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Soundwave on 04 March 2015
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torok said:
Soundwave said:

While I don't expect this to be a big success just because I don't think people want to play $1 Android apps at home, I think this is worth noting for Nintendo fans. 

Basically Nvidia just unveiled the Shield home console box. Why this is significant is because it runs on a Tegra X1 ... which is basically a smartphone/tablet processor. But it clocks in at a whopping 512 TFLOPS with 3GB of RAM ... which means this is likely more powerful than a Wii U. It can run games like Crysis 3, Borderlands, ... the real Crysis 3 too, not some watered down smartphone port. 

As you can see it's tiny ... much smaller than even the smallest Nintendo console, and I imagine it could be smaller if Nvidia really wanted it to. 

And it's only $199.99 ... sold at a profit too (nVidia does not sell anything at a loss), available in May. 

So what does that show us? Mobile tech is ready for prime time already. 

Nintendo should be able to make a handheld that's on par with the Wii U in 2016 to run games at say 540p-720p resolution, and a home version that's 550-even 1 TFLOP (considerably better than Wii U) in power using just mobile components. 

And they should be able to sell that at a reasonable cost at a profit too, the cost won't be outrageous. 


It's not as powerful as a Wii U. I probably only exceeds the GPU power of the 360, while having a slower CPU and probably equal memory bandwidth. In 2016 you couldn't be able to create a portable version of the Wii U's GPU.

Creating a Fusion consoles that runs games at a lower resolution outside isn't feasible. Decreasing resolution won't give you necessarily a direct increase in performance because you can be bottlenecked in other areas. Despite that, an ARM CPU is too weak for a home console. What we saw with the Shield is only a machine running games that were ported from the 360, that's turning 10 years old now. That's why we saw Crysis 3, MGR and Borderlands instead of Shadow of Mordor or Ryse.

They showed the Unreal Engine 4 Elemental engine running on the Tegra X1 during its unveiling. This is the same demo used for PS4/X1 (not PS3, PS3 can't run that). At 10 watts (versus 100+ watts for the XBox One). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcU56Q9vu84&t=320

They've also demoed games running on the Tegra X1 at 1080p, 60 fps. Not sure if the Wii U could run the same thing. I think the Tegra X1 is more powerful than the Wii U. 

To be honest I think if XBox 360 had double the horsepower it could run a lot of the X1/PS4 games ... at 540p. It's able to run things like Destiny and other PS4 ports reasonably OK. 

The problem is there aren't really any Android mobile games that would use this kind of horsepower, they're all kinda crappy $1/freemium games. But if you look at what the Vita accomplished with Killzone, a modern mobile GPU like the Tegra X1 absolutely demolishes the Vita chip. 

This is Killzone on the Vita. That could pass for a PS3/Wii U game ... certainly not the highest end one, but it's alright looking. But it shows what a developer can do with a mobile chip when they're just working on one spec rather than having to make it work on eight different tablet/phone models. And the Vita is terribly outdated today, and will be even moreso by 2016.