Miyamoto on HD Graphics: Nintendo's Games Will Move Along with Progression of Technology

[NightDragon83]

Senlis said:

NightDragon83 said:
It was definitely smart of Nintendo from a financial standpoint to sit out the first round of the "HD wars' with M$ and Sony, rather than spent a ton of money trying to keep up with 2 companies who before this gen started had much deeper pockets than Nintendo did. Now Nintendo can afford to trick out their next system a bit more while still making it affordable enough to have mass market appeal. When it hits in 2011 or 2012 it should at least be as powerful as the 360 or PS3 currently are, and that would be more than enough to satisfy both the casual and core gaming audience in the visuals department.

So the amount of money a company has dictates how powerful their systems are?

Why was the GameCube almost as powerful as the Xbox then?
Also, do you really think M$ and Sony has any more money to spend on their gaming dept. than Nintendo has?  You have to remember that game systems is not the only thing that M$ and Sony has to spend money on.

 

My point is that the gaming companies budget has little to do with how powerful their system is.  They look at the market and make their console as powerful (and expensive) as they think the consumers will buy. 

Not necessarily... but it sure does help when it comes to what's under the hood of the latest gaming systems.  The GC was as powerful as the Xbox because it was a no-frills gaming system that had a custom CPU by IBM and a custom graphics chip by ArtX which was owned by ATI, whereas the XBOX basically used modified versions of off-the-shelf Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs, which although were technically more powerful than the GC's on paper, they were made for multitasking PC applications, and raw horepower doesn't necessarily equal better performance when it comes to game consoles.  MS, being the multi-billion dollar megacorporation it is, was able to simply buy Intel and Nvidia's top of the line hardware in bulk and integrate it into their system.

This generation, we've seen Sony come out with a system that not only pushes bleeding-edge hardware in the CPU and GPU department, but also features a brand new custom storage medium that offers the best in visual and audio quality currently available.  If they didn't have billions of dollars from their previous successful systems and their electronics division to pour into researching and developing that technology, then the PS3 wouldn't have been nearly as advanced as it was.

And I beg to differ with that last statement... see the Dreamcast's short life span for reference, or any number of failed systems for that matter.  SEGA was hemorrhaging cash when the Dreamcast was released, and despite it being more powerful than the current sytems on the market (which isn't saying much since they had already been out 3-4 years at the time), it simply was no match for the PS2, which was released just a year later and featured a custom CPU and GPU hardware, dubbed the "Emotion Engine",  which Sony had been able to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into researching and developing thanks in part to the enormous success of the PS1, and to their hugely successful home electronics division which was also pushing a new storage and video medium at the time... DVD.