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HappySqurriel on 03 August 2010
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Xoj said:
HappySqurriel said:
LordTheNightKnight said:

Let's assume by some miracle, Nintendo was able to make the Wii as powerful as the other systems, without breaking $300 in MSRP, or selling it at a loss.

Either they make the GC games they were making, which mostly don't have mainstream appeal, and the system continues to sell less than the last one. Porting be damned, the system would have too little overall sales (userbase doesn't affect individual game sales, but software shipments of all the games on a system*).

Or Nintendo makes Wii Sports, just with greater graphical detail. It would still be an evil casual game, same with Wii Play and Wii Fit. Developer still decide Wii owners are "the wrong people", and still find ways to neglect the system. Modern Warfare would be an exception (since it actually was tech issues that kep the Wii engine from being done in time for the first MW game), but not because Infinity Ward would actually want to work on the Wii, but because Activision makes them.

You do realize that an Intel Atom (D525) and a $35 Graphics card (ATI Radeon HD 5450) would produce very similar results to the HD consoles today, don’t you?

If starting from scratch using modern technology it would be fairly easy for a company like Nintendo to exceed the performance of the HD consoles in a $200 system; and with every day that passes it becomes easier and easier. Hell, by the end of 2012 I wouldn’t be too surprised to see a phone with (roughly) the processing power of the HD consoles.

erm not an atom that's wrong in so many levels. that's for sure, maybe gpu will be better but even a core 7i barely gets to floating point performance of cell based cpus.

and windows games have a performance hit of using directx and a slow system OS running on the back.

I'm talking real-world performance, not theoretical performance. The PS3 and XBox 360 have demonstrated in game performance that puts them in line with the Athlon 64 X2 and low end Core 2 Duos, which the Intel Atom D525 is in the same (basic) range. Both the PS3 and XBox 360 have (potentially) more powerful CPUs than the Intel Atom, but probably not to the extent that some would believe; and anyone who believes that the Cell can compare to an i7 in real world performance has been drinking the Sony Kool-Aid.

edit: Just to make my point clearer ... Back in the mid/late 1990s there were DSPs that were able to decode an MP3 in less time than it took an Intel Pentium II processor to do the same process; and these DSPs sold for 5% the cost of the Pentium II processor. This (of course) did not make these processors faster than the Pentium II, they just made them better suited to the task of decoding an MP3.

The Cell processor is really well suited to certain tasks (in particular in scientific computing) but very rarely will a task line-up in such a way where the theoretical processing power of the Cell can be realized. As we’re approaching the 6 year mark of developers working with the Cell processor, and it still showing very little benefit over processors with a fraction of its theoretical processing power, it should be obvious that the Cell processor is a poor fit for most modern videogames.