Nintendo Revolution Not to Compete with X-Box/PS-3
Nintendo not to Compete
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Unconfirmed rumors floating around the internet say that the Nintendo Revolution is going to be competiting in an entirely different market than the PS3 and the Xbox 360: a more Nintendoish market.
It looks as though Nintendo might be targetting the lower-end gamer, the one in the games for the fun, not the graphics or “beat-em-up” style game play. These rumors are saying that the Revolution will retail for $99 USD, a far cry from the over $300 USD other consoles.
You think that’s unreasonably cheap, especially when thinking about Sony losing $100 on every copy of the PS3, but, it’s really not: both Sony and Microsoft are aiming for maximal power in an attempt to convince consumers their games are better because they have more gigabiggaliggaflops, Nintendo doesn’t need that: Nintendo has their “casual gaming” lines of games, which require good graphics, but, not realistically good graphics.
The graphics processor in the Revolution is said to be less than double that of the GameCube, not a very large jump when you consider that of the other console developers. The RAM in the Nintendo Revolution is said to be approximately 100mb, dramatically less than the 512mb in the Xbox 360, and similar count rumored for the PS3.
By making the Revolution dramatically cheaper, it could be a good sale for parents looking to buy presents for their younger children - the more child friendly games will be a good bonus in that market as well.
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Revolution not powerful
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Revolution Only Twice As Powerful as Cube, say Developers
Developers working with Revolution kits (albeit incomplete) are starting to reveal some of the details on Nintendo's next-gen system. We already knew about the lack of HDTV support, and now we know that the system's memory and processors won't be up to the level of an Xbox 360 or PS3 either. As expected, Nintendo is not positioning itself as a competitor to those systems.
It was fairly evident when Nintendo unveiled its Revolution controller that the company had decided to pave its own path by creating its own little niche. Games made for Revolution simply won't be possible on Xbox 360 or PS3.
Nintendo doesn't want to fight it out with the tech heavies, so it's clear that its next console will no longer be in direct competition with the other systems—whether this is ultimately the right decision for the company, time will tell.
(GameCube x 2) = Revolution?
In the meantime, we're starting to get a sense of just how "underpowered" (compared to 360 and PS3) the Revolution will be. Although Nintendo has not yet revealed any official specs for the system, IGN has spoken to several development sources that have been working with incomplete Revolution hardware and have seen Nintendo documentation for the system's components.
The consensus? Nintendo's Revolution console will have roughly twice the horsepower of their current-gen platform, the GameCube.
IGN's sources said that the Revolution will have nowhere near the amount of memory of either Xbox 360 or PS3, but because of its lack of HD graphics, massive RAM isn't as necessary. Apparently, Revolution will build on GameCube's configuration of 24MB 1T-SRAM and 16MB D-RAM by adding 64MBs of 1T-SRAM, resulting in a total memory of 104MB.
That doesn't take into account the system's 512MBs of Flash RAM or the on-board memory of ATI's Hollywood GPU, which is believed to be 3MB. The Flash memory, however, seems to be reserved for general memory (e.g. game saves and other things) and it's not likely to be something that devs can rely on.
Along the same lines as the system's memory, Revolution's Broadway CPU and Hollywood GPU are also believed to be extensions of their GameCube counterparts. Although exact clock rates on these chips are not provided, the development sources are only expecting marginal improvements over the GameCube.
"Basically, take a GameCube, double the clock rate of the CPU and GPU and you're done," said one source.
Another source doubted the platform's main processor would even be twice as powerful: "The CPU is the same as Gekko with one and a half to two times the performance and improved caching. Our guys experimented with it and think they'll be able to get about twice the performance as GameCube."
Slightly better than Xbox
To give you an idea from a technical/graphical standpoint of what the Revolution may be capable of, one third party source interestingly likened it to the original Xbox: "To be honest, it's not much more powerful than an Xbox. It's like a souped up Xbox. But it's the controller that makes the difference and the controller is really nice."
If Nintendo's aim has indeed been to separate itself from the competition, it looks as if it's already succeeding in that respect. "We are looking at it quite differently. It's like another current generation platform for us," said another source. "But it's such a nice controller that it opens up a lot of possibilities. It's very different and it's very precise."
The other important nugget of information that was revealed is that the Revolution's DVD discs will be able to hold 4.7GB of data on a single layer and 8.5GB when double-layered on a single-side. By comparison, the GameCube's tiny discs only hold 1.5GB. Once again, because of the lack of HD the Revolution discs should be more than adequate for any of its games.
Price advantage
The main advantage of all of this, of course, is cost. While some are speculating that Nintendo will launch the Revolution at a low price of $99, we tend to think that it's more likely to be somewhere between $149 and $199. Even at $199 the Revolution would have a major price advantage over other consoles on the market, and because of the "must have" Nintendo games like Mario and Zelda and the uniqueness of the new controller itself, most gamers will probably want to pick up the Revolution in addition to either a PS3 or Xbox 360.
It's certainly a risky approach for Nintendo, but would they have been any better off just feeding the market another system similar to those from the competition? At least this way, the company has gotten the entire development community talking, and making games for the Revolution will cost developers less money as well.
One of IGN's sources summed it up this way: "People are interested, but they're still taking it all in at the moment. I'm sure [Nintendo is] going to get a fair amount of support. Probably a lot of people will initially look at existing franchises and whether or not they can kind of do customized versions for Revolution using most of the assets they've got. But whether they'll say, 'Okay, let's do something completely original for it,' that's the other question because it could be quite expensive to do that. Not as expensive as doing a PS3 or Xbox 360 game. But if you're a third party and you want to do cross platform, if you're doing a game on 360 you can do it on PS3 or PC using the same assets and that does make it a bit easier."
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Diablo: No need for these to be 2 separate threads, they're quite related and similar.
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X-Box X-Box X-Box
Last edited by Diablo; 12-11-2005 at 09:33 PM.
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