With the announcement of the 3DS, I’ve been starting to think more and more about what Nintendo could do in the next generation of home consoles; and one thought I had was what happens if Nintendo makes a significantly more powerful console, that is powerful in an unconventional way. I think the best way to explain what I mean by this is to actually describe what I mean.

Suppose you had a console that (for all practical purposes) could render as may polygons as you could ever want, could display as much texture data as you could throw at it, all at 1080p while maintaining a frame-rate of 60fps with 16xAA and 16xAF, but (while it supported many effects in hardware) it didn’t support programmable shaders. Essentially you could see it as Wii styled graphics with virtually unlimited detail and clarity.

The reason I started to think about this is that (in many ways) we have hit a point where you could (probably) produce a system like this and this might be an attractive approach for Nintendo. While I’m certain some people wouldn’t believe me, a large portion of the extra work associated with HD console games is the additional work required to create textures to supply the programmable shaders with data to display their effects; and while game development costs would escalate from the Wii to a system like this, they would become no where near as large as if Nintendo released a system with the latest and greatest programmable shader-based GPU.

The benefit of an approach like this (from a visual perspective) is that artists would be able to (effectively) produce whatever they wanted; and the downside would be that the technology behind the graphics would be frozen.

Since I don't know much about this side of things, let me ask you this - suppose a system supports programmable shaders - do you actually have to program for this aspect or can you ignore it? Because if you can ignore it, doesn't that mean that you don't have to waste time programming for it if you don't want to (?)

I'm not really knowledgable in the tech side of things, but I figure Nintendo would not take a leap much larger than what the PS3 could do right now. IDK about shaders/TEV and all that, but it would take a lot of time.

If Ninty could produce games just as quick, they could go right ahead. Whatever matches development now in terms of time will be used next-gen.
For a laymen's example, Ninty makes Wiis now with a SuperGX100 chip, taking 18 months to make a game. If they can make a game in 18 months with a SuperGX325, that's the route they will take.

You can ignore it, but most developers are unwilling to take that risk on systems like the PS3 or XBox 360. The reason is simple, if games you’re in direct competition with take advantage of programmable shaders you don’t want to give them that advantage.

i wouldn't get it. i want state of the art next-gen graphics with 7.1 DD support.

Even if it means that the average timeline for game development exceeds 5 or 6 years? What if the typical budget of a game passes $100 Million? What if it means that most publishers will go bankrupt?

Im sorry, but this really doesn't make sense. To get all the polygons you could ever want you'd need at least vertex shaders and a tessellator, but for a tesselator you need more programmable shaders to do the hull/domain shader programs etc and then you end up with a modern GPU anyway.

I doubt Nintendo will even go past the power of the current PS3 console, mostly because of the price of manufacturing. It was extremely stupid of Microsoft and Sony to release such over-powered consoles, they lost billions of dollars and ended up in a distant second and third place. All of the games released on the Xbox 360 and PS3 could be done on machines with a lower cpu/gpu - and the games that are made to take most advantage of these systems require insane budgets.


What Nintendo will release, will be a system with features that people want, and will buy.

I’m not talking about the feasibility of an approach like this nearly as much as I am talking from a conceptual standpoint. Understandably, one of the main reasons why Nintendo claimed to have chosen the hardware they did with the Wii was because of the development costs that would be associated with the HD console games; and this was of particular concern to Nintendo because you can’t try to make new and unusual software when you need to put tens of millions of dollars towards graphics to "Keep up with the Joneses" ...

The central thought is, what happens if Nintendo produces a more advanced piece of hardware (which could be dramatically more powerful than the HD consoles in a way) that is designed around keeping software costs limited? I don't think the specifics matter, and my suggestion was entirely theoritical.

As long as I get my next iteration of big Nintendo titles a few times in its life at a cost that is not outrageous, then I don't care what is under the hood.

However, I wouldn't own a PS3 if Wii was bluray with integrated media center capabilities, so that's saying something for the additional features I would like to have and am willing to pay for.