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happydolphin on 04 April 2012
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Viper1 said:
happydolphin said:

That's what I wanted to know, your replies are spot on. But the question is, why? What did Nintendo use for Flipper was it ATI? So, are you saying that Nintendo couldn't find an architecture and work it over 2-3 years like they did for cube, as HappySquirrel mentioned in the other thread?

The brute force power Sony and MS used in their X360 and PS3 was magnitudes greater than the brute force power of their PS2 and Xbox.   ATi had stopped development of fixed function pipeline GPUs.  Technically, the GC GPU was developed by ARTx which ATi purhcased after the GC was launched.  To that whole GPu architecture was no longer even in development at all until Nintendo requested ATi develop Hollywood for the Wii.   Going with more modern shader based architecture would have cost more and removed all backward compatability from the system.

The same goes for the CPU.   IBM didn't develop multicore versions of their PowerPC 750 CL CPU so Wii's Broadway had to remain a sigle core CPU.

RolStoppable said:

And that would be because both, Microsoft and Sony, were putting really cutting edge stuff into their consoles, right?

Well, it obviously was a much bigger push for high-end technology than usual, because not only did the Xbox 360 and PS3 start at higher price points than previous consoles, but on top of that, they also sold at a bigger loss per unit than anything before them.

Indeed.

So this leads me to a question I've been meaning to ask since forever. Let's put aside cube SW BW-compatibility for a sec.

Given Sony and MS went brute force (I'm surprised you are saying that about MS's xbox but I'll go with it), what is the feasibility of creating a console that was HD capable, and capable of producing high texture res, high poly count, and enhanced shader operations, using a new CPU/GPU combo architecture (from another vendor), working that over 2 to 3 years (as they did for the cube), and be gen7 ready? Let's say, something a little lesser than the xbox360, but still HD and high texture/shader/poly ready? That's my million$ question.

And then let's get back to the price analysis you brought earlier about the Wii, Wii sports and Wii-mote nunchuck with the new architecture in mind. Granted, this is all a hindsight analysis.

As an idea, what graphics card for instance would you have chosen to being the customization process as was done for the cube if you were in their shoes in 2003-2004?

Granted, this R&D would have had to have been done in parallel with the motion control R&D and focus on motion control within the SDK, but let's keep it simple for now.