[Deepblue]

Pocket Sized Xbox.

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/03/29/ign-reveals-new-revolution-tech-specs/

IGN's Matt Casamassina has gotten his hands on the most recent technical specs for the Nintendo Revolution, compiled from a few "extremely reliable" sources. Here is what developers will working with:
The "Broadway" CPU: 729MHz (approximately the same speed as the original Xbox)
The "Hollywood" GPU: 243MHz (again, very close to the power of the original Xbox) with 3MBs of texture memory
RAM: 88MBs, which breaks down to 24MBs of main 1T-SRAM and 64MBs of "external" 1T-SRAM, which one developer notes "can be accessed as quickly as the main RAM, which is nice." The original Xbox, in continuing with teh comparison, had 64MBs of total RAM.
These numbers are not official, but they do make sense with what Nintendo has been saying all along that their focus was more on innovation than pushing the graphical limits--a philosophy which has worked with the Nintendo DS to great success. A slightly more powerful Xbox is still an major improvement from the GameCube, but technically inferior to both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Not to incite fanboyism, but do you still feel this is the right move for Nintendo?

I'd buy it in a heartbeat for $100, but $200 will give me pause.

[Turambar]

i thought maybe they;d need some more processor 'oomph' to put some power behind their innovation

guess not

*shrug*

i'm still gonna get it, probably just so that i can play twilight princess with the revmote

[achtung]

I'll get it for the downloadable retro games whether it can match today's graphic intensive systems or not.

[Deepblue]

Couldn't they have just made a rev controller attachment for the GCN?

Mario games won't suffer, but MP3 will.

[Mefustae]

Hey, I thought the later-generation games on GCN - such as Resident Evil 4 - looked absolutely fine, so i'm not sweating too much that you won't be able to see beads of sweat on members of the crowd at a Footy game like you probably can on PS3/X360.

[aldo_14]

Bugger specs, it should be about the games.  IGN sometimes seems to have a bit of a dislike for the Revolution; a while back they tried to spur a letter writing campaign because it wouldn't have high def output.

Worth echo-ing what one of the commenters on the joystiq link said, though; you simply can't compare performance between different architectures by using MHz rating alone.  Even the chip in the original Xbox couldn't really be compared to the P3s and P4s of the time (different core - I think coppermine, shortened pipeline, and a number of new fp assembler instructions spring to mind).  Not that I'd expect IGN to actually know these things.

[Turnsky]

Bugger specs, it should be about the games

Hear Hear! console fanboyism is a very moot point, i mean, people can put a console onna pedestal and worship it until doomsday, or simply wipe their ass with it (as painful as that may sound).  at the end of the day, it does nothing, it's the games that make or break a console, either way, the -extreme- backwards compatability of the Revolution will be definitely a selling point. i think nintendo's more of a "it's not the hardware, it's what you do with it" philosophy, other than the brute-force approach of sony and microsoft.

[aldo_14]

To be honest, the Revolution has stopped me from buying both a GCN.  I'm quite excited about the DS Lite, actually; plus it's a good example of how games > tech.

[Turnsky]

To be honest, the Revolution has stopped me from buying both a GCN.  I'm quite excited about the DS Lite, actually; plus it's a good example of how games > tech.

same here

[Deepblue]

The difference is one is a handheld, and one isn't. Nintendo promised the graphics would compete, but they are already going to look dated at E3!

I know games are fun, but good graphics contribute to the overall greatness of a game. I think that's a major misjudgement on Nintendo's part.

[aldo_14]

The difference is one is a handheld, and one isn't. Nintendo promised the graphics would compete, but they are already going to look dated at E3!

Explain why this matters (handheld).  Also remember to reference the success(es) Sony had with, for example, the Eyetoy, and why the factors that made people (and more importantly, new demographics) favour the DS and stretch the market cannot be applied to a home console.

I know games are fun, but good graphics contribute to the overall greatness of a game. I think that's a major misjudgement on Nintendo's part.

Why do they contribute to the 'overall greatness', anyways?  What about graphics makes a game fun?  Maybe more immersive in a certain context, but you can't polish a turd in any case, and that's all graphics are - polish.  We're living in a world of generic cut and paste sequels, where the innovation is another 10,000 polys on specular-mapped crotchguards and authentic debris physics for cola cups on the footwells of your racing car, and I for one welcome thinking outside the box.  Why is it technical supremacy is being measured in polygons and pixels rather than what you do with that hardware?

EDIT; so presumably no-one ever buys stuff from the Xbox live arcade, then?

[Rictor]

Smart move by Nintendo. They know they can never compete with Microsoft in terms of specs, they're simply not rich enough. And besides, it's a sucker's game, because you're essentially competing to see who can loose the most money. This way, the Revolution is in an entirely different market than the Xbox360 or PS3, since everyone is going to pick it up at $100, even if it has only 1/2 the graphical capability of the 360 (thought I'm betting on Nintendo squeezing out every inch of that power to create games that live up to next-gen graphical standards.)

[deftonesmx17]

Worth echo-ing what one of the commenters on the joystiq link said, though; you simply can't compare performance between different architectures by using MHz rating alone.  Even the chip in the original Xbox couldn't really be compared to the P3s and P4s of the time (different core - I think coppermine, shortened pipeline, and a number of new fp assembler instructions spring to mind).  Not that I'd expect IGN to actually know these things.

Exactly, because as i remember the xbox's CPU was nothing more than a craptastic "Celeron" clocked at around 700Mhz.

[aldo_14]

I think this sums up my opinion quite well

Iwata pledges to keep Revolution game prices down
[q]Software prices for Nintendo's Revolution console will buck the trend of next-generation titles being priced more expensively than their current-gen counterparts, with Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata expecting to keep prices below $50.
...
While Nintendo's resistance to price inflation is unlikely to endear it to the publishers currently pushing for the industry's baseline software price to rise, Iwata's stance is at least partially justified by the company's commitment to keeping development costs down - with the Revolution being cited as by far the cheapest next-gen system to create titles for, thanks to mature hardware and development tools enabled by a specification only a few times more powerful than existing platforms.[/q]

VS

More DOA Volleyball 2 news
[q]In an interview with Famitsu, Itagaki said you'll be able to take shots of all your favourite scenes and preferred poses. And to make sure the ladies you'll be photographing look lovelier than ever, Team Ninja is designing a whole new beach wear range, using fancy cloth simulation technology.[/q]

An extra $10 for dynamic jubbly simulation?

[BlackDove]

They talk the talk, they seem to be walking the walk. If they can deliver with those specs, waaaaay more power to Nintendo.

[deftonesmx17]

More DOA Volleyball 2 news
[q]In an interview with Famitsu, Itagaki said you'll be able to take shots of all your favourite scenes and preferred poses. And to make sure the ladies you'll be photographing look lovelier than ever, Team Ninja is designing a whole new beach wear range, using fancy cloth simulation technology.[/q]

An extra $10 for dynamic jubbly simulation?

Or you could take a girl to a movie for that $10 and get real life.............you know where i am going with this..........

[WeatherOp]

Yeah, I think the Big N knows what they are doing.

Also as Aldo said, , the chip is what matters, if they can pull a ton of power out of that chip, think of how little heat that would put out, and that means they would'nt have to add extra fans and stuff, that would make the system more expensive, to keep the thing cool.

[Grug]

I like the idea of the Revolution completely, affordable, possibly great games. They arn't going to look **** either, the XBox still has some pretty good graphics IMO, and if this rumor is true, we're looking at slightly better graphics then the Xbox. Take the speeds sure, but note that the architecture has had an axtra few years to be worked on, so I'd expect a very sturdy design and refined technology.
Again, on a similar front, the games. It has backwards capability, which means of developers will have of pre-developed code bases readily applicable to the Rev. Means more time for working on the games and refining the quality of them rather than hacking away at the latest shader pixel code.

I'm looking forward to the future, most will probably have the Revolution, and then expand with a 360 (which is way to expensive atm way) or PS3.

More DOA Volleyball 2 news
[q]In an interview with Famitsu, Itagaki said you'll be able to take shots of all your favourite scenes and preferred poses. And to make sure the ladies you'll be photographing look lovelier than ever, Team Ninja is designing a whole new beach wear range, using fancy cloth simulation technology.[/q]

An extra $10 for dynamic jubbly simulation?

Or you could take a girl to a movie for that $10 and get real life.............you know where i am going with this..........

Then what are you doing posting in a gaming forum?

[deftonesmx17]

Or you could take a girl to a movie for that $10 and get real life.............you know where i am going with this..........

Then what are you doing posting in a gaming forum?

Passing time while I am at work 

[StratComm]

Deepblue, talking about stats like that without even knowing the architecture underlying those chips is incredibly pointless.  I'd actually like to point out that the 700MHz Intel core in the X-Box was (besides being a low-end off-the-shelf component) an x86 intel core, which have had the reputation for years for being clock cycle whores.  Almost regardless of what Nintendo is using as their chip, a 750MHz processor with any other architecture (or from any other provider, see AMD's superior performance with significantly lower clock on x86) would easily run circles around the XBox equivalent.  Try to step back from your MS paytab for a minute and think before you post.