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potato_hamster on 29 September 2015
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Dusk said:
potato_hamster said:

Are they going to have the exact same hardware specifications? No? Are you going to be able to make the same memory allocations? No? Cache sizes? No? etc. etc. Since the answer is "No" then you need to accomodate that. At the end of the day you will never be able to make a game for the NX Home and it "just run" a "scaledown version" on the NX Portable. There is additional costs involved with every specification you add.

You can try to find it if you want. I certainly wasn't proven wrong, and I hardly call what I said "backtracking" as much as I was clarifying that while it may be possible to develop tools, and develop the engine to make some parts of the development more streamlined (some of which I overlooked, and conceded to), it would still at the end of the day be more expensive to develop a game for the NX platform than it would be to develop a game on the PS4 or Xbox One.

If that's the case, how is it done on PC? Nothing accomodates more than PC. It ranges form near super computers, all the way down to anemic set ups with on board graphics. They certainly don't run tests on each and every variation involved with that. Tests are done, without doubt, but they support different GPU's, CPU's, different amounts of RAM, different resolutions. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible, if Nintendo is creating a unified OS structure, API, Chip set and the like, to be able to actually scale down like you said wasn't possible. Just dropping resolution can change how a game runs in leaps and bounds, even with similar textures. Often with memory differences things like view distance is changed so that the computer can handle it. Could this not be a similar circumstance?  

You don't see why it wouldn't be able to actually scale down because frankly you do not know what you're talking about.

A PC game is made using PC game engines are developed for graphics card APIs which do a lot of the heavy lifting. If your game doesn't run well on a 2 year old graphics card - increase those minimum specifications! Problem solved. You cannot do that with a console. This is the core difference between console games and PC games. With PC engines you sacrifice performance to achieve compatibility. With console games, you only have (presumably) one spec, so you optimize your game engine for that single specification, and as a result you get far more out of weaker hardware.

Now if you want the NX to achieve the same type of performance you expect from console, game developers are going to have to put that much more time and effort developing engines that would be optimized for both specs. Either way it's added costs for the developers, and none of this changes the significant increase in testing costs.