Technology has come a long way in five years, this is true. But as JustBeingReal has pointed out, the concept in as of itself is a rather old one. PC games have been doing this for years. But like with every design ever made in the history of mankind, there are trade offs in doing so. Those trade offs still exist. Now while it true that gains have been made in terms of making APIs more capable and more lightweight than ever before, many of those same principals can be applied to the APIs used in console game development making console-style APIs still much better suited for consoles. A broader API that is made to encompass multiple processors, memory allocations etc will always be more bloated, slower, more obtrusive, and more resource hungry then simply hardcoding variables for one specific hardware specification, and the differences between the two are still substantial even to this day.

Another point, this technology is already used in multi-platform engines developed for the PS4 and Xbox One. Sure the operating systems and APIs for those devices are different, but coding the engine (which is in a lot of ways a high-level API, along with a lot of other things) that communicates directly with these APIs and OSs still needs to be made as capable and as resource-lite as possible. Yet what do we still see from developers? Time and time again, first party exclusive games consitently look better and perform better than multi-platform games, and I don't see that gap shrinking, do you? That's not just due to the spreading of resources over mutliple platforms, it's due to the simple fact that developing an engine that only has to deal with one API, one OS, one hardware spec gives makes the engine smaller and more efficient, leading to significant performance gains. It's the same concept, just applied literally one level higher.

But let's move on from APIs, as they are just one part of it. Let's discuss infrastructure. It's one thing to say "you can create development suite which will allow developers to simply just scale the settings up and down and it "just work" because it's all basically the same hardware". Well it's not exactly the same, and it's not that simple. It would be like saying "i have these two rockets, one 1/2 the size of the other, and I want them to land 100 yards away from each other on the moon, so I'll just make a big panel with a button on it that says 'launch big rocket' and another button that says "launch little rocket" and there you go! Two rockets on the moon". People have to put a lot of work into developing the underlying infracstructure to those two rockets to launch correctly, and land them exactly where you intend on landing, and as it turns out the little rocket's fuel tanks aren't big enough to get it to the moon, and the big rocket won't fit right on the same launch pad. But, it's just a couple buttons, right?

Now I'm not calling video games rocket science, but making the infrastructure that would allow developers to develop, compile, and test games on two similar but different hardware specifications, with two different screen resolutions, and two similar but differnent everything else and making it so even a few hundred settings can be tweaked and a "just work" on these two similar but differernt hardware specs is an epicly huge undertaking, and a lot more complicated than making two sepearate developer kits for two similar, but separate devices, and just letting developers make what they want for each hardware spec.



M mainy point of contention is this -  If there really is that insigificant of a difference between console-APIs and PC counterparts, then even in 2007-2009 Sony had all the means of making an API that was "slightly less efficient" than the one they created for the PSV and PS4, and develop tools to make that porting games from the PS4 to the Vita a much simpler process than it actually is.  When it comes to development kits, development tools and support, in my experience Sony is marginally better than Microsoft and Nintendo is a very distant third. The developers kit and developer tools for the PSV when it came out were industry leading.  Also, there's no reason why Sony couldn't have leveraged new techology over the PSV's life to make APIs and new OSs for the Vita to do just that. But they haven't. Maybe they have in the years since I worked on that port (I haven't worked on a Vita game since) but still, the OS is more or less the same, and from what others have told me, it's still no walk in the park to port a game to Vita. These two devices barely interact with each other even though they were developed at the same time, and lead by the same person, all the while Sony was (and still is) one of the industry leaders in the very technology  JustBeingReal believes Nintendo can leverage to do just that.

I really don't think Nintendo could pull that off. In fact, even if they could, I don't think it would be wise of them to do so.

Thank you for the nice detailed response, I just have one other question. Would another factor in porting and making games for both Vita & PS4 be possibly affected by the difference in power between the two devices? Just from a quick Google search, this is what I found for specs on Vita & PS4.

Vita

CPU-4 core, 333mhz per core

GPU-30-50 gflops

RAM-512mb

PS4

CPU-8 core, 1.6ghz per core

GPU-1840 gflops

RAM-8gb

I don't know much about specs but that seems to be a pretty large difference. On top of that, don't they have seperate operating systems, architectures & API?

Theoretically if Nintendo's next handheld and next console were closer in power, for example Dual-core CPU, 250 gflop GPU, 2gb RAM vs Octo-Core variant of same CPU, 1 tflop GPU, 8gb RAM along with having the same architecture, operating system & API than wouldn't it be much easier to have cross-platform support across both devices? I'm not necessarily saying easy, but much easier than it is for Vita/PS4 or 3DS/Wii U?

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!

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?

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.