Speculation about the power of the dev kits, even the last few pages of Arkam saga - hasn't informed me one jot. I am less sure about what other people know, and I personally know about as much as I did last week... which isn't a lot.
I do hope Nintendo start getting some news out soon... tomorrow would be a good start. E3 can be the blow-out, but a few teases and incidental announcements to whip up hype towards the expo might be nice.
There's been only one real problem with everything. People for whatever reason have interpreted the early dev kits to be a 100% representation of the final hardware. That just doesn't happen. Even some of Wii's early kits were modified Gamecubes (insert jokes about Wii still being a modified Gamecube).
With Arkam I believed him
from the beginning, but some things weren't sitting right with what he was saying and I said as much. Now I understand why and that's because he doesn't have direct access to the kit and is instead passing on what he was told. The fact (and I do believe him on that as well) that they had to scale their games back though isn't something I can attribute to the hardware as that is way more likely due to how they were designing their game(s) for PS360 hardware. Too many have already said otherwise to believe it's the dev kit's fault they had to scale back the game. However Arkam has been very clear in multiple posts that he was talking about the earlier dev kit.
Going back to what I was saying I don't see how people can say some of things they have in regards to expecting the early kit to be like final. Let's look at all the info we have been given.
This is going to revolve around the GPU and memory. First is that we've had multiple, yet consistent, indications that the GPU in the dev kit was an RV770 though which one has been tough to pin down. This means that the GPU in the case is on a 55nm process which fully clocked is going to be hot. Not long after E3 we learned that the GPU had been underclocked. Lherre also told us that anytime they pushed the GPU it would freeze. I believe one or two others on the board that know someone mentioned that as well around that time. There is a very good chance that the GPU was underclocked under 500Mhz for stability. And when I say under I don't mean barely under.
We also have to acknowledge that this was most likely an "off-the-shelf" part. What does this mean? It means the dev kit most likely does not have the eDRAM that Nintendo is saying it will have. The lack of that would cause a big deficiency when developing. Look at the Zelda demo. The lighting and textures were beautiful, but that thing was so jaggy you could cut your hand if you touched the screen. Arkam's post also has backed that up with his comment on the memory being slow. It's obvious the system memory even in the final won't have some huge bandwidth or else they wouldn't need the eDRAM in the first place. But with the dev kit not having that eDRAM leaving the BW-hungry things like AA to depend on the slower system memory, then you can understand why we saw what we did in the Zelda demo. But I also attribute that to the amount of time they had to create it while also focusing on controller interaction.
Going to the memory what we know is that dev kits tend to have twice the memory of what the final would have. We know that like past Nintendo consoles there is the early kit that looks like a plain black (or grey for the GC if I remember correctly) case, and also in the last thread lherre said he had the "ugly, retail version". That alone indicated that there were two aesthetically different dev kits in the wild. And it's plausible that the black Wii U kit has less memory on top of other things that were an issue back then. It may very well have only had 1GB while lherre's "newer" kit has way more. So we have to wonder that if there are actual differences then which one does Arkam's company have? We also know thanks to lherre that there had been no "real" changes in "ugly, retail version" for a good while. Considering the GPU in the dev kit, the memory was most likely GDDR3. With the 4830/4850 that memory is, according to Wikipedia, clocked at 900/993Mhz so it's not like that is dramatically more than the 700Mhz GDDR3 in the 360. And even then we don't know if that was underclocked either. We also know that the kit has at least 2GB and most likely has the max amount. Considering the target max for the retail console is 1.5GB, that would put the dev kit at 3GB.
Personally when I look at all the info, as of now I think the GPU in the dev kit looks something like this. When looking at the amount of memory, the GPU in the kit is most likely a 4850 due to the bus because they would need a larger bus for the extra memory as the 4830 has a 128-bit bus. But at the same time they probably disabled a couple SIMDs to help reduce heat making it more comparable to the 4830 from a power perspective. The latter of course not including the underclocking on top of that to reduce heat. After all as we know that's a 55nm GPU and they probably did as much as they could to get the heat down till the final GPU is ready on what is pretty much guaranteed to be a smaller process and probably 32nm.
So for me as I said before my expectations have not changed. My guesstimated specs are the same barring certain, yet small, things that may have changed in the final hardware. Miyamoto said Wii U won't dramatically outperform PS360 and I agree with that. At the same time it's not going to be blown away by Xbox 3 and PS4 like Wii was, which was intentional on Nintendo's part.
I've seen no reason to get upset with anything that was said recently. The info was consistent with what we have heard. And while the opinion on that info was not consistent, that doesn't degrade the info itself. That's what some need to understand instead of getting so riled up. Separate the opinion from the facts that were given.
