Topic: IGN Promises Rev Specs: Evening 3/29/06

[Kairon]

Be prepared for the initial speculation to end and even more frenzied argument and secondary speculation to begin! It's all downhill from here:

Matt C's IGN Blog promises Rev Specs

There, now I'm gonna be refreshing the darn site every 2 minutes for the next 5 hours in darned anticipation. You've ruined my evening Matt!

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com  

[Ian Sane]

Some NDA must have run out or something.  I'm excited though I honestly would have no idea what the written specs would mean so I hope someone here will be able to translate the tech speak for me.  What I want to know is how things compare to the Xbox 360 and if possible the PS3.  How comparable is the Rev to the competition?  A comparison to the Cube would be nice too so we can see how big the jump is.

Too bad Nintendo hasn't shown us any screens.  If they showed us some screens and they looked fantastic then even if these specs are "weak" it wouldn't matter because we can say "it doesn't matter because the games will still look this good."

[Talon]

Personally I couldnt give a damn what the specs are.  As long as the hardware is efficient and has no bottlenecks the Rev should be fine.  Although a bit extra RAM wouldn't hurt

The only people who truely care about the specs of the Revolution is the developers (and fanboys comparing cock sizes).

[Kairon]

Ah, but what about fanboys who want to be developers?

Anyways, saying that specs don't matter is just as ridiculous as saying that they're all that matters. The key is that specs don't tell anything as is, they're just pixels on your computer screens, and as with everything else in life the true value in anything is only uncovered after a lot of hard, conscious work and thinking. Specs alone can tell us nothing, but a considered analysis of the specs may lead us to some insightful conclusions about the world of videogames.

Especially for Nintendo fans is this true. After all, what other company out there believes so much in the intentional and calculated synergy of hardware and software but Nintendo?

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[Kairon]

Here's the link!

IGN basically confirms their past predictions

After reading that I had three thoughts:

1. Should we all start talking about $99 or $150 launches again?

2. Nintendo is obviously steering away from the "More is more" approach. With IGN reconfirming the comparatively low amount of system Ram for the Rev (though, it should be pointed out that competing systems only need so much RAM for their bloated HD textures) and no talk from IBM about multi-cores, the Rev will be known NOT for games that support worlds with hundreds of thousands of characters at once, but for games based on essential and innovative gameplay.

For example, Ninety-Nine Nights, on the XBox 360, has its wow factor in having thousands upon thousands of enemies onscreen for players to kill all at once by merely pushing a button. The Revolution looks to be aiming to have games that, without the appeal of thousands upon thousands of mindless NPC cannon fodder, will be involving through the essence of their gameplay.

3. Where's that guy who talked about the repackaging of the GC? I wanna worship him!


~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[trip1eX]

Yeah if those are the specs and the gpu doesn't feature alot of extra goodies than $150 ain't out of the question that's for sure.  Tho I remember Iwata mentioning the controller was expensive to develop.  Maybe he was setting the tone to justify $199.

This thing definitely ain't going for more than $200.

Sure it's a gamecube repackaged, but really it's always been.  From the get go, Perri Kaplan said 2 or 3 times more power.  

btw folks remember you don't need half the power to 480i/p that you need in order to do hi-def.  

[IceCold]

Quote
3. Where's that guy who talked about the repackaging of the GC? I wanna worship him!

Oh no, don't lure Knoxville in..

[Kairon]

Just thought of some awesomeness.

Take the $100 or $150 launch thought and mix in Nintendo's "in-addition-to-a-PS3-or-XBox" strategy and also their "non-gamers" strategy and mix it all together...

It all seems to come together so well!

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[trip1eX]

Nintendo doesn't have an in addition strategy.  It would be like saying they market the  DS as being in addition to the PSP.  

While a low pricepoint makes it easier for hardcore gamers to pick up the REv too most folks (75% or greater) don't buy more than 1 console and the hardcores buy 'em all anyway.

Still a low pricepoint will be tempting to many.  They'll get increased graphics and tech, but save themselves at $200 if not more.  Plus have a new way to play.  Sure the tech increase won't be as great, but also remember the difference on a regular TV won't be as great as a spec comparision would imply because 360/PS3 games will be developed for 720p.  

[PaLaDiN]

Eh. This isn't a good thing by any means.

That said, I trust Nintendo to make up for it with an extremely compelling controller and games.

[Kairon]

Trip1ex, Nintendo has gone on record that they want gamers to buy the Rev EVEN if they own a PS3 or X360. Hardcore gamers will basically have no excuse to NOT own a Rev if the thing is as cheap as we all suspect. This non-competition thing is certainly working out nicely.

And I think that the Rev's price point, combined with it's mind-blowing interface and "can't get anywhere-else" gaming experience, will make it VERY attractiev to the casual know-nothing gamer.

And of course, the mainstream market, and the non-gamers, wouldn't be as picky on Specs, they're all about utility and the price barrier they face.

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[KnowsNothing]

READY GO

These specs are pretty dissapointing, I guess.  Personally I don't really care.  It's more powerful than the GC, and honestly with compelling software I wouldn't have cared if it were the same as the GC.  I just wanted to say that while one of the main benefits of this harware is price, I really doubt we'll see even a $150 launch price, never mind you crazy $100 theorists.  This is going to save Nintendo a bunch of money on manufacturing, but how much of that money will be passed on to us?  I think it'd be pretty stupid to launch at $100.  

Personally I'm predicting around a $199 launch, which is still pretty cheap.  I also think it's a high possibilty that we'll be getting some sort of demo with it, and/or maybe some kind of coupon for the Virtual Console.  So yeah, uhhh.  The end.

[BigJim]

In a nutshell: Revolution = GameCube on steroids, literally. The Rev's CPU and graphics are derived from its Gamecube ancestors, with 67% clock boosts.

There's no doubt Revolution is $200 max now. It could scale down to $150 fairly quickly I think.

GameCube was able to measure up well against the other systems because the on-paper stats alone don't speak for the bandwidth and other efficiencies in its design. So, just think "equal or better than Xbox" if you want an idea about how games will look.

It's not as power hungry on paper as I thought it'd be, but I'm not sure it matters. It's not an HD system. If you thought GameCube looked good, if you thought Xbox looked good, then Revolution will look better. Though don't expect to be blown away with HD-equivalent visuals either.

More RAM would be nice, though. They could bottleneck themselves quickly on that.  

[TMW]

The best thing would be a slew of tech demos like those seen in the original Rev video...a fishing game, some wandering around in the dark game, a cooking game, etc, as well as say...1-3 free VC games per console.

[ThePerm]

what if a devloper was feeding ign really bad specs as a joke? It would be funny.

as far as the underpoweredness...why?

Theres no point. You can have cake, and eat it too.

[KnowsNothing]

But then you have to pay for the cake, only to find out that it's nothing special.  You've had cake, right?  You know what to expect.

I'd rather have one, cheap, but really good cupcake, with revolutionary cupcake features.

[Ceric]

Actually I'm a little dissapointed about some things.  But if it's has the same amount of detail that the cube got, little things like all the labels face the same way if you crack one open, I'm sure that it's tuned to the point that only way to make it more efficient would be to put it all on 1 chip.  Anybody else notice how the processor speed seems a little off.  I'll bet it's to sync with the rest of the chips better.

Nintendo is pretty good at picking the right Tech to get the job.  Knowing what and what not to dedicate to hardware.  We'll just have to see how the leverage the now how.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

Yeah I really don't know what the numbers mean anymore, other than newer/cheaper can yield bigger numbers.  Just what kind of performance does it really yield?

On paper, my PC, a 1GHz Athlon T-bird (is this old-skool already lol) with 256mb RAM and 16mb Voodoo3-era video card, looks NUMBERIFIC, but it could only run games that look less than the Dreamcast's best.

And I still think Xbox's best doesn't look as good as GC's best (gameplay design considered).  The only obvious "advantages" I see in Xbox is the extra RAM available for bigger textures and its bumpy-maps (and no, its absurdly high-contrasted shadowing doesn't count for anything since most games used the same blasted contrasted "different as night & day when comparing shadowed surfaces to non-shadowed surfaces" lighting conditions).

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

Capcom should put Okami on Rev.

[jasonditz]

Oh for Pete's sake, have these guys never heard of the Megahertz myth?  

[Ian Sane]

Reading IGN's article it sounds to me that Nintendo is passing off an Xbox with a new controller as a next gen console.  This thing BETTER be cheap because those numbers are really small compared to the competition.  Honestly I don't know much about this stuff but when you see numbers that are a quarter of the size of the competition's its pretty clear that the hardware isn't comparable.  Nintendo is incredibly talented at making something out of nothing so I'm not that worried about their stuff but I am really worried about multiplatform games.  If you make a game for the PS3 under the assumption that 512MBs of RAM is going to be available how do you get that to work with 88MBs?  EA and Ubisoft aren't going to go to any serious effort to get their PS3 focused games working well on the Rev.  They're just not and this isn't going to help.

In some cases there are tradeoffs.  Console A has this one thing better than console B but console B has something else that's better than console A.  But in this case EVERY one of these "numbers" is smaller and significantly so.  I have a hard time believing this is not going to be a problem.

[jasonditz]

Quote
Originally posted by: Professional 666
Yeah I really don't know what the numbers mean anymore, other than newer/cheaper can yield bigger numbers.  Just what kind of performance does it really yield?

On paper, my PC, a 1GHz Athlon T-bird (is this old-skool already lol) with 256mb RAM and 16mb Voodoo3-era video card, looks NUMBERIFIC, but it could only run games that look less than the Dreamcast's best.

Yeah, and my old Lindows PC with its 1.2 Ghz Duron and the Gig of RAM I stuck in it (and it's 64 MB shared video card) ought to fricking scream, but Quake 3 gets about 3-4 FPS on it with all the settings at bare minimum.

I'm still holding out hope that the chip in the Rev isn't simply a Gecko with a higher clock speed, but a step up on the PPC architecture. Sort of a trimmed down G4 in the same way the Gecko is a trimmed down G3. You up the clock speed 67% AND add Altivec and you're talking a very respectible performance boost.

[IceCold]

Quote
Originally posted by: Kairon
Trip1ex, Nintendo has gone on record that they want gamers to buy the Rev EVEN if they own a PS3 or X360. Hardcore gamers will basically have no excuse to NOT own a Rev if the thing is as cheap as we all suspect. This non-competition thing is certainly working out nicely.

And I think that the Rev's price point, combined with it's mind-blowing interface and "can't get anywhere-else" gaming experience, will make it VERY attractiev to the casual know-nothing gamer.

And of course, the mainstream market, and the non-gamers, wouldn't be as picky on Specs, they're all about utility and the price barrier they face.

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

Aha! Now I remember - I just made a thread about multiplatform and exclusive games on the Revolution, and why it is going to be an exclusive console. I had forgotten this one point and couldn't remember it, but now I do.

In addition to all the reasons I listed for the negative situation regarding multiplatform ports, if the Revolution is a "second console" it will be even worse. Everyone who buys the Rev as a second console will never buy the multiplatform games for it. If they already have a PS3/360, they would buy the superior version and neglect the Revolution one. Therefore, the sales of these games would potentially be even lower. I never did like the "second console" thing..

Unless, of course, 3rd parties actually spend time on the Rev port and utilise the controller to improve it. Then it would be unique and better, so it would sell a lot more. But we really can't trust 3rd parties not to use the controller as a gimmick.

[trip1eX]

REally the specs are about what IGN reported before so not much of a suprise not to mention Perri Kaplan let slip that the Rev will be 2-3x more powerful already.  These specs spell that out.  

The GPU doesn't seem that powerful, but we still know nothing about it's architecture.  There's been 4 generations of ATI gpus since the 'Cube and Xbox launched.  Make it run 50% faster with a newer revision of the 'Cube's gpu and you'll have 2-3x faster.  

Also if you don't know anything about hardware specs then don't comment.

Clock speed doesn't tell the whole story.  Yes the REv is not as powerful as the PS3 or 360.  But we all knew that already.  Nintendo has said they aren't playing that game.

Anyway back to clockspeed.  Compare an Athlon AMD 64 cpu to a P4.  The P4 all run at much higher clockspeeds, but the AMD 64s do more work per clock cycle and thus are just as fast and actually faster.

The 'Cube memory has always been the fast kind of memory.  They deliberately picked that memory because they believe it suits games better because of the  frequent input and output between gamer and machine.   IT's much faster than what the Xbox had and so in essence it's equal to larger amounts of slower memory.  

[jasonditz]

Quote
Originally posted by: Ian Sane
EA and Ubisoft aren't going to go to any serious effort to get their PS3 focused games working well on the Rev.  They're just not and this isn't going to help.

I agree 100% and add a great big "so what?" to the equation.

EA and Ubi by and large make garbage, and virtually nobody buys a Nintendo system to play their sloppy ports of sloppy games.

I have some reservations about the seemingly low specs, but what it does to EA or Ubi's games frankly doesn't even enter into the equation for me.

I'm going to hold off judgement until I see some actual game footage...  

[Arbok]

Quote
Originally posted by: Ian Sane
Reading IGN's article it sounds to me that Nintendo is passing off an Xbox with a new controller as a next gen console.

Yeah, that's exactly what I don't like. I was expecting the system to be weaker than the 360 or PS3, but not to the point where it was comparable to the original Xbox. It really gives third parties a whole new reason to exclude Nintendo too, except instead of online play it's graphic power and Ram, and having ports scaled down because lazy developers don't want to spend the effort to reprogram "bloat ware" games is going to look very bad for the Revolution, or having to cut the number of things occuring on the screen at once.

I hope this turns out better, but I think Nintendo drastically dropped the ball in what went under the hood of the system and they really need to release some “damage control” footage or screens for the online community who will see this to mill over.