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Games Entertainment

Revolution Easy To Port To 48

Posted by Zonk from the hands-across-the-consoles dept.
Despite suggestions that the Revolution will not be as powerful as the other next-gen systems, 1up is reporting the system will be easy to port games to. From the article: "It's easy to see Nintendo's logic, though. Even though Revolution won't have the same memory bandwidth as Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the familiarity with current generation development and tools that Revolution takes advantage of means most companies shouldn't have much trouble working Revolution into the mix."
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Revolution Easy To Port To More

Revolution Easy To Port To

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  • I though it would be somewhat backwards compatible. So porting old games isn't needed. Then what is there to port?
    • How about third party titles that haven't been released on the GameCube yet?
    • I think when they say "port", they are really just talking about a multi-platform release.

      The impression I got was that they were referring to the much-talked-about claim that games designed for the XBox 360 and PS3 will be too demanding for the Revolution hardware. This article seems to refute that.
  • Every single point in console history has had two or three systems all of varying horsepower and porting has always happened and generally the ports were so close it made no massive difference.

    Why do people still want to believe that the extra cores and slightly better GPU's in the 360/PS3 are so massively different? THEY AREN'T. They offer a DIFFERENT way of accomplishing things, but they really are only about 2-3x as powerful as current gen systems in REALITY. The Revolution will be about 2-3x the power a
    • Let's all end the hype now, the 360 is out and even though MS is still making excuses and promises, the games are not that spectacularly different. Don't expect things to be that much different with the PS3. HD textures are about it, that is what all the hubub is about. Give it a rest now. The three systems will be competitive and no different than the current offerings.

      I would agree with you that the games aren't spectacularly different...NOW. There is a reason for that: Just about every single 360
      • I'm not sure who you're trying to sell on that, but I'm not buying. I work in the industry and have friends who develop for consoles including the 360. I am well aware of what the system is capable of and while it is a step in the HD direction, I have yet to be wowed. Just because the term HD is thrown around like it is something new, it isn't. PC titles had far surpassed the resolution levels that the Xbox 360 tops out at for some years now. While they are great for a console, they really aren't all that a
        • Just out of curiosity what do you do in the industry? I'm programmer and a game studio and have a dev kit sitting right on my desk, I've seen some pretty amazing things on it. I'm just wondering because I haven't met ONE developer who wasn't atleast somewhat amazed at the pwoer of the console. Hell looking past just the technical details, Xbox Live is a great service that has huuuuge potential.

          Sure HD on a console doesnt beat the resolution on a PC, but what size is you're monitor? 19"? 21"? On avg,
    • The 360 is only 2-3x as powerful as the xbox? Think for a moment. 3.6GHz vs 733MHz, and there's 3 cores. Just one core is at least 3x as fast, and 2nd gen games will take advantage of all the cores. Now look at the video card. A GeForce4 Ultra was twice as powerful as a GeForce 2 or 3, which was in the xbox. The GeForce6800 was more than 2x as powerful as the GF4. The GF7800 is about 2x as powerful as the 6800. Meaning the 360's video card can render over EIGHT times as many polygons and effects as
      • heh, well think what you will but you are not even close. Theoretically you are correct, in reality you are wrong. You are looking at the individual components, not the whole. Look at I/O speeds, ram speeds, drive speeds. Now tak einto account the data transfer rate of HD content. You are forgetting that the 360 is having to process over 8 times the data with the new content, so even with component increases the overall speed is about 2-3x the original Xbox. You left out all of that. If it was the 360 runni
        • There's also the construction of the hardware to take into account. One of the reasons the GC was able to produce visuals so nearly matching what the Xbox did was because even though all it's numbers were less, the actual components it used were superior to what the Xbox had. Specifically, it had faster RAM and the Flipper video card which did all the effects on the fly, so you were only loading about 10% as much stuff into RAM as you were on the Xbox or PS2.

          The 360 is using an ATI video card this time

        • There's no point bringing emulated xbox titles into this since the 360 is spending so much power just translating the game. Drive speeds also don't matter much once data is loaded into RAM. For memory bandwidth, the xbox has 6.4GB/s [ddj.com], and the 360 has 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth, 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM, 21.6 GB/s frontside bus. So that's almost 4x.

          You are correct that at 1280x720 the 360 may not be able to render 8x as many polygons compared to 640x480. However since the card
          • While your numbers are correct, again you are only looking at THEORETICAL performance. Not real life performance. Theoretical numbers are always deceiving.

            You are making the same errors in reasoning in regards to the CPU and it's cores. Each core is not a whole new CPU... it is just like hypertrhreading except LESS efficient. Also if you do the math for HD texture size and resolution and effects you will quickly see that I/O bandwidth becomes a limiting factor quite quickly. Same with the GPU. While it is i
            • I'm being conservative with the CPU. Compare the 733MHz to the 3.6GHz in almost any benchmark, and the 3.6 will be at least 3 times as fast. But I didn't claim the 3 cores would make it 9 times as fast.

              Now I found some benchmarks for those games tested with cards from a GF4200 to a 6800. Keep in mind that the GF3 was even slower and paired with a 733 chip, not the latest and greatest. Also remember that the 7800 can do twice as many frames as the 6800. So just from the benchmarks alone, the 6800 on Far [firingsquad.com]
              • As your numbers show, the actual FPS increase is about 2-3x. Which is exactly my point.

                Consoles are not computers (except for the Xbox 1) and do not work even remotely similar. The fact is that you can take the three cores and throw that right out the window. The system will run as a single 3GHz CPU, the extra cores will take some load off once utilized but the net gain is minimal.

                So now we are comparing a 733MHz CPU to a 3GHz CPU. While this alone is a 4X theoretical increase, we all know that it is not a
                • Read it again. The actual FPS increase was 2-3x using a 4200 and 6800, insted of a GF3 and 7800, and while using the same CPU for both GPUs. Factor those in and it's more like 4-8x.

                  Now I know both CPUs aren't made by Intel, but clock for clock the PPC is supposed to be faster than than the P4. Furthermore, take any benchmark and a 3.2GHz P4 or PPC will be at least 3x as fast as a 733MHz P3. Photoshop filters, mp3 compression, AI routines, it will be 3x or faster. Not 2x. I can find pages on the net fo
                  • Answer: CPU/GPU specs sounds more impressive.

                    It's just like how the number of bits a console had was a huge deal in the days before and shortly after the SNES. However, after the playstation and n64, no one really cared about them anymore because they were obviously not really that important.

                    The same thing will happen after this generation, as people will realize the CPU/GPU are not all there is to a console, important as they may be.
                    • Some developers took advantage of the xbox's greater power and made better looking versions of games that also came out on the PS2. It seems like those developers would appreciate the more powerful system and therefore MS would be doing themselves a disservice; particularly if the PS3 has more bandwidth.
  • First of all, 1up has become an extremely unreliable and biased source for info for some reason (money probably) second: IGN showed some of the technical info for the console and it seems it has been pretty constricted in terms of CPU, memory and even video power compared to the PS3 and the xbox360 add that to the fact that it uses a completely unstandard controller and you get a console that is extremely difficult to port to. But dont take my word for it, several publishers have already confirmed their por
    • " it has been pretty constricted in terms of CPU, memory and even video power compared to the PS3 and the xbox360"

      "Pretty constricted" is subjective at best. The PS2 is "pretty constricted" compared to the GCN and Xbox.

      "add that to the fact that it uses a completely unstandard controller"

      They've already stated the system comes with the thumbstick dongle, giving you a pretty standard controller for unoriginal ports.
    • No offense, but the reason that no third party companies have come out to say wether they will or won' tport to the Revolution.. is because it hasn't even been officially announced yet. NO company is going to begin to speculate in the media about a system they haven't even seen official specs or stats on.

      Give it time, ports will be very common actually among these next-gen systems due to the high development costs, they need as much exposure as possible to even begin to recoup costs.
  • .. as this machine is. [gbax.com] And yes, this machine is very, very easy to port to .. it was designed to be so..
  • The GameCube was easier to port to than the PS2, and look at how well that worked.

    [I own one of each, thanks.]

    • Re:GameCube? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by fujiman ( 912957 )
      It worked well for the following reason: PS2's market share made releasing on that platform MANDATORY. It didn't matter how hard porting to PS2 was... there were 4x the amount of PS2s than XBoxes or GCs. In fact, most cross-platform games were coded PRIMARILY for PS2, since it was the hardest to port to.

      I dare say Sony won't have that big of a lead this generation, so yes, now it is relevant for them.

      • Assuming the PS3 has the 100% back-compatibility with PS2 and PS1 that's promised, I can see it becoming market leader very rapidly. One of the reasons I bought a PS2 first was I already had a bunch of favorite PS1 games, as opposed to having to start from scratch with a GameCube.

        Yes, console market share leads to manufacturers making games for the console.. but equally, games for the console lead to console market share.

  • Courting Third Party Vendors (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DrWho520 ( 655973 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @05:59PM (#14214698) Journal
    According to the Nintendo mastermind (psssst, Miyamoto!), Revolution software development can take place on existing GameCube development kits. [advancedmn.com]

    This is a key fact to keep in mind. The preliminary development kits were actually tweaked 'Cube kits. I cannot speak to the fulfledged dev kits, but they should be very similar in practice. Nintendo is hoping to see their efforts at courting to third party vendors to start coming to fruition here. If it is easy to develop for, third party vendors will develop for it, right? This generation should begin to answer that question.

    Early release games are always inferior to late lifecycle games. This is partially due to the learning curve inherent in new development kits. If a developer has learned the 'Cube dev kit, they should be able to easily come up to speed on a Revolution dev kit. Hardware optimizations will take some time. This could also explain why the current 360 games are so similar to current Xbox games. The development kits must have changed drastically from one console to the next. It is an entirely different chipset. I am making some assumptions and have no personal experience with either dev kit.

    As for the controller, if you have not read about the controller shells that will be available for the control stick, you have not business commenting on any story about Next Generation consoles. I am sure a Wavebird shell, 360 shell and a Dual Shock shell (or something very similar to each, probably released by MadCatz or someone similar) will be available soon after the console launch. Ironically enough, the Revoltion may have a traditional Playstation controller before the PS3 if Sony sticks with that boomerang design.

    I always liked the N64 controller. It was big enough for my ginormous bear paws.
    • It's actually very simple. The GC had a GPU that offered 8 layer texture mapping... *8*. However the surrounding hardware could not do anything meaningful with a screen full of 8 layered polys. I've seen some dev studio demo's on the GC hardware and they would stagger you at the beauty... but then there was no headrrom for AI/gameplay.

      The Revolution will finally have the hardware to handle these graphics so really nothing needs to change as far as the dev kit goes. The GC had the better graphics chip of bo
      • The impressive thing was that the GPU could do 8 layer texture mapping, bump mapping, lighting and shadow effects on the fly. Unfortunately, the processor and frame buffer weren't able to handle those kind of effects while also calculating physics and AI. I'm still hoping for a seperate PPU in the Rev, that would make the other listed specs a non-issue.
  • Hmm. I don't know if I *like* the idea of easy ports. One of the strengths of the DS, in my opinion, is that it forces developers to think at least somewhat about the new games they're making, and NOT just port over GBA games or N64 games.

    I wonder, do I really want to play the games that are going to be coming out for all three platforms? Or would I rather play games that have been designed from the ground up to take advantage of the exciting new features of the Revolution?

    About the only benefit I can see
    • Honestly, I think it's perfectly fine. It will keep unoriginal developers who have no business even trying to do something new (read EA) from making games that will be posterchildren for Revolution controller naysayers.

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