To be honest, so far I'll be taking all of this with more than a grain of salt, given that IGN hasn't been shown to be fully accurate before. Given that R700 is a dated technology that likely will be harder to port from the old 55nm process. It could be a guess they went on if, perhaps, they heard the number "800" used to refer to the number of stream processors.
Given that unlike a PC graphics card, consoles don't even have the OPTION to output higher than 1080p, (while PC users are increasingly considering 1200p to be too pedestrian) a console need not match the same power, as it simply runs at lower resolution. So, in the end, the number of stream processors says little to nothing; remember that the 5770 and 6770 both have 800 SPs as well. The latter ones sound more reasonable given that, for manufacturing cost reasons, as well as yield and power draw/heat issues, Nintendo will almost certainly be making their chips at 40nm.
Oh, and the controller? I'm so surprised that I've not seen anyone
call out IGN's image for the photoshop it is. The key is the blatant, flat-colored top edge of the screen: it has zero apparent thickness, and just SCREAMS "fake."
Also, if it was 6.2 inches across the screen, (diagonally, as if that was the wide dimension it'd be even more huge) that'd mean that's a HUGE controller, bigger than the original Xbox "duke." The screen in the picture is 245x140 pixels, which means that it's 282 pixels diagonally, or ~45.5 pixels/inch... With the controller about 510 pixels across, that'd mean
the controller is 11.2 inches wide. For comparison,
Wikipedia tells us that the Wii "classic controller" (of which the photoshop is originally based on) has a width of only 5.34 inches, less than half. Also for comparison, the ENTIRE width of the DualShock line of controllers is ~6.2 inches, including the extra width from the handle prongs.
Obviously, we know that at the VERY least,
IGN is making stuff up on the controller. The image is an obvious photoshop, and a 6.2-inch screen is impractical to incorporate. I mean, even the outsize DSi XL only had 4.2-inch displays.
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[citation][nom]feeddagoat[/nom]Remember consoles get x20 the amount of performance from their gpu than PC's due to optimisation. The HD4870 was just about capable of 1080p, with developers tweeking game for the hardware, this should be more than capable.[/citation]
This is patently false. 1080p was capable in games from around the time of the X800 or so. There is no such thing as "optimization;" it's just a magic word used by console-pushers to make the illusion that the console is more powerful than it is.
The 4870? If we take a modern game,
like, say, Mass Effect 2, we see that even in DX10 mode (which neither the PS3 or 360 support) and with x8 AF, (which neither the PS3 nor 360 support) we see the 4870 get 96.6 FPS even at 1920x1200, which is 11% higher a resolution than 1080p. Remember that
Xbox 360/PS3 games are framerate capped to 30fps. They do NOT run at 60 fps. They also compare to about "medium" in modern PC games in details. Couple that with the fact that no major 360 or PS3 games run above 720p... That means we're talking a resolution 2.5 times as much, which means the 4870 sports at least 8x the potency of either console, even if we ignore the whole "the 4870 is doing DX10 with AF and at higher quality" part.
[citation][nom]blubbey[/nom]I think I'm right in saying that the 360 uses equivelants of X1900/X1950 XT GPU's and so using a 4xxx series card (lets hope it's a 4870!) it will be MASSIVELY more powerful. They usually have slightly worse graphics than their M$/Sony counterparts.[/citation]
For one, the power of the 360's CPU was closer to that of an X800XT, just like how the RSX was significantly cut from the actual 7800/7900; half the ROPs, and cut to a 128-bit memory interface. It just happened to use a deteched, non-pipelined architecture like the X1k series. (even though the X1k didn't have universal shaders, it eliminated the pipelines)
Also, Nintendo has only MORE RECENTLY been known for being weaker in hardware. The Nintendo64 beat the ever-loving crap out of the PS1, and was actually closer in power to the Dreamcast than any other major console around its time, in spite of the fact that the Dreamcast was 6th-generation, not 5th. Similarly, Microsoft and Sony traded places in power between the 6th and 7th generations, did they not? That just goes to show that things can and do change. Usually, though, whoever has the most powerful console is that who comes out latest, so if the Wii2 is much earlier than the Xbox 720 or PS4, it *IS* liable to be weaker... But that didn't stop the PS1 and PS2, now did it?
[citation][nom]nukemaster[/nom]You know that Consoles(much less anything from Nintendo) do not actually use DX 9 or 10 right? Direct X is a windows thing.[/citation]
As others have already shown, the "X" in Xbox stands for "DirectX." If you knew ANYTHING about game programming at all, you'd know that XNA, the software development kit for the Xbox, also works for Windows, as it's designed for DirectX.
[citation][nom]the associate[/nom]As long as they don't cut it short on ram and video card memory, this system should be a beast.Can't wait to see this come out.[/citation]
This is the most sensible concern: Nintendo's main weakness in hardware has been their unwillingness to pack a lot of RAM into their systems. the Wii's CPU and GPU are, once accounting for the cut from 576-720p to only 480p, not that much in want versus what the Xbox 360 and PS3 bring on board. However, the mere 91MB of RAM (split between four banks, no less) versus the far more sizeable and unified 512MB of the Xbox 360 and PS3? THAT is the main difference you see results from.
However, some good news may be seen from the 3DS: the jump to 128MB (or 256MB if some sources are to be believed) marks a far more agressive stance than Nintendo's had with their handhelds, so they may do the same with their home console, giving us memory totals measured in the gigabytes as they should be.
/www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/fermi_white_papers/NVIDIA_Fermi_Compute_Architecture_Whitepaper.pdf
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