| greenmedic88 said: The longer Nintendo holds off on releasing current hardware with HD compatibility, the truer this claim becomes. It could have been feasible for Nintendo to release an up-specced version of the Wii with HDMI output, an updated GPU and CPU, additional RAM/VRAM for about the same asking price as the original Wii ($250), fully compatible with current games only at 1920x1080p render resolutions. It would essentially work like Wii emulators for the PC, without the overhead emulation requires, meaning it would run smoother than PC emulators, even operating on high end builds. Nintendo has already done this before with the DS, but for the Wii, it would likely result in lower margins per unit, with the only key feature being HDMI/1080p output. Not enough to get the casual consumer to upgrade, and not enough capture significantly more marketshare than current. The longer they hold off on their next console update, the more likely it is that Nintendo will try to move in a different direction with the two most likely features to remain motion controls of some sort and improved network connectivity and services. I'm not under the impression that the Vitality Sensor qualifies as any sort of game changer at all. We'll see what games they have at E3, but it's been pretty quiet since last year's announcement and most of the game support may fall into the category of supplementary usage, meaning optional. While it may not necessarily be another Wii Music, it may just fall into the category of another fun experiment from Nintendo that many existing users will enjoy. Hardly redefining. |
Releasing an updated Wii HD with a native resolution of 1080P would be quite frankly a waste of their time. Pixels for the most part are over-rated given the fact that they would see much more benefit increasing the per pixel effects than increasing the number of pixels rendered to 4-5* the current Wii output. Most of the changes would go above the head of their own userbase. They would be far better off releasing a significantly faster replacement Wii and using that to really WOW the socks off a userbase which has been subsisting on progressive scan Xbox 1 level graphics at twice the frame rate.
They will of course release a Wii 2 or whatever they want to call it with more performance than is currently available on the systems today. I think its par for the course to expect that. That won't be their only improvement but its a start and its a good position to be in especially if Sony/Microsoft hold onto their systems for a few more years. The hardcore are the people with itchy feet so getting out first with a more powerful system will instantly give them a more balanced game ecosystem which they failed to get in this generation.
The CPU I pick for them is a fusion AMD based system. They can easily wedge 2-4 cores and 160-480 stream processors into a space which will be smaller than the Xbox 360 CPU with a narrower and cheaper memory bus which is attached to 64bit 4x 16bit 2Gbit @7Gbps (1GB) GDDR5 (50GB/S) inbuilt 16-32GB flash and a slimline 4 speed Blu Ray drive for $249. Its neat and simply and yet doesn't break their design parameters whilst giving them excellent power and performance attributes. Furthermore they don't have to tell developers about it until the year of release because all software would be easily portable to their system anyway. Every developer is familiar with X86 development and all developers have X86 development PCs.
Tease.
