owned Factor 5 in the first place, what if I tell you they also developeed the SPU for revolution, and may have one or two exclusives coming?

 

online is starting this gen, sony is going along with it as is nintendo, xbox was just to early and paid, I'm not willing to pay for that kind of service for example, and silver pack is still ridiculous, I paid for the game, I deserve online 24/7, for free.

 

most people don't even know how to tell the diference between PS2 and Xbox, let alone Xbox to Xbox 360, graphics alone are not that important anymore, proof of that is that last gen everyone was talking about "look rogue squadron 2 pushes 15 million poligons at 60 frames" now we look at X360 games and most of them run at 30 frames and there's no information whatsoever about the poligons on-screen.

 

what game is more next gen? I don't know, but maybe a game running at 60 frames is far more fluid.

[Shino]

Let's see, the gamecube already has very good graphics, doubling that might be enough, add the controller, the wifi and 20 years of great games just for 99$, I think it will sell quite well. And about the ports, who really needs them? Most people who buys nintendo consoles, buys mostly nintendo games. And you never know, maybe third party devolopers will make they're games for the revo first, then port it to the other consoles, that way they won't spend much money developing Hi defenetion game, but it will still look nice.

[Hellfire]

I don't think it's hard to port games for underpowered consoles. Tone down the textures due to the lack of HD and some other technichal mumbo jumbo and that's it. That didn't sound very convincing eh eh. With the rumored size of the DVDs there would be no space problems like with GC and that was a major reason for not porting some games.

[pedrocasilva]

Let's see, the gamecube already has very good graphics, doubling that might be enough, add the controller, the wifi and 20 years of great games just for 99$, I think it will sell quite well. And about the ports, who really needs them? Most people who buys nintendo consoles, buys mostly nintendo games. And you never know, maybe third party devolopers will make they're games for the revo first, then port it to the other consoles, that way they won't spend much money developing Hi defenetion game, but it will still look nice.

don't sort out the third party ports, and support for exclusives, the console is not that weak, right now xbox 360 has lots of ports of third party games existing in this generation, if revolution is 3-4 times more powerful than GC it's already 6-8 times more powerfull than xbox1, don't tell me it can't reproduce what Xbox 360 is doing in third party games, specially at 480p...

 

here is a graphics comparation:

-> http://www.gamespot.com/features/6140621/index.html

(of the ports between Xbox and Xbox 360)

[Dilli Gee]

who said nintendo lost Factor 5? they never owned Factor 5 in the first place, what if I tell you they also developeed the SPU for revolution, and may have one or two exclusives coming?

While they never owned them, Factor 5 was a second party in that they had a sound partnership with Nintendo, and through their dealings they only released games with Nintendo.

 

However, now Factor 5 have gone to Sony, with talks of being exclusive to the PS3 system. Which is a shame, cos' Rogue Squadron was excellent.

 

online is starting this gen, sony is going along with it as is nintendo, xbox was just to early and paid, I'm not willing to pay for that kind of service for example, and silver pack is still ridiculous, I paid for the game, I deserve online 24/7, for free.

Well, that's what you think you "deserve". It costs a hell of a lot for the game companies to set up servers, and even if you think Nintendo aren't charging for their online service, you're forgetting that they'll just charge a lot for the retro downloads.

 

Xbox Live is the reason why Nintendo "lost" against the Xbox - if Nintendo had gone online, more game companies would have released titles on GameCube, and more people would have bought a Gamecube. Xbox Live was a success.

 

graphics alone are not that important anymore

While you are right in an ideal world, that's not how the average EA Sports targeted gamer is going to think - it's what system has the most power, regardless of price.

 

I mean, if I really wanted a PS3, but didn't have £300 to buy it, I wouldn't then spend my money on getting a Revolution. I'd get the next powerful one (Xbox 360) or i'd save my money until a price cut on PS3 or until I have the money.

[pedrocasilva]

Well if we may believe IGN, than this are the current specs

CPU around 970 Mhz

and the GPU 324 Mhz

and 104 MB-Ram

 

Compared:

XBOX:

Intel Pentium 3 733MHZ

GPU 233MHZ

64Mb-ram.

 

Game cube

CPU: 485mhz

GPU 162mhz

32Mb-Ram

Here you have a real Xbox to GCN comparation, not just stupid numbers, besides your numbers are wrong GCN doesn't have 32 MB of RAM.

Gamecube can store lots of textures in it's memory using S3TC's texture compression format. Note that another benefit of using compressed textures is that the bandwidth requirements also decrease by the same ratio as the actual compression. i suspect thats what you were telling me...and i agreed, but....

 

At a ratio of 6:1, the memory bus can pass 6 times more textures. That means the GPU's texture cache bus of 10.4 GB/sec can pass 62.4 GB/s of 24-bit compressed textures, and the external bus of 2.6 GB/sec can pass 15.6 GB/s of 24-bit compressed textures, now....the Xbox cache doesnt have texture cache compression???, if so then that can make a huge difference in the comparison as with a 6:1 compression ratio, the cache can hold 6 times more data! 6 MB of data for the GC compared to 256 KB for the Xbox is a huge difference.

 

heres some calculations...

 

Effective Texturing Bandwidth - GigaBytes/sec

Calculations for Effective Texture Bandwidth:

Maximum Main Memory Bandwidth

 

Xbox has 64 MB of 200 MHz DDR SDRAM with 128-bit access.

GC has 43 MB of 324 MHz 1T-SRAM with 64-bit access.

 

Xbox: 6.4 GB/sec of main memory bandwidth

GC: 2.6 GB/sec of main memory bandwidth

 

CPU Bandwidth

Assumption is 1 GB/sec for either console, which is plenty of bandwidth to sustain either CPU.

Xbox: 6.4 GB/sec - 1 GB/sec = 5.4 GB/sec of main memory bandwidth

GC: 2.6 GB/sec - 1 GB/sec = 1.6 GB/sec of main memory bandwidth

 

Memory Efficiency

There is no question that GC's main memory of 1T-SRAM is much more efficient than the Xbox's DDR SDRAM, as the latency of GC's 1T-SRAM is 5 ns, and the average latency of 200 MHz DDR SDRAM is estimated to be around 30 ns.

Memory efficiency is largely driven by data streaming. What that means is that developers can do optimizations to their data accesses so that they are more linear and thus suffer from less latency. Latency is highest on the first page fetch, and less on subsequent linear accesses. It's random accesses that drives memory efficiency down, as more latency is introduced in all the new page fetches.

 

It has been brought up that DDR SDRAM is only 65 percent effective, and it is only 65 percent effective when comparing a SDRAM based GeForce2 graphics card with a DDR based GeForce2 graphics card. The Xbox's main memory efficiency should be around 75 percent effective if one considers that the Geforce3 has a much better memory controller than what is on the Geforce2 chipsets. The GC's 1T-SRAM main memory is speculated to be 90 percent effective. A significant difference between the two memories!

 

Xbox: 5.4 GB/sec x 0.75 = 4.05 GB/sec of main memory bandwidth

GC: 1.6 GB/sec x 0.90 = 1.44 GB/sec of main memory bandwidth

 

Michael Abrash, who is part of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group at Microsoft has also indicated that Xbox's memory efficiency to be 75 percent effective.

 

Frame Buffer and Z-Buffer Accesses

The GC has a 2 MB on-chip frame (draw) buffer and z-buffer, so reads and writes to that on-chip memory buffer does not effect the main memory bandwidth. The GC still has to send the frame buffer to memory for display each frame. The Xbox stores it's frame buffer and z-buffer in main memory, and it supports z-buffer compression at a 4:1 ratio, so a 32-bit z-buffer value is only 8-bits in size when compressed. The decompression and compression of z-buffer data, to and from memory, is handled automatically by the Xbox GPU.

 

Xbox: 640 x 480 (resolution) x 5 (frame buffer write (24-bits) + z-buffer read (1 byte) + z-buffer write (1 byte)) x 3 (overdraw) x 60 FPS = ~277 MB/sec or 0.277 GB/sec. So 4.05 GB/sec - 0.277 GB/sec = 3.77 GB/sec of main memory bandwidth

 

GC: Only has to write out frame buffer each frame and at 60 FPS is roughly 55 MB/sec or 0.055 GB/sec. So 1.44 GB/sec - 0.055 GB/sec = 1.39 GB/sec of main memory bandwidth

 

Sound

Sound accesses on the Xbox should be no more than 2 MB/sec or 0.002 GB/sec for a typical game supporting 8 channels (stereo) 16-bits at 48 KHz. To small to even consider as part of the calculations. On GC sound access is to A-Memory, which has no effect on it's 1T-SRAM main memory.

 

Polygons

Let's assume a typical game would have a rendering rate of 10 million polygons per second. 10 mpps x 40 bytes (vertex and lighting data) = 400 MB/sec, and we will assume 250 MB/sec if some of the vertex data is represented as bytes (8-bit value) or shorts (16-bit value). This is a form of vertex compression that both the Xbox and GC support.

 

Xbox: 3.23 GB/sec - 0.25 GB/sec = 3.52 GB/sec of main memory bandwidth

GC: 1.39 GB/sec - 0.25 GB/sec = 1.14 GB/sec of main memory bandwidth

 

Explanation: The polygon calculation assumes 40 bytes per polygon (vertex and lighting data). Vertex data is represented by a 32-bit floating point number. Both the Xbox and the GC allows that data to be stored as either a byte (8-bit integer value) or short (16-bit integer value).

That kind of compression involves loss of accuracy information, so bytes would be used for objects that can tolerate 8-bit accuracy, and shorts would be used for objects that can tolerate 16-bit accuracy. Some vertices like the game world environment would not use compression but keep it values at 32-bits, as the greater accuracy is needed for better precision.

 

I assume that developers would compress some of the vertex data as bytes and shorts, so the 400 MB/sec would be an estimated 250 MB/sec for a typical game doing 10 mpps.

 

Texture Cache

The on-chip texture cache on the Xbox GPU is 256 KB. The bandwidth of this cache is as follows:

Xbox: 8 texel/clock (4 pipelines with two texel units a pipeline) x 4 Bytes (32-bit texel) x 4 (bilinear) x 233 Mhz = ~59 Gbyte/s

 

The on-chip texture cache on the GC "Flipper" GPU is 1 MB in size, and it's bandwidth is 10.4 GB/sec. Using the above calculation:

GC: 4 texel/clock (4 pipelines with one texel units a pipeline) x 42 Bytes (32-bit texel) x 4 (bilinear) x 162 Mhz = 10.368 Gbyte/s

 

As you can see the result which is the same as the GC quoted spec lends support to the above Xbox cache bandwidth calculation being correct. Maybe this calculation will suffice if we consider how effective the texture caches are with 12 MB of textures, and using pro-rated averages:

 

Xbox: (0.256/12 x 30 GB/sec) + (11.972/12 x 2.98 GB/sec) = ~3.6 GB/sec

GC: (1/12 x 10.4 GB/sec) + (11/12 x 1.14 GB/sec) = ~1.9 GB/sec

 

Another thing to consider which is very important, is how efficient is the texture caches at reloading new data from main memory.

 

Xbox: 32 GB/sec / 4.05 GB/sec = 7.9 times difference

GC: 10.4 GB/sec / 1.44 GB/sec = 7.2 times difference

 

Above we divided the cache bandwidth with the total effective memory bandwidth (minus CPU bandwidth only) to give us the ratio difference. GC has a slight advantage, since the ratio difference is not as great.

Xbox is better able to keep it's texel units fed with data simply because it can feed 4.05 GB/sec of data compared to GC's 1.44 GB/sec.

 

What is known:

GC cache is 4 times larger than the Xbox's 256 KB.

Xbox can feed it's cache with 2.5 times greater data per second than the GC.

 

now it all comes down to this, if xbox doesnt support data compression in texture cache, then simply GC is better.....

 

GC: 1.44*6= 8.64 GB/s

Xbox: 4.05*1= 4.05 GB/s

 

and.....

 

texture bandwidth

 

GC: 10.4 GB/s*6= 62.4 GB/s

Xbox: 30 GB/s*1= 30 GB/s

Source: http://forums.g4tv.com/messageview.cfm?catid=8&threadid=54975&FTVAR_MSGDBTABLE=arc&STARTPAGE=173

 

get your numbers right before comparing them, also the numbers are not direcly comparable, the architectures are diferent and both Sony with PS2 (specs not posted) and microsoft with Xbox lied about specs how can a extra shader in a geforce 3 make the chip output, like 50 million poligons more? impossible , yes sony and microsoft will always have higher specs in paper, even if they tell the truth, but in realtime it may not be so.

 

the coment about "Revolution is a souped up Xbox" still makes me laugh, for god's sake.

[Dilli Gee]

if revolution is 3-4 times more powerful than GC it's already 6-8 times more powerfull than xbox1

How's that? Xbox has more power the GC.

[monkeyDluffy]

well broadway is finished but, is it in dev kits yet? hollywood isn't finished yet so graphics processing wise they have no idea yet, plus its not just about the CPU/GPU power, its also about bus speeds etc, if nintendo can improve bus speeds then this will have a great effect on performance etc. My point is that theirs alot more that goes into making a console/PC etc work fast than just the CPU/GPU speeds, so wait and see the final machine to get a true idea of its capabilities.

 

Edit: At double the gamecube, it should have enough power to run the unreal or doom engines and thats good enough for me!

[pedrocasilva]

While they never owned them, Factor 5 was a second party in that they had a sound partnership with Nintendo, and through their dealings they only released games with Nintendo.

 

However, now Factor 5 have gone to Sony, with talks of being exclusive to the PS3 system. Which is a shame, cos' Rogue Squadron was excellent.

They have exclusives for Sony, doesn't mean they can only develop for Sony.

Well, that's what you think you "deserve". It costs a hell of a lot for the game companies to set up servers, and even if you think Nintendo aren't charging for their online service, you're forgetting that they'll just charge a lot for the retro downloads.

 

Xbox Live is the reason why Nintendo "lost" against the Xbox - if Nintendo had gone online, more game companies would have released titles on GameCube, and more people would have bought a Gamecube. Xbox Live was a success.

boohoo, Microsoft are so poor they can't even offer people a good, free online service when they loose $126 per console sold.

 

Also there are online games on the PC who cost nothing to go online and you have xbox games, like PSO 1+2 where you pay XBOX Live AND the game mensality...

 

about the retro-games... we don't know how much they'll charge but it seems like a "iTunes" service, very cheap probably, i'd rather pay nothing though.

 

While you are right in an ideal world, that's not how the average EA Sports targeted gamer is going to think - it's what system has the most power, regardless of price.

 

I mean, if I really wanted a PS3, but didn't have £300 to buy it, I wouldn't then spend my money on getting a Revolution. I'd get the next powerful one (Xbox 360) or i'd save my money until a price cut on PS3 or until I have the money.

maybe because the other two promise the very same thing when revolution goes into a diferent path, if you have to buy two of them why not buy something diferent and cheaper?

 

Parents in christmas look ALOT at the prices you know... if it has the same games, or even, good exclusives in it, it can be a serious contender.

 

EA sports graphics are really the best graphics in the world... the diference between a fifa 2007 on Rev and PS3 will be less than fifa 2006 on PS2 and PC, if they port it well.

 

as for "Oh my good it's so weak"... this next-gen... it's more about pipelines, for applying bump mapping, textures, and about fill rate power for lightning effects than poly counts or CPU, infact... Xbox 360 and PS3 are quite bad at physics and AI, X360 being the worse and the only one anounced who won't not support liquid tissue physics, even if revolution joins that leage it's not that far away. hope for a PPU anyway, and more memory, or dedicated RAM for GPU and PPu if there is one.

 

How's that? Xbox has more power the GC.

now it all comes down to this, if xbox doesnt support data compression in texture cache, then simply GC is better.....

 

GC: 1.44*6= 8.64 GB/s

Xbox: 4.05*1= 4.05 GB/s

 

and.....

 

texture bandwidth

 

GC: 10.4 GB/s*6= 62.4 GB/s

Xbox: 30 GB/s*1= 30 GB/s

did you even read the damn thing? Gamecube is overall more powerful than a Xbox; full stop.

[Shino]

He just doesn't care...

[robertknight]

if revolution is 3-4 times more powerful than GC it's already 6-8 times more powerfull than xbox1,

 

It seems ridiculous to argue about performance. Nintendo said from the outset that the Revolution wouldn't compete with other next-gen consoles in terms of performance, and they meant it.

 

If you want a visual fiesta then buy a PS3 or an XBOX 360 and plug it into an HDTV, you are probably not Nintendo's target market.

[robertknight]

did you even read the damn thing? Gamecube is overall more powerful than a Xbox; full stop.

 

I don't know where the flaw is in your reasoning, but what I will say is that the proof is in the eating. IGN head-to-head comparisons make for pretty consistant reading - with the XBOX version looking best and running the most smoothly, followed by the GC and then the PS2.

 

Personally that doesn't bother me - I brought a GC because I like Nintendo's own titles (Mario Sunshine, Smash Bros, Zelda TWW, Mario Kart DD, Metroid Prime) which are not available on other platforms.

[DCK]

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

[pedrocasilva]

I don't know where the flaw is in your reasoning, but what I will say is that the proof is in the eating. IGN head-to-head comparisons make for pretty consistant reading - with the XBOX version looking best and running the most smoothly, followed by the GC and then the PS2.

 

Personally that doesn't bother me - I brought a GC because I like Nintendo's own titles (Mario Sunshine, Smash Bros, Zelda TWW, Mario Kart DD, Metroid Prime) which are not available on other platforms.

Maybe because microsoft pays a incentive for better graphics on their consoles.

 

really, it can be answered by the line above, really simple right.

 

There are games that look far worse on Xbox than Gamecube

 

 

as for splinter cell... the xbox and PC versions were done by montreal, infact xbox is like a pc it's even based on x86 architecture and DirectX API so converting it was easy.

 

as for gamecube version montreal promised back then that it would look "every bit as good" but... ubisoft made montreal develop Splinter Cell 2 and gave "Xangai" (a developer) the work to port/remake the game for PS2 and GC... now... GC has the best water effects from all platforms, yes its based on the PS2 port, but it runs at 60 frames per second something you don't reach in Xbox... yeah... it's so inferior it even runs a inferior port at more framerate.

 

Don't trust marketing, specially from companies who are known for lying about those, animal crossing runs on GC just like RE4 does... some companies would never allow a Animal Crossing to run in it, because they only care about "how it looks"; Sony even blocked autorization for lots of publishers, to publish 2D games this generation, for example.

[Dilli Gee]

did you even read the damn thing? Gamecube is overall more powerful than a Xbox; full stop.

In texturing? WTF that got to do with power?

[Dilli Gee]

Actually, if these IGN reports are true, Revolution isn't really "next gen" - it's more this gen plus added features. That's kinda risky, but then again the DS isn't next gen at all, and it still sells.

[pedrocasilva]

In texturing? WTF that got to do with power?

the processor is faster, the ram is faster, it's better handling light and textures... thus lightning effects and vertex effects, the GPU has less hit outputting textured poligons, the result is that, the biggest poligon pusher in XBOX pushes 15 million poligons with some effects applied at 30 frames per second, while cube pushed 15 million poligons with all effects applied at launch, and it ran at 60 frames per second, it went ahead to use as much as 21-30 million from closed areas to outdoor, with all effects applied at 60 frames per second, so 42 to 60 million are possible... XBOX stayed in the 15 Million mark! don't bother to answer this question, i'm sick of arguing with a person with no arguments whatsoever, i've been running the internet to post proof of what I said, but it seems like you refuse them, and even pasted a CELL processor spec taken direcly from google or some Sony fanboy site... I give up, think as you will, "in a imaginative world where you can be right even if all the arguments/information point the oposite", I hope I won't loose more time over this matter with you.

 

also... one of the biggest advantages this new generation has over the last is the texturing features. that's why more pipelines are so important. Gamecube has less hit over raw poligons to textured poligons, give some of that advantage to the fact that it is faster than Xbox Texture-wise, why? because it's more efficient.

 

EDIT:

Actually, if these IGN reports are true, Revolution isn't really "next gen" - it's more this gen plus added features. That's kinda risky, but then again the DS isn't next gen at all, and it still sells.

PSP is not next generation either, actually if you say PS2 pushes 77 million poligons by Sony's numbers and PS2 pushed 10 million poligons... then PSP with specs like 31 million poligons that means 4-5 million polygons can be achieved (with luck), if those numbers can be compared and were both released by Sony... then PSP is not even half as powerfull as a PS2, leaving it probably under the Dreamcast performance, with optimized features hardware optimized support, PSP is not a big poligon pusher for the current generation, let alone the next one.

 

DS at least sells for it's game and experience alone, I'll not say revolution will sell as much as DS does compared to the competitors (i don't find it likely) but I really hope it sells well, it deserves it.

[Dilli Gee]

It looks a hell of a lot better than DS though, in terms of graphical power, and the controls are much more comfortable - it's only let down by its lack of that many quality games, same as the DS.

 

But Sony were very clever with the PSP, as you can play video on it - when Sony's new movie download site goes online, the PSP is going to be the only format you can transfer the films onto. And in the US and Japan, TiVo (the PVR) is also developing technology where the box will auto-save video files onto your PSP and iPod. Nintendo DS doesn't really have such feature, and the Play Yan is limited in its uses.

 

Back to Revolution, I can't say I'm "happy" that the Revolution doesn't have graphical capabilities similar to Xbox 360, but for a system that doesn't want to be Number 1 on the market, I guess the bargain-basementness of the system will generate sales.

 

You just gotta hope Microsoft doesn't use this against Nintendo - it's very easy for them to reduce the Xbox 360 right down to a destructive price. Afterall, Nintendo tried to do the same with GameCube, so perhaps Microsoft will do the same. Perhaps when Halo 3 comes out?

[Noku]

That's because the DS isn't in direct competition with the PSP. The latter is an attempt at portable multimedia, while the first is a successful and new way of portable gaming.

Same goes for the Revolution versus PS3 and XBOX360. Even with their prices reduced, Sony and Microsoft still won't be in direct competition with Nintendo.