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HappySqurriel on 04 April 2012
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happydolphin said:
HappySqurriel said:

I would term their approach as efficiency of design ...

If what we know about the Wii U hardware is true then Nintendo could have (probably) had prototype hardware built in 2008/2009 that was based on unmodified components. For the next 2 to 3 years they could have had demo-software to represent games running on their current iteration of the hardware, evaluated bottlenecks and limitations, and resolved them producing a newer revision of the hardware to be tested. They could cycle through this process dozens of times over the next several years until they had hardware that performed exactly how they wanted it to.

If done well, you end up with hardware that is inexpensive because it is (essentially) 3 or 4 year old hardware that performs as well as brand new hardware under the conditions you were evaluating. Of course, if you make poor assumptions your system will perform like 3 or 4 year old hardware under the conditions of certain games.

This is (of course) easiest to explain with fixed functionailty GPUs where Nintendo could assume that all games would use Bump-maps and built in support in the hardware, but it is still a viable approach with programmable hardware.

HappySquirrel, if Nintendo was able to achieve that with the Cube, and will pull it off with the WiiU (it's a certainty in my book), why didn't they do so with the Wii, why was it not minimally HD ready? If you want, I would love to make a thread on this and have you post there if you will, the topic really really interests me.

Had Nintendo had it HD ready, going with a Cube-like HW approach (capable yet affordable), gen 7 would have looked a hell of a lot different.

Let me know, and you know what, I'm going to make the thread right now.

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=141959


Honestly, I don't know the internals of Nintendo's decision making process but I suspect Nintendo changed hardware strategy with the Wii in order to manage risk. The R&D and licensing costs of producing a new system from scratch are hundreds of millions of dollars (and in some cases billions of dollars), and the manufacturing costs would be substantially higher. Beyond that, the development costs of making a game that took advantage of high end hardware would be substantially higher.

Ultimately, I think Nintendo was worried that they would have billions of dollars invested in hardware (R&D, Licensing, and inventory) and billions of dollars invested in software and their system would fail in the market. By releasing the Wii as they did, they minimized this risk ...