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snowdog on 01 March 2013
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richardhutnik said:
Gnac said:
richardhutnik said:
Conegamer said:
Turkish said:
Just look at the reactions of 3rd parties, they're all very happy with PS4s 8GB GDDR5 ram, ram was one of the biggest bottlenecks current gen. Nintendo just let them down.

Gamecube was a beast console, in return it got many multiplats.

As I recall at E3 2011 (or even 2012?), Nintendo said that they designed the console with 3rd parties in mind, and as such there was nothing but praise for the system. Who knows what happened to cause such a change.

Assuming that Microsoft's console also ends up with 8 GB of RAM, that is what happened to it.   With both of them having that much RAM, third-party codes to that and won't bother with Nintendo's offering.  This change makes a difference.

Imagine how much story you could make with all that RAM. I'm salivating.

War and Peace I am sure doesn't need that amount of space.  Will see what happens when implementing games though and so on.  Still, with this is very much an increase in dev costs.  Will see how it goes.  What it means is Nintendo is not able to partake in what games come out for the other two.



I beg to differ. We know that the DDR3 combined with the eDRAM and SRAM on die for Latte and the DDR3 and ESRAM on die for the 720's GPU have sacrificed bandwidth for latency. The biggest bottlenecking problem last gen was high latency, Nintendo and Microsoft have addressed that issue and Sony haven't. It's pretty pointless having loads of bandwidth for 'fast' memory if it takes time for the CPU and GPU to handle memory operations once it gets it. Nintendo and Microsoft haven't just done this for a laugh, it's actually a better solution, particularly when you consider the speeds of hard drives and optical drives. The Wii U and the 720 will be more balanced systems, and developers will prefer it.

We also know that over half of the silicon of the GPU is a complete mystery. Some hardware buffs, including my good self, believe that Nintendo have implemented some form of fixed functions into the GPU. Whilst this caused problems with the Wii due to having a nonstandard rendering pipeline you can be sure that Nintendo have been working with engine developers and designers to ensure that these fixed functions can be easily implemented into 3D engines without a problem. What does this mean..? 'Free' use of HDR, depth of field, AA and whatever else they've cooked up.

We also know that Latte uses efficient texture compression, I would hazard a guess that it's based on the same compression algorithm that WiiWare uses which allowed Shin'en to squeeze a Super Mario Galaxy style game into 40MB.

We really don't need to worry about multiplatform titles this gen because all 3 consoles this gen are in a similar position in terms of power as the 6th generation. They're all in the same ballpark. The Wii U is the PS2 equivalent, the 720 is the GameCube equivalent and the PS4 is the Xbox equivalent. The GameCube and Xbox were much more powerful than the PS2 but it could still handle ports, albeit with graphical downgrades. The same will happen this gen, particularly when you consider that the Wii U will have a considerable marketshare advantage. We'll just see Wii U being in 720p, or perhaps even sub-HD like most games last gen, and upscaled by the Wii U to 1080p and the Wii U SKU having less impressive AA, more texture pop-in and less impressive particle effects.