| SubiyaCryolite said: I get it, but I don't see 3rd parties embracing that model at all. They'll need to program their games to scale against two performance levels. Add different amounts of memory and processing power and things could get messy. Looking at Smash 3DS and Smash Wii U for example, that seems like too much work. |
Well I think the point of the whole approach is that now Nintendo can focus their entire development teams onto one format. That coupled with some Japanese support should give you a platform that has a constant flow of games with or without Western 3rd parties. Imagine Mario Kart 8, Pokemon X/Y, Mario 3D World, Monster Hunter 4, Dragon Quest VII, Zelda: LBW, Bayonetta 2 on one platform instead of split to two seperate ones.
I don't think scaling would be that big of an issue, the Wii U and 3DS are dramatically different architectures and the Wii U is far more than 3x more powerful than the 3DS. It's more like 10x+ more powerful with 10x more RAM and a completely different CPU/GPU architecture.
The Fusion using the exact same chips to a developer would be more akin to a PC developer making that works on say a lower end GPU, but one that's still in the exact same family of products. It would be like supporting a Radeon 7970 and a Radeon 7790 at the same time or something. It's actually probably a good deal easier than the PC developer analogy because PC devs have to support like 5,6,7,8+ different GPU classes sometimes (from both nVidia and AMD, lol). Ditto for smartphone devs that have to make games/apps for 2-3 generations of phones/tablets at a time. This is actually probably a lot easier than that.
Also the handheld games could render at a lower resolution (540p or 720p) and the console games at full 1080p. So the handheld chip doesn't need to be as powerful.
