Thunderbird77 said:
You should quickly forget the idea of a $199 handheld having wii u graphics in the near future. |
Actually an AMD Polaris GPU basically offers 2.683Tlops on 86 Watts (using AMD's own GFlop calculation method).
So AMD are capable of 31.20GFlops per watt, at 10 watts Polaris architecture can outperform PS3 or 360, it's basically at Wii U levels of performance on less than a 3rd of the total power consumption of Wii U, which is handheld territory.
Price wise full polaris is probably going to be competitive with a GTX 950, so around £130/$150 for that full 2.683TFlop GPU, a handheld version of that chip, using a fraction of the silicon of that chip will probably be under £20 per handheld for the whole SOC.
That GTX 950 price is at retail, not taking into consideration the cost to a platform holder, which is actually much lower, because Amazon makes a reasonable profit per item of stock, to Nintendo chips are going to cost less. Actually a 320GFlop AMD handheld, with a 1080p panel and everything else needed to make it all work can easily happen at $199.
Running Wii U level graphics on a handheld at a reasonable price is actually possible now, it just all depends on what kind of battery Nintendo wants to use.
Considering that NX console would probably have graphics a bit better than PS4, the handheld will likely be running the same games, just with lower resolutions and with some of the graphical bells and whistles turned off. So the handheld version of the games will actually still look better than Wii U graphics.
