So, the Wii 2 is announced
- Thread starter Lonemagpie
- Start date
The PS3 potentially is more powerful but in the past, developers have said they prefer to make games on the 360 because Sony's dev kits tools or whatever you call them are bastards. However PS3 seems to have sorted itself out over the past 18 months
I think it's something about the way the cell chip works, rather than having 7 independent cores it has 1 master control and 6 slave cores, and the master has to dedicate different cores to different tasks. Which takes more coding.
The PS3 is a decent machine, and I say that as someone, who at the start of this generation, said they wouldn't have a PS3 if they were giving them away.
That's not quite it. The 360 has a 512mb pool for both system RAM and video RAM. The PS3 has the same total amount, but 256mb is system only whilst the other 256mb is video only.
third party issues extend beyond just, "can we get our game up and running on the Wii 2?" it will start with, "is it worth the investment to get a game running on the Wii 2?"
let's for a moment assume that all tech specs are equal among all 3 platforms and that there is no extra development costs associated with it. 2 of these platforms already have tens of millions of systems in homes. 2 of the platforms have proven that 3rd party games sell.
now, is it worth spending money on that system? it's risky. like i said before, i think you'll get barebone ports (assuming the architecture is similar enough, and assuming middleware supports it) to test the water.
what also worries me, is that if Sony and MS release a new system in 2 years, Nintendo will once again find themselves lagging behind in terms of tech.
let's for a moment assume that all tech specs are equal among all 3 platforms and that there is no extra development costs associated with it. 2 of these platforms already have tens of millions of systems in homes. 2 of the platforms have proven that 3rd party games sell.
now, is it worth spending money on that system? it's risky. like i said before, i think you'll get barebone ports (assuming the architecture is similar enough, and assuming middleware supports it) to test the water.
what also worries me, is that if Sony and MS release a new system in 2 years, Nintendo will once again find themselves lagging behind in terms of tech.
Ah, I see. I'd thought it was the other way around and the PS3 has slightly less overall but it appeared to be more when read as 1 single amount of memory.
That's exactly what I said about the Wii and the difficulty in coding games for it as compared to the others. It remains to be seen whether the Wii 2 will be different in that regard.
Oh, as far as FPSes go, I think the Wii wasn't a great platform for them. I liked Goldeneye which could be said to be the best FPS on the system, and it was impressive game for the system in what they were able to do with it and it improved on a lot of things that others on the system failed to do. Generally though, the control system was inadequate as turning around quickly (which is needed in an FPS) was almost impossible or hard to do due to it acting sluggishly. The system would also randomly lose track of the controller even when pointing right at the screen often making pointing around an exercise in frustration in critical times.
The PS3 memory is a little harder to block out and allocate. It's got more, but you have to be a bit more careful about it. (This was one major stumbling block to early development.) New libraries do this allocation automatically so it's not the isssue that it once was.
The X360 cheats with 1080p, with the chokepoint being the AV output. This is a side-effect of it being rushed to the market with the HD format not really settled-upon just yet. The X360 renders internally at 1080, hits the output chokepoint, and then rescale it. This was one issue the XBlu was supposed to fix (along with the switch to BluRay discs).
In the sense that they're ALL out of date if they were PC cards, then sure.
But, really, for home consoles there are a few years left to each of them. The Wii's real shortcomings are more 'capacity' than performance, at least for the types of games that Nintendo wants and is known for. Also, the gimmick controller, while great for what it does, requires developers to make a game around the controller... which isn't intiutive.
^As Arrqh said, they actually have the same overall amount of RAM, but the PS3 has 256mb system ram (but only 244mb is available to be allocated) and 256mb video ram. Where as the Xbox has 512mb shared ram which can be shared as needed. So while they have the same amount of ram physically they're allocated differently and the PS3 has slightly less to be used by the games. This is why games like Ghostbusters actually have worse graphics on the PS3 than they do on the Xbox.
If you're talking about the Xbox using component out, well that's not been the case for a long time now, all new models since the original Elite came out have had HDMI, and after a system update was able to output on the components as 1080p as well. I don't know what you mean by Xblu, or about the xbox using blu-ray discs. There is a new disc format coming for the xbox but this is just the same DVD discs but with the space reallocated so it doesn't reserve 1gb for video and gives them an extra gig of space to play with.
What I mean is both the Xbox and the Wii graphics chips are based on the same chips as the Radeon X1000 range. So if we were talking PC graphics cards the Wii may be an x1500 while the xbox may be an x1900.
If you're talking about the Xbox using component out, well that's not been the case for a long time now, all new models since the original Elite came out have had HDMI, and after a system update was able to output on the components as 1080p as well. I don't know what you mean by Xblu, or about the xbox using blu-ray discs. There is a new disc format coming for the xbox but this is just the same DVD discs but with the space reallocated so it doesn't reserve 1gb for video and gives them an extra gig of space to play with.
What I mean is both the Xbox and the Wii graphics chips are based on the same chips as the Radeon X1000 range. So if we were talking PC graphics cards the Wii may be an x1500 while the xbox may be an x1900.
You can allocate video memory and game memory more freely with the PS3 libraries. It just takes more work. Game houses that cut their teeth on DirectX will not likely take advantage of this, or use extended libraries, since they're trying to keep their low-level code as simple as possible.
Perfectly understandible considering time and budgets and all that. But, again, it's not quite the excuse it used to be.
The only issue here is that the XBox outscaling issue can vary depending on the SKU of the actual XBox that you're using. (The HDMI native change is more than just the plug, after all). Again, for most people this is a minor, even negligible difference. But the XBox specs are not really 1080i native, since developers are instructed to assume 720p accordingly. (For awhile, there was an effort to have games labelled as 'Runs Better on the XBox Elite', but marketing put a nix on that pretty damn fast.)
XBlu (I forget the actual code name) was a project a couple of years back to replace the HD-DVD set up with a new internal blu-ray drive (from Toshiba), expand the memory to 2G, and have HDMI true native. Some of the specs got used in the Elite, but Microsoft apparently didn't really want to use the BluRay discs just yet - probably because Sony would then make some money from XBoxes...
Wii is a custom chip ("Hollywood") that only outputs to 500x (exact number above). It's good and fast for what it does, and it helped keep the Wii affordable, but it's definately a few notches below the X360 and PS3 GPUs. This isn't to slam the Wii, since the 'high end graphics' would push the Wii's price range out of their sweet spot.. really, they only need to 'upgrade' their output to 720 to keep their market share going with the next iteration. (Playing at least DVDs would help as well...)
PS3 and X360's next iterations would likely both have to be BluRay at 4G machines with 1080i native (downscaling to 720). I'm not really sure the market could bear new console entries at that price point right now, though. Even combined, the current generation of consoles is way behind the PS2's numbers last gen. The PS3, really, just isn't ready to require an upgrade.
The X360 could do an upgrade with a unit that is fully backwards compatible but swaps the drive and memory available to keep it going awhile longer. X360Nu? But, again, I don't think the market can bear another major console release at the moment.
We're all getting really off topic but I dont think the Wii's GPU is really related to the radeon X series. It's only AMD because AMD bought ATI who bought ArtX who made the Gamecubes GPU. I'm not sure hwat if anything(other than clock speed) was changed between the GC version and the Wii. To compare to a PC graphics card the 360 is porbably close to a Radeon X1900 and a Wii is more like a Radeon 9550
It'd seen something that said Hollywood was based on the R500 core, but I can't find it now.
