HappySqurriel said:
JEMC said:
We all now that Nintendo will use an ATI AMD graphics chip with WiiU, but apparently both Microsoft and Sony will also go red with their next consoles.
Sources:
[H]ardocp
Tom's Hardware
Going with AMD makes sense for both Nintendo and Microsoft as they are using their chips with their current gen consoles and this guarantees that almost every game launched for Wii or Xbox360 will work with their next consoles. And you can ask Microsoft how troublesome can be going from one camp to the other, not every game launched on the original xbox(Nvidia) works in the xbox360(AMD).
The shocking news if true is Sony. We haven't heard of any troubles between Sony and Nvidia that may have caused this change and (again, if true), they won't be able to have fully backwards compatibility. Again. So, why would Sony do that?
Anyway, if true that means 2 things:
1-AMD would have scored a major win over Nvidia. Being the provider for the 3 console manufacturers guarantees them a lot of sales and revenue that their rival couldn't threat. It could also lead to an advantage with the coding of PC games, that may end runing better on AMD GPUs.
2-Having the same(or very similar) GPU architecture on all the consoles would simplify the work that has to be done when porting a game from one console to another, meaning that multiplatform games would be faster, easier and cheaper to make.
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For Nintendo it (probably) doesn't matter which architecture they choose because backwards compatibility can (probably) be handled through software emulation of the Wii/Gamecube. For Sony/Microsoft it shouldn't be an issue because they probably restrict access to the GPU through an API (DirectX or OpenGL) which acts as a hardware abstraction layer; similar to how they operate on a PC.
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Even though the Xbox 360 uses DirectX, the version it uses is different from the PC version. It exposes a lot of the console's custom hardware and allows you to do a bunch of low level stuff you can't do on PC (like directly accessing the GPU's command buffer). Sony has it's own proprietary low level library that developers use that gives the same low level access to the GPU. Hardware abstraction layers don't make much sense in a fixed platform like a console since you can just write directly to the hardware. And even the few there are (like the PS3's OpenGL ES implementation), most developers choose to ignore them and go for the low level access because it's just faster.
