superchunk said:
Anything to assist development is great.
I was just pondering on how smart Sony and MS are at going with a more standard PC architecture. That will provide leaps and bounds of simplicity and ease of use for 3rd party devs.
Whereas Nintendo is now the odd man out in the CPU and small memory footprint.
Hopefully the use of Unity and now this info makes it so simple to port to, devs see it as a no-brainer to throw the game over.
Nintendo needs to focus on the ability to have a very, very small investment to allow a scaled down PS4/neXtBox game ported, otherwise we have Wii all over again with zero AAA 3rd party games. But unlike Wii, you don't have the crazy mass consumer interest... yet, if ever. |
Funnily enough the architecture of all 3 consoles this gen is pretty similar, last gen was a bit of an oddball one which left the CPU doing most of the work that the GPU in previous gens and with PCs used to do. Having a similar architecture will make it easier to port between the Wii U/PS4/720 than it currently is to port between the Wii U/PS3/360.
As far as the memory is concerned, the size of it aside, the PS4 is the odd one out. Both Nintendo and Microsoft have sacrificed bandwidth for latency having DDR3 and eDRAM/ESRAM whereas Sony have gone for GDDR5 with a high bandwidth and more latency. The high latency is going to be a pain in the arse for developers later on, it's going to cause bottlenecks, as will the difference in speed between the optical and hard drives compared to RAM access.
You'll probably see developers prefer to be working with less bandwidth and lower latency I think. Think of it like a row of taps in a plumbing system. You get more taps with the PS4 Plumbing Company but when you turn the taps on you have to wait a few seconds for your buckets to fill. With the Nintendo and Microsoft Plumbing Companies you'll have less taps but when you turn them on the water starts as soon as you open the faucet.
And you shouldn't worry about the difference in the RAM quantity too much, Nintendo have an insane compression algorithm which will shrink textures down considerably. Have a look at Shin'En's Jett Rockett, that whole game was squeezed into 40MB. Bloomin impressive.
You've also got to remember that thanks to Nintendo's unprecedented deals with Greenhill, Autodesk, Havok and Unity developers are getting tens of thousands of pounds worth of software and middleware free with each dev kit. Indie devs in particular are going to be all over Wii U development these next few years, expect plenty of PC ports of Unity-driven games from Steam sooner rather than later.
As far as big publishers are concerned you'll always see them forcing developers to code for the lowest common denominator when that platform has the largest marketshare, the only reason we didn't see that happening with the Wii was because the Wii had a nonstandard rendering pipeline. The Wii U won't have that problem at all.
We'll see Wii U games resembling PC Medium settings and PS4/720 games resembling High/Very High settings, your Average Joe probably won't be able to tell the difference unless viewed side by side. The Wii U's hardware has been designed for a 720p native machine and the PS4/720's hardware has been designed for 1080p native machines. You're not going to see publishers leaving money on the table when Nintendo have an installed userbase over 10m before the end of the year.
