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JustBeingReal on 31 January 2016
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Soundwave said:
JustBeingReal said:
Thunderbird77 said:
teigaga said:
WoodenPints said:

You're probably right with this but even a jump from $39.99 - $59.99 for people who are big handheld fans wouldn't go down to well with them.

 

 

If the next Pokemon offers Wii U level graphics, I think people will quickly forget the price hike ;) 

 

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.

 

Polaris is still designed with fat laptops and desktop class environments in mind, I think AMD could give Nintendo more power per watt if they specifically asked for something from the ground up for a portable. 

The Apple A9X I'm fairly sure would eat the Wii U alive, and that's a portable chip in a fan-less design. PowerVR pegs it at dead with a mobile Nvidia 730M GPU, which isn't a bad little chip, it can even run PS4/XB1 only games like The Witcher 3 and Assassin's Creed Unity well enough at 720p resolution. 

I think if Nintendo priortized it, AMD could give them a similar kind of chip (as the A9X or Nvidia's Tegra X1). 

No Polaris is designed to be a more efficient architecture, which is why it's made on a smaller 14nm finfet scale. It's a matter of performance per watt. It's not hard to eat Wii U's processor for breakfast, because that was made using an older 40/45nm scale, which is way less efficient than PS4 and Xbox One's architecture.

This is what AMD has now, along with their Zen CPU core or maybe Puma, unless Nintendo wants to go with the older tech, like the architecture that Carrizo uses. You need to forget this Apple A9 or PowerVR stuff. Nintendo sticks with their partners, the only reason they'd move away from one is to make sure they're compatible with their competitors like Sony and Microsoft, so they probably won't use IBMs PowerPC tech any more.

Polaris is definitely competive with Tegra X1, considering that it's possible to run Xbox 360 level graphics on like 5 watts, that's full native 720p, games with visuals like Halo 4, 30FPS.

A Polaris chipset at 43 watts could basically hit Xbox One levels of graphics, that's 900p 30FPS, with all the same visual bells and whistles.

Nintendo will likely go all AMD, the only question really is whether they choose Polaris and Zen, Puma and 2014/15 GPU tech or some combination of those architectures. Hopefully they go with the newer combo, because it futureproofs them somewhat more if they're planning on releasing newer devices, with better capabilities, but keep the NX Family idea.

 

Polaris should be able to scale, if Nintendo requires a handheld version, then AMD just uses fewer CPU and GPU cores, along with clocking them slower. Same goes for the RAM. The console would just use more of everything and everything stays nice and compatible for developers making their games.

No porting, because of the unified OS, just lowering of graphical and resolution settings. Simples.