This is a little curious (And dubious) a claim. The 6670 is in fact 20% LESS powerful than the 4770 when describing raw processing power, both for shaders and textures. In terms of memory bandwidth, the 6670 does have a 25% improvement, by virtue of its otherwise-identical memory subsystem clocking its GDDR5 at 4.0 GHz instead of 3.2 GHz.
However, relying on the memory clock is going to be a non-starter when Nintendo's involved... Since historically, each machine they've put out has emphasized very heavily on having the fastest RAM available, or at least plausible. This pretty much rules out the Wii U using anything OTHER than GDDR5, and clocked anything less than 4.0 GHz. (up to the current maximum of 5.5 GHz is a distinct possibility)
As far as comparison goes, in terms of raw throughput, the PS3's GPU was 10% beyond that of the Xbox 360; both had the same number of TMUs and shader vector units, (the 360 had 48 independent SPs, while the PS3 had 24 two-vector pipelines) with the PS3 being clocked 10% higher. (and arguably, it might've had slightly improved power through its 8 dedicated vertex shaders)
[citation][nom]memadmax[/nom]I remember back in the day when consoles could spank anything a PC could muster.....God, I feel old........[/citation]
That actually only happened once: that was with the Nintendo64. Of course, it's worth noting that there was also a bigger price gap then, too; if you were building a decent gaming rig circa 1990, you were using a 33 MHz 486, a VGA card, a MIDI card, and 16MB of RAM; such a setup made even SNK's Neo-Geo look laughable, (let alone the Sega Genesis or SNES) but would set you back $3,000US+, a steep price compared to less than $200US for mainstream competing consoles.
The Nintendo64's superiority came mostly from the simple fact that through the early/mid 1990s, PC hardware development stagnated: that 1990 PC I just mentioned wouldn't become obsolete whatsoever until at least 1996; it was kind of analogous with how the current console hardware market has left a lot of software development stagnated.
[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]consoles dont use direct x, so features in dx aren't tied to the gpu.[/citation]
Actually, the exact opposite is true: both the Xbox and Xbox 360 rely on DirectX. For the 360, it's a unique version that ROUGHLY equates to 9.0c as found on the PC: it falls short on some specs (only equating to DX9) but on some actually surpasses them slightly, nearly reaching DX10. Overall, it's very comparable to PC 9.0c cards; almost all shaders written for one can be used on the other and vice-versa.
[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]people complaining about how the "hardware is already dated" how many games today take full advantage of everything available to them?[/citation]
Pretty much all flagship Xbox 360 and PS3 titles, and all Wii titles that actually bother to try looking good. (like, say, Conduit 2)
[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]what im saying is that both consoles have a tessellation unit in them, and when done right will produce great graphics regardless of the hardware. as long as the consoles can push higher rez textures, and can push more pollies (4million ish) than they will be great.and on the pc side, you will most likely see the benefit being higher detail settings. with engines taking advantage of tessellation, and probably doing it a hell of allot better than now, you will most likely see a huge leap in graphic quality on the pc, and probably specs for better graphics being reduced a bit too, because of better engines.[/citation]
I think you've bought WAY too much into the "Tesselation" hype. Contrary to popular belief, the stuff doesn't magically insert an infinite number of polygons/second. Rather, it allows for a very smooth, on-the-fly adjustment of polygon levels in a model. The drawback present with tesselation, is that even after the unit finishes its work, the stream processors STILL have to handle the setup for each polygon and vertex, just as if tesselation wasn't being in use.
The real advantage of tesselation is that it'll make many forms of LOD scaling obsolete, or vastly easier: no longer will a game have to include multiple meshes for the same model, as it can just include a single one and generate all the others on the fly. The quality improvement won't necessarily be direct; the first instance will be that sharp "LOD tiers" will be eliminated, putting an end to times where an object will "pop" between different detail levels: ideally, tesselation can adjust a model's detail by an increment of 1 polygon at a time. The second, indirect improvement will be an increase in higher-polygon models: they WON'T be faster to render than before, but will be practical to use for close-ups because the work of making multiple meshes will be eliminated, as would the increased disk and RAM usage.
If I was to make a technical comparison, I'd say that tesselation is for meshes what trilinear filtering (along with mip-mapping) is for textures. Similarly, the GPU has dedicated fixed-function units to handle mip-mapping, along with trilinear filtering.
[citation][nom]memadmax[/nom]this next gen, is realistically be the first gen that could last 10 years as we have all the tools right now to render photo real in real time.[/citation]
Photo-realism was also claimed for both the 6th generation and 7th (current) generations. Hell, I could probably find some claims for FIFTH-generation consoles. Someone was probably nutty enough to claim that about the Nintendo64, or possibly even the Sega Saturn or Playstation.
[citation][nom]memadmax[/nom]i don't see dx12 or such being as show stopping as 11 was (what 10 should have been) dx 12 will most likely be a better rendering system than 11, no real new features to be added. if games use opencl physics, we get better versions on the pcif game employ dx11 graphics, we get better versions on the pctell me one way consoles will hold the pc back this gen, because i cant see it, and i would love to know, and please to not site gpu advancements from 10 years ago, because 10 years ago we werent in an area of diminishing returns.[/citation]
The actual GPU "diminishing returns" chiefly come from visuals, not technology and features. You yourself espoused on the virtues of tesselation, indicating that you still believe that even today earth-shattering features are still coming out. The lack of DX 12 or DX 13 (since we're having a major release every couple of years)
Just look at the current generation. 7th-gen consoles are so very badly holding back PC development. The same will happen in the 8th generation, just starting with a different level.
[citation][nom]Steveymoo[/nom]Microsoft really needs to look into making direct x more of an open standard, or using opengl for it's consoles. Locking down a console to use a pre-defined set of instructions and features, really limits studios on what they can do. Imagine what you could create with a completely free reign on code and shading techniques![/citation]
You're mistaking an abstraction layer for a programming langauge, it would seem. If you want to hard-code your own shaders, everyone is still perfectly free to use ASM for the shaders; HLSL is merely an OPTION.
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