viciouskillersquirrel said:
I was responding to your comment about Nintendo's next console being graphically underpowered. I was essentially saying that there are very good reasons for this to not be the case.
The reasons are business related (competitive advantage, marketing mix and all that). Because of Nintendo's advantages in other areas, they were able to forgo the tech race this time around. Since those advantages will disappear next gen, they might not be able to do that next gen.
I see what you're saying now, and I completely agree with you there. I hope Nintendo sees fit to offer a massive increase in power over Wii. The Wii chipset is very much late 1990s technology, since GameCube is late 1990s technology. If Nintendo was to offer a console in 2011, 2012, 2013 or whenever, with a chipset that was both modern for the time in terms of features, and reasonable in terms of power/performance/speed
(i.e. midrange by PC standards of that time), they would effectively take Nintendo gamers from GCN/Wii, who are acustomised/used to GCN/Wii graphics, forward by two console generations!
Also, my comment about the next leap not being so huge, I simply refer to the fact that both Sony and Microsoft are likely to be gun-shy about using such expensive tech in their next consoles given what happened to them this gen. I predict that the leap will be more conservative, because they won't be prepared to spend as much. I do admit though, that the technological leap as compared to cost may not have a straight-forward relationship.
That's very possible. We'll just see. One thing that I believe (perhaps wrongly) on the side of a larger leap, at least in visuals, is that resolution won't make another big leap next-gen. The console game industry will still be at the same 720p, 1080i, 1080p resolutions of today. Sure, there will be more 1080p games than this gen, but GPUs won't have to, again, fork over performance that just goes into increasing resolution, beyond what is already needed today. Although I suppose the arguement could be made that many games this gen are BELOW native 720p and that many games NEXT gen will be AT native 1080p, which is significantly higher resolution.
But it won't be like going from last-gen 480p to 720p/1080p which demands 3-6 times the pixel fillrate, higher bandwidth,and more RAM for basicly similar graphics at higher res. With 360/PS3, with their GPUs pushing resolutions that are 2.5 or 3 and upto 6 times more pixels, there wasn't much additional power beyond that to really improve the graphics themselves very much. Yes they are improved over last-gen, but not even close to as much as last-gen consoles improved over the gen before it.
So on the resolution front, things should have stabalised. If Microsoft/Sony can get much better GPUs, then in-game graphics can improve alot. I don't think the CPU leap will need to be as much, even though they'll go from multi-core to manycore, assuming all the articles we read are true. Sony won't need to invest massively in a whole new type of CPU. IBM can do most of the work for Sony. If though, Microsoft and Sony go with very modest leaps in performance, not as small as GCN to Wii (1.5x) but still small, like, 2x to 3x, then we will only be catching upto current HD resolution requirements, that 360/PS3 are barely handling properly (or aren't handling very well with some games) and so next-gen we WILL have games that look alot like current games.
Ultimately, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo don't give a shit about what I would like to see, but their bottem line. Yet, within that even, there should be some good stuff ahead, because of that wonderful thing called competition.
