NX game price if the library is unified?

[potato_hamster]

Soundwave said:

potato_hamster said:

 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. 

You could be right, but if and only if the end result,  peceived quality of the game on the handheld is not detractingly inferior to the game on the home console, especially conidering, even with the performance drop of building a more resource hungry API, and possibly an OS that is more bloated than typically seen on handhelds. There's no way around it you will be losing performance taking this approach. If that can be overcome, and games are near identical on both handheld and console as a result, this becomes far more do-able, making it easier to port games.

However, I personally don't think Nintendo can get the performance of the NX high enough to overcome this given the pricepoint thresholds, battery life etc. But I still do not think the process of porting will be simple as a recomplie, nor do I think both consoles will take the same cartridge/disc format, nor do I think games will be cross compatible, but those are more business decisions than anything.

I must say, you've done a good job coninvincing me that the concept does have more merit than I originally thought. Well argued.