The rumors surrounding the Revolution is that it would be two times as powerful as the Gamecube or just about as powerful as the X-Box. Well I am not suprised that the rumors are pretty much true. After all Revolution is focusing on a new game experience and not on graphics. I'll be happy enough with XBox graphics as long as I can use that freaking sexy controller.



Read the rest here.

That's quite a bit more powerful than the Xbox, given that the Xbox used inefficient PC parts not meant for full-on gaming (A modified GF3 ffs). If they sell it for any more than 200, though, it wouldn't really be worth it.

Not to mention, it was never a rumor--unless you count being spread from a Nintendo employee a rumor. It was pretty much a solid fact.

Nintendo said it was aiming for $150 or LESS. Nintendo also stated that it thought the $60 price tag on new games was stupid and that all Revolution games would cost $50 or less.

They never said that. They've never committed to anything for pricing. So far as we know they could still charge 250 for it.

And they may think the 60 dollar pricetag is stupid, but they're not the ones who have to come up with some insane engines running on multiple threads taking advantage of new archtiecture/hardware. I'd say Rev games would have a good price point of 40-ish.

I've read multiple reports that they are aiming for a $100 price tag for the system.

And Sony's aiming for a 300 dollar price tag on the PS3.

Nintendo's goal of $100 dollars is realistic, PS3 at $300 is not. Besides I haven't seen anyone ever say they were aiming for $300. More around $500 all the way up to $800 in extreme cases.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]And Sony's aiming for a 300 dollar price tag on the PS3.[/QUOTE]


Are you being sarcastic? I don't follow console news that much, except what friends have shown me about the revolution.

[QUOTE=Victor Van Dort]Nintendo's goal of $100 dollars is realistic, PS3 at $300 is not. Besides I haven't seen anyone ever say they were aiming for $300. More around $500 all the way up to $800 in extreme cases.[/QUOTE]
Uh, Sony THEMSELVES have said MULTIPLE TIMES they want a 300-400 dollar pricepoint. And Nintendo's goal of 100 dollars would have them eating plenty of money on the hardware end. Not a lot, but in volume it'd add up. Sony's of 300-400 would have them (supposedly) eating like 5-600, but in reality someone said it's only about 200 or 300 per console. At the moment, still a lot, but given the time we have between manufacturing and now, I'd say it's realistic that they'd only have to eat about 100 at that point for the first line of models.

But my point is--aiming for is in no way a commitment.

SRAM? That's like 88MB of L2 cache. That could be good or bad depending on much main memory the system has. Also, clock speed figures are pretty useless here given the vast differences in architectures.

When comparing it to the Xbox, yes, but not to the GC, considering they use the exact same technology.

This is total nonsense. Ugh. Where to begin?

Apples to oranges. Clock frequency means absolutely nothing when you're comparing architectures as disparate as the Revolution's modified PowerPC-based chip and the Xbox's modified Pentium 3.
For starters, the Xbox's processor had 128 kB L2 cache. Revolution's first 24 MB of 1T-SRAM is on-die, meaning it can be accessed more-or-less as fast as the L2 cache. Other technical details about the processor are difficult to come by. The processor is also said to be dual-core, and given contemporary IBM processor designs it will probably be able to run 2 hardware threads per core. On a more technical note: the processor is RISC. Even at the simplest level, the PowerPC architecture gives the compiler access to many times more registers than a Pentium processor, meaning that programs will universally run faster because they won't have to use the stack to pass function arguments.
Beyond that, the processor is more streamlined and stripped-down to work better for games, at the expense of traditional operating system performance. It is nothing to cough at and I would rather have it in a gaming console than a 1.6 GHz Pentium 3/M.

ATI has stated that Hollywood is not based on current PC technology.

"Swinimer: Hollywood is a specific design and is in no way reflective of PC technology. Even when the Flipper chips came out, people were asking that question: "Is this a spin-off of something done on the PC?", and the answer is no. It is designed the same as the Flipper was -- from the ground up for a specific console."

A comparison by clock rate is meaningless.

3 MB for textures doesn't sound like much, right?

If you thought this, you're wrong. It might surprise you to hear this: the PS2 only had 2 MB of texture cache.

The PS2, Gamecube and Revolution all have a very fast bus leading from the main memory straight to the video card. The video card doesn't need to own a preposterous amount of memory because you can very quickly clear and re-fill the texture memory when you need to switch. The only limitation here is that you can't use more than 3 MB of textures per polygon per pass. That's a single 24-bit texture at 1024*1024 resolution, or 4 512*512 textures. Per polygon. Per pass.

And to reiterate what I said above: the lower 24 MB of 1T-SRAM is on the CPU itself, meaning it's very very fast. The higher 64 MB of RAM is somewhat slower but still very fast (PC-style RAM). It means you'll be able to preload content to get rid of loading screens, or it means you'll be able to free up more lower memory for a performance-critical application.

If I remember my Gamecube programming correctly, 6 MB of the Gamecube's on-die RAM was high-latency and effectively reserved for audio only. Since the audio controller is on Broadway I don't think this will be the case for the Revolution.

Either way, the memory structure absolutely crushes the Xbox. A comparison in this area isn't fair.

[QUOTE=Victor Van Dort]Nintendo's goal of $100 dollars is realistic, PS3 at $300 is not. Besides I haven't seen anyone ever say they were aiming for $300. More around $500 all the way up to $800 in extreme cases.[/QUOTE]Nintendo's goal isn't as realistic as you think.

The Revolution is using a very large number of custom-made components. Hollywood and Broadway are both custom chips that will never appear in any other electronic device. Nintendo also doesn't really move the kind of volume to get an enormous discount from IBM on this. I'm guessing that Hollywood and Broadway are both being made using an outdated fabrication method (probably 130 nm) so they have a very high yield.

On the other hand, the PS3 is using the state-of-the-art electronics that Sony is already mass-producing for the consumer market: Blu-Ray, which every Japanese tech company is rooting for; and Cell, which Sony, Toshiba and IBM are hoping to incorporate in home electronics, appliances, servers, other multimedia devices and even general computing applications.

More significantly than that, Sony owns its entire fabrication line from start to finish. They don't have to pay outside manufacturers and suppliers for their parts. The price of the PS3 doesn't have to cover IBM's and ATI's profit margins.

If Sony says they're aiming at a $300-400 price point, you can bet they're going to hit it. I'd even guess that they'll drop it by another $100 the day before release just to throw off Microsoft.

If the Revolution is cheap enough, I will snap and buy my first console... so long as I get one of those cool wand things and a Zelda game.

So basically the on board ram is like L2 cache for the GPU, and since everything is on board it can use system memory for the GPU with no hit in performance? That's cool.

/me mods Jon`C +1 Informative

Yes, I must agree. Jon'C has made this thread so much more awesome.

24 MB of on die SRAM?! That's the only thing that I find hard to believe. If it's true, yikes.

John C, does the thing really have enough bandwidth to transfer a 1024x1024 texture to the SRAM for every poly in the scene? I know we're talking about SRAM here, but wouldn't that be a tad harsh on bandwidth?

Well, that's a given with releases of console specs. But can't you just let us PRETEND we know what it means and get all excited for a little bit? YOU ALWAYS RUIN EVERYTHING

I know $100 isn't gonna happen, but if it did, I'd be over the revolution like a fat kid at a buffet. I would pay $100 bucks just to "have" it. I'd probably hardly use it, as I would be playing PS3.

I don't really care about the price, because it's going to have the best games. There are some good financial reasons why. But i'll only bother explaining them if anyone doesn't realise what they are.

The Gamecube had 24 MB of on-die 1T-SRAM too. The major differences are that the Revolution has 3 times the texture cache as the Gamecube and more secondary memory.

Why would you be less excited if the Revolution is more powerful?

Edit: I reread what you said and it's a bit goofy, so I'll explain more.

A scene where every polygon has a different texture is the worst-case scenario for graphics cards. Switching textures - even on PC hardware where the texture already exists in video memory - is an expensive operation. You want to avoid doing it as much as possible. This is why virtually every game dating back to Quake 2 packaged an entire model's texture into a single image file, and why HL2 did texture paging aggressively.

In this case, you don't need to upload a new texture until you're finished rendering all of the meshes that use it. So, no, bandwidth certainly isn't an issue. It would be an issue if Broadway and Hollywood communicated over a slow PC-like bus, like AGP or PCI Express. The connection between Broadway and Hollywood (or Gekko and Flipper) is more accurately compared to Hypertransport. Flipper could access the Gamecube's main memory at a rate of 2.6 GB/s. The Revolution will probably see a significant boost in this area, especially since Hypertransport became something of an industry standard since the Gamecube was released (~11 GB/s). The Gamecube (and most likely the Revolution) also supports hardware texture compression.

If your scene is well-designed, your textures are packaged competently and they're compressed, the bandwidth between Broadway and Hollywood shouldn't be your bottleneck.

Cause I don't have one :[

Doh! That was stupid of me. I should have realized that things like low fps do occur. :p

Hey Jon`C, since you know alot of stuff here, what about backwards compatibility? I don't see how the tiny GC discs would go into the huge disc slot thing... unless that's not really a disc slot and it's the tray-looking thing.

[QUOTE=The Mega-ZZTer]Hey Jon`C, since you know alot of stuff here, what about backwards compatibility? I don't see how the tiny GC discs would go into the huge disc slot thing... unless that's not really a disc slot and it's the tray-looking thing.[/QUOTE]

As far as I have heard, there are 3 possible explanations so far:

A. The slot loader features some fancy new tech to line the disc up in the middle.
B. There's a second slot for GC discs
C. There is some sort of container the GC discs would be placed in before going in the slot.

I don't know if any of these are even remotely on track, but that's what I've heard passed around.

[QUOTE=Cool Matty]A. The slot loader features some fancy new tech to line the disc up in the middle.[/QUOTE]
That wouldn't be too hard, actually.

Does anyone remember the old Macs that had you put the CDs in a tray before you loaded them into the disc drive? God I hated those.

[QUOTE=The Mega-ZZTer]Hey Jon`C, since you know alot of stuff here, what about backwards compatibility? I don't see how the tiny GC discs would go into the huge disc slot thing... unless that's not really a disc slot and it's the tray-looking thing.[/QUOTE]Apparently it uses some kind of dark and evil magical ritual to move the Gamecube disc to the center of the load tray. Or something.

The Revolution has Gamecube controller ports too.

And on the hardware front, the Revolution isn't too different from the Gamecube. They're both PowerPC-derived, with a small texture cache and the 24 MB of on-die memory. Emulating the rest would be "easy". I say 'easy' relative to trying to emulate a Gamecube or a PS2 on PC/Xbox/Xbox 360/PS3-type hardware, which is pretty much impossible at acceptable framerates.

Do you have a source for that? Everything I've found seems to state that the 24MB 1-T SRAM is all external.

Too bad they can't reduce Gamecube backwards compatibility into a single chip like they did gameboy compatiblity on the GBA.

[QUOTE=Victor Van Dort]....as long as I can use that freaking sexy controller
[/QUOTE]


I hope your joking, it's gotta be the crappyest controller I have ever seen. I have no clue what they were thinking with that one. as for graphics, GC was on par with X-Box, sure it wasn't as "powerful" numbers wise. but it was alot more efficient with what it did have. and I still say Metroid Prime is one of the best looking games I have ever seen 360 included. (I haven't seen that mane 360 games though)

1. Have you seen what the Revolution controller can do?
2. Have you SEEN what the Revolution controller can do?
3. HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT THE REVOLUTION CONTROLLER CAN DO?
4. many*
5. Have you seen what the Revolution controller can do?

[QUOTE=Numenor King]I hope your joking, it's gotta be the crappyest controller I have ever seen. I have no clue what they were thinking with that one. as for graphics, GC was on par with X-Box, sure it wasn't as "powerful" numbers wise. but it was alot more efficient with what it did have. and I still say Metroid Prime is one of the best looking games I have ever seen 360 included. (I haven't seen that mane 360 games though)[/QUOTE]
I hope you're joking. Or else I vote for your expulsion from Massassi.

Here's a related story:

https://www.cmpevents.com/sessions/GD/S1609i1.ppt

It's a presentation by Factor 5 at GDC. It goes into the costs of how much more developing for the next generation systems are compared to prior systems. (If you don't know - Factor 5 did the Rogue Squardon series for GC but is not developing for the PS3)

They state how development for the GCN games took teams of about 40-45 people and budgets from 3-6 million.

Now, they say that development for their game Lair for the PS3 has a team of about 115-120 people and a budget of 23-25 million dollars. *copied from IGN*

What this shows is how it's becoming a huge amount of money to make a quality game look good on a new system. And if they don't sell well - that could crush a developer. Meaning developers are willing to take less chances, only release sequels, and just longer development times in general.

One of Nintendo's arguing points for the Revolution is that it allows a small team of people the ability to make a game that looks good and is fun, yet at a reasonable development cost. Personally, I think this could be true.

I want the games to look good, but I care more about how they play. Halo 3 might be awesome with close to photo realistic graphics. But Metroid Prime (that looks better then GCN's version) being controlled by using the control as an actual aiming device? That's gold!

.... PS3 FOR THE FREAKING WIN....


>.>

<.<

*Runs

... To the post below...


I had no clue what sram was...

So really

Disregard

You're an idiot.

Thank you Captain Obvious.