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potato_hamster on 01 February 2016
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JustBeingReal said:
potato_hamster said:
JustBeingReal said:
Soundwave said:
JustBeingReal said:
 

A ballpark can be a pretty big space TBH, when we're talking about resolutions scaling up or down. I mean 1920X1080=2,073,600 pixels (The Console), vs 640X480=307,200 (The Handheld), the handheld can be 6.75X weaker than the console, so we go from 2.683TFlops on the handheld, down to 397GFlops being needed on the handheld, you run the games basically the same as the console, just at a lower resolution.

Knock off AA or some textures and you're easily there, it's just if Nintendo wants to reduce costs further then they have that option.

The whole reduction of geometry thing is a none issue, it's no different than tweaking PC settings, essentially an automatic thing for modern game engines, just a flick of a switch when you build those features into your tech. You do the work at the beginning and iterate on them over time, but it's not a hugely time consuming thing.

Optimization is not something that you're going to get rid of, but it will be dead easy to handle for developers or even just on Nintendo's end, like how AMD releases drivers for different GPUs when a new game releases. Nintendo would only have to worry about their 2 devices or however many NX includes into it's ecosystem.

Polaris should be within the same pricepoint as a GTX 950, so around $150 at retail, for Nintendo considerably cheaper and for the handheld varient even cheaper than that, but incredibly power efficient and not hot for a small case. AMD's new stuff will definitely be cheap, especially in the handheld portion, because Nintendo will order big quantities of it for the handheld space, the console may also be ordered in big quantities if the system takes off.

That would reduce costs. AMD are the only ones that really do both handheld or big performance console, so they're a proven quantity and Nintendo has a great relationship with them. It's essentially been confirmed that AMD are the ones. The math proves they can do this, not sure why you'd have any doubts.

 

Anyway we've taken the thread off topic really. Prices for NX games was the topic, I think it makes sense for those costs to essentially work how they've always done, just that all games, be it previously handheld or console exclusive run on both devices or whatever devices exist in the NX family. Costs just depend on the kind of game and publisher's choices in that area.

 

Yeah, it's just that easy! Of course! That's how hardware scales. Just tweak a few settings and "poof" magic optimal hardware output.

 

Just curious -  what is your background in hardware design and development? Because if it was as easy as you're making it out to be, the engineers at Sony would have designed the PSP and PS Vita to do exactly that. Because that's precisely what they were aiming to achieve, and I can guarantee their collective intelligence and knowledge of hardware design vastly outstrips yours. Yet they couldn't manage to do it. Nowhere close to it in fact. Now I can understand the PSP meeting that goal when Sony chose the Cell processor for the PS3. But, the PS Vita? They had to know they were going towards the x86 architecture of the PS4. They've been making x86 processors for decades! But they couldn't make one that made the PS Vita a walk in the park to port PS4 games to - trust me, I know from first hand experience how difficult of a task that actually is.

You know what shows this will work that easy? PC, just look at how highly complicated, different hardware specs can all run the same games, because developers and hardware creators support the tech in all of those different PC builds, they do not have to make ports of games for each hardware set-up, they just make sure hardware drivers are updated and take new games and program code into consideration.

This hypethetical NX family of devices would actually be night and day simpler than this, because it wouldn't have anywhere near as many hardware set-ups. Nintendo's OS designers can easily just take all hardware specs into consideration and as long as each device is within a certain ballpark of the other(s) then this would work easily. Hell it's not hardware to disable AA, Tesselation, etc when you code a game engine to allow for that, which is the case for all 3rd party developers and their engines dating back to beginning of modern PC gaming.

You think a 4K capable PC and a thousand other spec builds are getting unique ports? No, developers make a high end build of their game, that's the only one. End users choose their settings to make the game run how they like on their particular, unique PC build and the developer has built their game engine to allow for the settings to be tweaked.

The only major difference in the hypothetical NX set-up is that it's way less complicated than PC, because NX only has maybe a few different specs, but they all use the same OS and all of the tech (just like in PC) is taken into consideration by Nintendo and their OS programmers.

Sony didn't make anything like this, PSP and Vita, PS3, PS4, etc are all made in their own vacumes as far as their final OS goes, the OS of each weren't designed to run on a bunch of different devices and unify the library of games and the technical architecture wasn't really made to work seamlessly across all games for this kind of thing, proven by the fact that they all have different control inputs and the fact that developers have to port their games across them if they want to allow crossplay. Which isn't necessary in a windows or Linux, etc environment

There's nothing magical about logical math equations and analysis of real world hardware that actually exists or real examples of this very thing that I'm suggesting.

As for what I do, or what my experience is, I could say whatever I like, but the proof is in the pudding of the examples I give here. You haven't given a single example of why this couldn't work. Math and real examples disagree with you.

This isn't how console video game development works. PC game development is actually a lot different than console development, and those comproimses that PC developers make to have scaling hardware settings by interfacing with APIs rather than the hardware itself means major sacrifices to performance. In doing so,  You lose the ability to optimize for specific hardware specifications, something consoles can't afford to do given the fact that the hardware is weak to begin with. You see, console developers don't program a game to interact with the operating system, or even with APIs to send instructions to the hardware. The engines are built to interact with the hardware directly. Certain portions of the hardware are "roped off" that game engines do not have access to which the OS runs on, and the engines do interact with the OS for things like controller input, camera input, achievements/trophies etc. But for the most part, engines are programmed right "on the metal". It allows you to optimize specifically for that hardware,  allowing developers to streamline commands, minimize processing times, work around bottle necks, and free up additonal resources to make other parts of the game better. It's why console games can look so much better and run so much smoother than on PCs with near identical hardware. In other words, it's a fundamental and critical part of console video game development.

Because you don't appear to know this, the rest of your argument completely falls apart because it's based on a flawed assumption. It's not less complicated for the hypothetical NX and more than PC development becoming more complicated if intel releases a new processor. It doesn't matter if you have 5 specs of 500 specs, not being able to optimize for one spec, and interfacing with an API or OS instead means you lose that performance advantage. That's why console video game developers don't do it.

Again, if it were as easy as you said, Sony could have just developed an OS or an API for the Vita knowing what the OS or API for the PS4 would be (or vice versa) and get near instant ports of PS4 games on the PSV. The hardware specs wouldn't really matter, would it? I mean it's "just" two diifferent hardware specifications" to design the OS the handle - what's the big deal, right? This is what Sony was aiming to achieve with the PSP and PSV, home console games seemlessly taken on the road and back to the console going from one device to the next. That was the vision. The hardware and OS was designed with that in mind. Why do you think Sony didn't take the approach you're suggesting? Seriously. If it's that obvious and that easy, then the engineers at Sony with decades of experience that should be more than capable of pulling it off. Why didn't they? Why did they take a different approach? And don't tell me they were "developed in a bubble" considering many of the people behind the Vita and PSP are the same people behind the PS3 and PS4. These devices were developed with the other in mind.