potato_hamster said:
Soundwave said:
Vita was good tech for its time, but Sony basically just missed the boat for really super powerful mobile processors.
The Vita actually basically got the same chip the top of the line iPad had for 2011 even before the iPad 3 came out. With a freaking expensive OLED screen. For only $250.
The difference today though is the top of the line iPad processor, the Apple A9X *blows* the Vita chip out of the water. It's 500-600 GFLOPS vs. 30-50 GFLOPS (Power VR SGX543MP4+).
If Sony released a Vita 2 this year, absolutely they could have had a unified platform with the PS4, the tech just wasn't ready for prime time (or even close) 5 years ago. It is today. The tech is here.
Nintendo has a wonderful oppurtunity here to use some seriously incredible tech (and affordable) if AMD can give someting comparable to what the other mobile vendors are doing. The thing is these super powerful mobile chips ... they're having trouble finding applications for them ... a phone, even a tablet only needs so much power, but a mobile game console could easily use all that horsepower. PowerVR is trying to impliment the GT7900 processor (their top of the line 800 GFLOP GPU) into cheap Android mini-consoles for example.
Nvidia's Tegra X1, you can buy that in a $199 console for almost a year already with 3GB of RAM. And that's with a large mark up on the hardware. These are not expensive processors, because that's the nature of the mobile processor market ... all vendors are asking for more powerful chips (for yearly refreshes) but at a cheap cost in exchange for high volume orders. This is a great situation for Nintendo to get themselves a really fantastic chip.
Which is probably what Nintendo saw coming, I'm sure they sat down with AMD 3-4 years ago and they mapped out where mobile chips would be at today and from that they started to seriously think about a unified platform I think.
|
Well yes and no. As I've said, there's only so much you can do with a slider. But mentioning the Vita's power output reminded me of another thing, the PS3. Sure the PS3 was long in the tooth when the Vita came out, but the Vita's architecture was much more similar to the PS3's, not to mention in terms of performance the PSV outperformed the PS3 in many ways, could Sony have employed a similar strategy for porting PS3 games? I mean just think about it - AAA PS3 titles are still coming out to this day. Sure they're not made to the same graphical fidelity as the PS4 or the X1, but if Sony took the same approach that Nintendo is supposedly taking with the NX, then you theoetically, you could have games like MGSV, Fallout 4, etc. all coming out for the Vita this fall.
Yet they never did that, because in my opinion, there are still technological hurdles that make such things incredibly difficult that can't be solved with a handful of sliders, and I've dicussed a few of them previously.
|
In what ways did a Vita outperform a PS3? The Vita was good chip for its time but it was also woefully behind the PS3/XB360 at only 30 GFLOPS vs 250+ GFLOPS. The PS3 also had a fairly wonky architecture.
The Vita chip is the same GPU that's in the Apple 5X chip, today's equivalent is the Apple 9X which is a 500-600 GFLOP part with a monstrous memory bandwidth too. The A9X is more than 1/3 of a XB1/PS4, the gap is shrinking because these mobile chips are exploding in performance these last 3 years in particular.
A 550 GFLOP processor with a memory bandwidth of 512GB/sec (more than 1/3 the PS4's GDDR5) likely is enough to give you fairly comfortable PS4/XB1 ports at 960x540 resolution, some even at 1280x720.
If Sony built a Vita for this year using the same equivalent processor for its time (what's in the Apple A9X instead of the Apple 5X) ... they absolutely I think would be able to have a unified platform today.
