zorg1000 said:
potato_hamster said:
But this is my point, isn't it? I'm not arguing that Sony realistically could have done this! I am arguing they couldn't. You don't have to convince me, but you should have to convince JustBeingReal that such a thing isn't very realistic, even if it's theoretically possible. But curiously that is not the case.
They do have a pretty large difference in terms of performace, but so would the NX home and NX handheld. In terms of OSs and APIs, these would have to be made "the same", but Sony should just be able to do that according to JustBeingReal. So that's really a non factor. So, the primary difference when the chips are down between the PS Vita and PS4 in terms of making this feasible is architecture. However that's by and large irrelevant according to JustBeingReal's example as proof positive this can be done: PCs. How different is an AMD vs Intel processor? How different are AMD and nVidia graphics cards, all varying amounts of Ram and clock speeds, and bus sizes, and hard drive speeds etc. etc. Look at all the different variables PC games have to account for - Sony would just have to account for two specs - the PS4 specs and the Vita's specs. That really shouldn't be that much more difficult than accounting for two similar hardware (not identical) architectures, should it?
Of course, all of those things are difficult to do. For example, going from 8 GB to 2 GB of RAM doesn't mean you can just make all those memory allocations 1/4 the size of what they were on the 8gb console and things "just work". There's a minimum memory allocation needed to handle all of the animations, or collision detection and what not. Your collision detection is going to be a lot worse if it doesn't have the same resources to make the same calculations at the same rates as before, thus you'd be fundamentally changing your game. You also can't just "scale" a 3D model, or it's rigging skeletion, or it's animations down to 1/4 of its memory footprint with the click of a mouse. Someone has to go in and make new simpler versions of the game so the game doesn't run terribly. Now you might be thinking "well what about PCs?". Well there's such things as "minimum requirements" for a reason. Also, take a note of any AAA PC game running at its lowest setting vs running at its highest. Do you think such a dramatic difference sold as "the same game on the same platform" would be acceptable to Nintendo's consumers? These are all factors that JustBeingReal completely trivializes, and thinks can be solved with a slider in a settings menu.
Now let's look at that identical Operating system. Let's say it takes less than half the Memory footprint the PS4 uses, and the same memory footprint as the Wii U - 1.0 GB. Woops. There goes half of the memory the handheld uses. They're identical after all, and Operating Systems don't exactly scale do they? Otherwise why make the console Operating System that big in the first place? Look's like we're stripping down that operating system for the handheld. Now that's another factor the infrastructure has to account for.
...this is all going pear-shaped isn't it? But it looks good on paper!
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I'm not trying to convince you of anything, I'm asking questions because I legitimately don't know. I'm just asking wouldn't a theoretical handheld & console that are much closer in power along with sharing an OS, architecture, API be able to receive cross-platform titles much easier than Vita/PS4 or 3DS/Wii U?
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It would definitely be easier - but by how much? A lot less than a lot of people think I'd say. I definitely I wouldn't say "much easier".
But that's a pretty vague term. The truth is I couldn't possibly say without knowing a lot of different factors that haven't been publicly revealed. I'd have to know how good the infrastructure for both devices is (tools, developer kits, test kits etc.) I'd have to know the arcitecture of both devices - if there are any bottlenecks found in one and not the other, or if the handheld has any power management controls that limits system resources if the system if under load for a certain period, for example. But even if one is a "scaled down" version of the same architecture, there could be a processor cache that's so small that it prevents certain operations from being used on it that would be arbitrary on the "higher scale" version. I'd have to know how similar the Operating Systems and APIs are.
There are so many things I'd need to know to make an even remotely educated guess, but if I were to speculate, I'd say it'd make things 20-30% easier, but that's still not exactly a walk in the park.
