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HoloDust on 03 October 2012
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Baron said:
HoloDust said:

Actually, I don't think cost of development for next-gen will be that huge of a leap (some estimates put it around 15-20%) - most of that transition has already been done in jump from PS2/XboX/GC to current gen. And "all real-time" engines like UE4 will just make development even easier for artists than it is with current engines, so lot of savings there (very nicely explained in UE4 tech demo video).

As for power of 720/PS4....there has been some rumours lately for both of them, 720's being bit more realiable I'd say - if final specs are anywhere near what those rumours are stating we might very well end up seeing difference of some 4x in power beetween (at least) 720 and WiiU. But since I was talking about physics, I'll just post comparison of e6760 and equivalent of rumoured 720's GPU power (though only one test, SPH fluid simulation - fuild simulation is exactly the stuff you have see a lot in Borderlands 2 PC PhysX version):

http://www.clbenchmark.com/compare.jsp?config_0=12513567&config_1=11973646

10x - shocking, right? Now I don't know how this translates to other GPU physics based tasks, but if you look that RayTrace is some 12x times as powerfull....that's why I think that major developers might have problem porting easily 720/PS4 titles to WiiU once they get the hang of their power.

But 15-20% more will elevate games with the same percentage. So games will be at least 69 euro's (don't know the retail prices for games outside Europe) so that's not something to take lightly.
Also, what does the UE4 cost for dev's to use? Epic themselves will be able to create nice and shiny games which will probably be exclusive anyway but other dev's will have to fork out money for the engine. I don't know how much the UE4 engine will cost but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it's not particularly cheap. The same goes for other 'Next-Gen' engines.

As for the rumored 720 GPU, could you give me a link please? Not to say your wrong. I'm Just interested.

Yes, I agree, I think it's very possible we will see some increase in price. As for UE4, not sure how much it costs, but Epic has extensive list of clients, so I'm quite sure lot of them will go with UE4, if they haven't already built their own engines - if they have (and lot of big publihers/developers have, to use them as in-house engines for all titles), I'm fully expecting them to be on par or better than UE4 (honestly, UE3 is far from best engine in current-gen).

I can't find the link to site where I picked up rumoured 720/PS4 rumoured specs (it was some German site), but it was more or less detailing diagram in following http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2405922,00.asp, with some additional info, crunching numbers to equivalent of slightly overclocked 7850. Some other rumours for PS4 (http://www.vgleaks.com/world-exclusive-ps4-in-deep-first-specs/) are also putting it in this range, some even mention downclocked 7950 type performance. That's just few I came across in last few months, so either 7850 or 7970m (which is downclocked mobile 7870) could be  decent starting points in lack of exact specs, considering they are around 8x (indicated next-gen projections) more powerfull than current-gen GPUs.

But, as i said earlier, I was not talking raw graphics performance here - I was just giving comparison of how those GPUs behave in physics tasks such as fluid simulation that will be (what Mikey Neumman was talking about) present as default in next-gen titles (you can even take 7770, and compare it with e6760 and it will still be shocker - 7.86x). When you combine this with other things (such as much better CPU, much more RAM) it may be reasonable to think that at least some of high-end 720 (and PS4) titles will have problem down-scaling so easily to WiiU.

This off course does not mean that publishers will automatically decide not to port them to WiiU, but they will have to invest more than if it was case of straightforward port, and then I guess it comes to how much WiiU's install base at the moment is actually interested in getting those titles on WiiU - cudos to Activision (as much as I don't like them) for porting CoD titles (as much as I don't like them) to Wii, that must've been some serious work there, for relatively small number of copies sold compared to Wii user base and PS360 versions. I do expect to see more of this for WiiU however, with difference not being as much as in case of PS360/Wii, but expecting this to be big selling point to current "core" PS360 user base, considering that WiiU versions of multiplatform games will be inferior to 720/PS4 versions, is bit of overstretch IMO.

This does not mean stating this is slamming, bashing or hating console - in my opinion WiiU is solid product in line with Ninty buiseness philosophy which will have some great games, both 1st and 3rd party - I just don't see it as appealing to "core" market they want so much to  attract as they would like it to be.