EricFabian said:
bonzobanana said:
If the criteria for 8th generation is simply launch date then does that mean the revised 360 model launched late last year is 8th gen? Does a basic chinese cheap console that runs nes games but was just released last week also considered to be 8th gen despite having a performance level of the NES.
It's clear release date is a truly awful way of linking consoles together. One console could be a 1000x more powerful but they share the same generation. What is the point of that. So Ouya, wii u and PS4 are the same generation despite the Ouya not really being competitive with the games that were available on the original playstation.
Clearly the wii u is eighth generation but its performance level fits in better with the 2 most powerful consoles of the 7th generation.
I personally think it would be better to link consoles to their performance level. Both ps4 and xbox one have gpu's with over a teraflop of performance. They are the first two consoles to have that performance level. That means something. The wii u is down at 176gflops at the same approximate level as 360 and PS3 which were the first two consoles to break 100 gflops of performance. The gamecube only had 8 gflops of performance but the wii being a gamecube ran 50% faster managed to get to 12 gflops so it was in the same performance over 10 gflops performance level as the Original Xbox which was about 20 gflops. So you could represent consoles by gflops performance with each generation going up by a factor of 10. Maybe the next generation will exceed 10 teraflops.
It's unfair to consumers for the wii u to be represented as an eighth generation console as if that puts it in the same performance class as xbox one and ps4.
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Actually we don't know. Only some randoms in gaf has claimed that.
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I'm not sure what 'randoms' means in that context but the x-ray analysis yielded a possible figure of between 176 -352 gflops and we all assumed 352 gflops at the beginning but then other factors like the built in embedded wii gpu, the gamepad screen compression engine and if I remember rightly the arm processor(s) and you ended up with realising the core modern gpu section was smaller and the power consumption is absolutely tiny, less than ps3 or xbox 360 despite being on the same fabrication process. Depressing as it is, it is likely 176 gflops. A huge factor is also wii u performance itself. It is struggling to match 360 and PS3 and often runs games with inferior frame rates and sometimes inferior graphics quality. Lets not forget that the radeon gpu in the wii u has far better archiitecture than 360 or PS3. If the wii u gpu really is 352 gflops something is going horribly wrong inside the wii u. I think the nearest Radeon equivilant to wii u is the mobility Radeon 6400M series and its not capable of reaching 352 gflops at 550mhz yet appears to match the wii u gpu spec in all areas. Yes its not confirmed its 176gflops but there is a lot more evidence for it than 352 gflops.
http://www.amd.com/uk/products/notebook/graphics/amd-radeon-6000m/amd-radeon-6400m/Pages/amd-radeon-6400m.aspx#2
