Hey guys, remember how 40 posts ago we were talking about the relative hardware designs of Nintendo consoles (y'know, the topic) and not whether the Gamecube was "good"? Let's get back to that!
lostinblue said:
And if I recall correctly the Wii retailer margin was more than the Arcade and a little under the X360 Pro. (makes sense, basically)
The normal console margin in the US is zero, though.
XPE said:
Then i seriously doubt that Nintendo sacrificed absolutely everything for BC.
whats more likely to have happened because of the extremely poor sales of the gamecube Nintendo had less money to put into R&D and less money to put into hardware, so in order to make money off the hardware they stuck to low specs
They didn't go with the architecture they did because they had to cut costs; they went with it because their own internal teams were extremely familiar with that architecture and would be able to do great work with it right off the bat. (Backwards compatibility was probably a secondary, but not entirely insignificant, consideration after that.)
I think the proof of the pudding is in the tasting of the 3DS here: Nintendo broke away from what a lot of people had theorized and went with a chip that uses something much more similar to the usual shader pipeline, resulting in an unprecedented situation where the first third party games shown off for the 3DS actually look much better than the internal Nintendo games. To me, that's a tacit acknowledgement that the design choices made with the Wii were suboptimal.
brain_stew said:
I'll leave the explanation of vertex shaders to someone more qualified than me
I'm definitely not more qualified by any stretch of the imagination :lol but the short version is that vertex shaders are useful in creating deformation effects (cloth effects, certain animation effects, etc.) and "procedural geometry," and also are used in conjunction with pixel shaders to produce many advanced lighting effects, that is to say, they're super-important and not being able to do them sucks.
