| ph4nt said: All rumors are pointing to Power 7 and R700 GPU. This would put it roughly 5-6 times the raw computing power of xbox 360/PS3. MS and Sony are going to have to throw a lot of money to get a system that makes the Wii U look obsolete like 360/PS3 vs WIi. The most I see them doing is releasing a system with a 6900 equivalent, and even then the actual difference in graphics quality would not be too noticeable since we are reaching the point of diminishing returns. |
I’m honestly less interested in the base hardware that Nintendo started with as I am with the modifications that they made to it.
There are (essentially) two different strategies you can take if you want to increase the performance of your hardware. You can focus on increasing the raw theoretical performance in an attempt to increase performance in all applications and situations, or you can target specific applications or situations and try to increase the performance under those conditions. There are benefits and risks to both approaches, but after the N64 (powerful but poorly utilized hardware due to a challenging architecture) Nintendo has tended to favor focusing on improving under specific game conditions.
Now I could be wrong on this but I suspect that how Nintendo would approach modifying the GPU would be to identify the 8 to 12 essential effects that all games will use (tessellation, normal maps, displacement maps, shadow maps, etc.) and then look to make modifications to improve performance for these effects. To put this into numbers, suppose a detailed scene using all of these effects used all available processing power of the stock R700, Nintendo might aim to have their modified R700 run the same scene using all of these effects while taking up less than half the processing power.
