alephnull said:
If the machine was designed for realtime ray-tracing it wouldn't necessarily need a GPU. Furthermore, the papers I've read involving the RPU (a different ray-tracing chip) seem to conclude that the kind of architecture you would want to pair with ray-tracing hardware is a so-called "broadband" architecture (high memory bandwidth). |
Nintendo is not a graphics technology company. As we've seen with the Wii and DS, they don't feel extra graphics power beyond a certain point (at the expense of cost, power and development effort) sells the console or its games.
Ray-tracing is far into the 'technology for its own sake' bracket, because its addition wouldn't sell those games that drive console momentum (Wii Sports, Wii Fit, NSMB Wii).
They will let competitors do this kind of thing first, so they can do the technologies that matter (touch screen, motion control) first.
Nintendo chose fixed-function graphics hardware for the Wii, when unified-shader chips were availible. If Nintendo were going to use ray-tracing they would need a CPU faster than all current CPUs by a few orders of magnitude at FP ops, or a GPU more flexible than any present GPU in fundamental architecture. Neither exist at retail in 2010, 2011 or 2012 in a small enough power envelope or price (Larrabee was 300W before it was cancelled and still not fast enough to raytrace anything).
