Nintendo's next console "Project Cafe" to be powered by AMD R700 GPU

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What do you guys think about this? not really next-gen with the R700?

http://au.gear.ign.com/articles/116/1163325p1.html

IGN has learned that the system will be based on a revamped version of AMD's R700 GPU architecture, not AMD's Fusion technology as previously believed, which will, as previously reported, out perform the PlayStation 3's NVIDIA 7800GTX-based processor. Like the Xbox 360, the system's CPU will be a custom-built triple-core IBM PowerPC chipset, but the clocking speeds will be faster. The system will support 1080p output with the potential for stereoscopic 3D as well, though it has not been determined whether that will be a staple feature.
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R700 as in RV770, the core found in the 4800 series? That's just weird, why use a 55nm chip in 2011? They could get alot better yields and power efficiency out of a new 40nm chip. The 360 and PS3 have been using 45nm for almost a year now.
 
Why do you think it will be 55nm?

I'm sure they know a lot more about yields and power efficiency than you or I
 
Yeah, RV770 would just be the architecture in general, DX10 derivative, i just hope that it would be a DX11 derivative is all.
 
There was a 40nm member of the R700 family, the 4770.

That being said, the 4850 and 6850 are about the same die size and power consumption, but the 6850 is almost twice as fast. The reasons for choosing R700 must surely be of non-technical nature? Maybe it was easier for Nintendo to secure the necessary IP rights.
 
Nintendo's design philosophy has always been to use established tech that is well documented and offers a wide profit margin. Nintendo doesn't operate like MS or Sony, who basically give away the hardware and recoup costs in software licensing. Not saying its good or bad, but thats the basic reasoning that Nintendo uses.
 
Hmm and the fact that even if people don't like to admit it, the Wii was "succesful enough", since each hardware was sold at a profit instead of at a loss for the other consoles, and outselling them at around +50% in units vs each other one.

So yeah the Big N is still plenty alive.


Worldwide sales figures
Wii – 84.64 million as of 31 December 2010[8]
Xbox 360 – 50 million as of 6 January 2011[30]
PlayStation 3 – 50 million as of 15 April 2011[31]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Console_wars
 
XacTactX said:
R700 as in RV770, the core found in the 4800 series? That's just weird, why use a 55nm chip in 2011? They could get alot better yields and power efficiency out of a new 40nm chip. The 360 and PS3 have been using 45nm for almost a year now.
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A R700 at 28 or 32nm(depending on the fab) would be incredibly small and use very little power while offering good(depending on clocks) performance. Just because the chip was designed on the 55nm process doesn't mean they can't move it. It would only take a little reworking, which would be needed anyway to get it a console(will probably share system RAM instead of dedicated).
 
If Nintendo can leap-frog the PS3 and 360 with an incremental upgrade in hardware, they'll dominate the "high-end" console market for at least 3-4 years until the next Sony/MS gen comes out... at which point they'll slash prices and dominate based on price until Sony/MS developers catch up in familiarity and begin to surpass Nintendo in terms of complexity. By then they'll be ready with their next console and repeat the cycle. With a couple gigs of shared DDR5 memory alone, they'd push console graphics and complexity way into the next generation and still be able to make good profit on each unit.
 
limitedaccess said:
I'm pretty sure Sony is not only larger, but actually dwarfs Nintendo in every possible way you can measure company size.
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Maybe in terms of products and employees and HQ floorspace, but Nintendo's market cap is substantially higher than Sony's, like 5 billion dollars higher, which makes them the bigger company where it counts.
 
kimmytime said:
Maybe in terms of products and employees and HQ floorspace, but Nintendo's market cap is substantially higher than Sony's, like 5 billion dollars higher, which makes them the bigger company where it counts.
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yeah, we have to remember, Sony doesn't just make PS3s, lol, they have other products to support. Heck, they used to have a 200mm/65nm fab...
 
kimmytime said:
Maybe in terms of products and employees and HQ floorspace, but Nintendo's market cap is substantially higher than Sony's, like 5 billion dollars higher, which makes them the bigger company where it counts.
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It is actually closer, but I did not realize Nintendo market cap was so high until just looking it up.

The hardware choice might actually be good in terms of today's cross platform focused development. If it can deliver truly deliver 1080p at the lowest cost possible, it will be an attractive upgrade to consumers while having a strong library of titles.
 
R770 is sooo disappointing. No DX11 support at all on Nintendo's new console? That's awwwwful. It would be nice if we could as pc gamers at least rely/expect to see some DX11 titles on 'A' console as we'd see some DX11 console ports.

Dx10 console ports will still be a nice step up from Dx9 though two steps up would be even better!
 
jeremyshaw said:
I don't think there have been that many nintendo--> PC ports, lol.
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True, but the ones that have been ported have been pretty good. A good example would be RE,,,,4? The wii RE. Wouldn't you rather see a resident evil game made ground up in Dx11 than Dx9/10?
 
WBurchnall said:
True, but the ones that have been ported have been pretty good. A good example would be RE,,,,4? The wii RE. Wouldn't you rather see a resident evil game made ground up in Dx11 than Dx9/10?
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isn't RE a Sony Franchise? Unless if I am thinking of the wrong RE, lol.
 
jeremyshaw said:
isn't RE a Sony Franchise? Unless if I am thinking of the wrong RE, lol.
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Its not a Sony franchise. RE5 appeared on the PS3/xbox 360/pc for example. RE2 and 4 appeared on Nintendo systems. Its a capcom title/franchise much like 'Monster Hunter'. Its not Sony-owned per say but its traditionally appeared on Sony systems.

RE1/2 on the PS1 were said to not be possible on the N64 due to geometry performance and/or storage issues. Or so fanboys claimed till later RE1? appeared on the N64 or gamecube. I forget which...

I think the original point still stands though that probably a game built from the ground up for Dx11 would look better than a game built from the ground up for Dx9/10. If you look at some of the DX11 exclusive titles like Aliens Vs Predator or perhaps more so Metro2033, they look fantastic compared to some of the shooters of the DX9 age like Deus Ex 1 for example.

In any case, the DX11 rendering path is more efficient than the DX10 rendering path. If you took a 5770 or something equivilent to a 4870 in terms of shaders and ran say 'World of Warcraft' in Dx10/Dx11 with the same quality options, you'd get more fps with the DX11 version. I'd rather see a mid-range 5xxx series card than a high end 48xx series card. That's just my two cents.
 
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Resident Evil is a Capcom franchise, not Sony, Microsoft nor Nintendo ;-)

And well, Miyamoto said to not believe all the rumors as they have made many internal versions of consoles in the past 5 years to test out concepts, so who knows? maybe it WILL have a DX11 gpu from AMD (i say AMD mostly due to the power comsumption being lower//cooler at load, something that matters a lot on a console)
 
WBurchnall said:
Its not a Sony franchise. RE5 appeared on the PS3/xbox 360/pc for example. RE2 and 4 appeared on Nintendo systems. Its a capcom title/franchise much like 'Monster Hunter'. Its not Sony-owned per say but its traditionally appeared on Sony systems.

RE1/2 on the PS1 were said to not be possible on the N64 due to geometry performance and/or storage issues. Or so fanboys claimed till later RE1? appeared on the N64 or gamecube. I forget which..
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ah, I guess I must of been thinking of the movies, I'm sorry. As for DX10 games, I'm happy if they are in DX10.1, much more efficient codepaths :) That are utterly not compatible with DX10 (well.... without loosing some shader driven functionality), but exist in DX11 :D

Shame nVidia didn't support it on the GTX200 series :(
 
kimmytime said:
If Nintendo can leap-frog the PS3 and 360 with an incremental upgrade in hardware, they'll dominate the "high-end" console market for at least 3-4 years until the next Sony/MS gen comes out... at which point they'll slash prices and dominate based on price until Sony/MS developers catch up in familiarity and begin to surpass Nintendo in terms of complexity. By then they'll be ready with their next console and repeat the cycle. With a couple gigs of shared DDR5 memory alone, they'd push console graphics and complexity way into the next generation and still be able to make good profit on each unit.
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This is what I'm hoping will happen. I think the upcoming generation of consoles will provide a lot of good changes and competition, and it'll be nice for Nintendo to retake the hardcore game market.


Then again, it could be another dreamcast scenario. Nintendo releases a faster console, but devs figure that by the time they get a game ready for release it'll be 2013, and by then maybe they could be developing for the much better ps4/xbox3, thus abandoning the new Nintendo console. So hopefully Nintendo chooses noticeably superior hardware and provides a few strong bundled games that'll highlight its potential.
 
It was the N64 that got RE2 in 1999, in 2001 the GameCube received a Remake of RE1, as well as a new IP in RE0 which was exclusive to the GameCube but was originally promised for the N64 in 2000, they cancelled that plan and just focused on the GameCube. In terms of market dominance I can't really say. All I can say is that Nintendo is close to a 120 years old. If they don't have the lead in the market they at least have the ultimate level of seniority. As for the GPU chip that will be put in it, if you consider the fact that consoles have much better performance over head compared to their PC counter parts then you could say that the R700 has the power of about 5 X306 GPUs. X360 was a 48 Pipe chip and the average R700 had 320-800 depending on the model. For an explanation of PC VS Console performance check out this article:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/03/16/farewell-to-directx/1

It explains that the directx API that is used on PCs and not on Consoles is the reason why consoles get so much more life out of hardware compared to PC parts
 
DualOwn said:
nintendo still exists? lol
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Sony has yet to turn a profit on ps3 this generation. I believe the same is true for 360 as well. Wii, on the other hand, has made Nintendo billions of dollars in pure profit this generation. In terms of who has been the most successful financially this generation, Nintendo crushes both Sony and Microsoft, it's not even funny. Also, the system is going to officially be playable at E3, which takes place from June 7 - 9, so we'll know a lot more by then.
 
WBurchnall said:
R770 is sooo disappointing. No DX11 support at all on Nintendo's new console? That's awwwwful. It would be nice if we could as pc gamers at least rely/expect to see some DX11 titles on 'A' console as we'd see some DX11 console ports.

Dx10 console ports will still be a nice step up from Dx9 though two steps up would be even better!
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It doesn't work that way.
 
Well you know what, if the specs are pretty accurate and it's a Triple-Core PowerPC CPU and AMD GPU, then we may get backwards compatibility all the way back to Gamecube. That's assuming the calls still function on the new design. And with a more powerful GPU / CPU you could probably change the rendered resolution up to 720p or even 1080p.
 
I'm just happy that we don't have to wait until 2015 or something for the next generation of consoles to hit. After Nintendo launches, I'm sure Microsoft won't be too far behind. Who knows when Sony will launch ps4. In the end, this should translate to more graphically advanced games on pc's and finally the jump that we pc gamers have been waiting for.
 
suiken_2mieu said:
Well you know what, if the specs are pretty accurate and it's a Triple-Core PowerPC CPU and AMD GPU, then we may get backwards compatibility all the way back to Gamecube. That's assuming the calls still function on the new design. And with a more powerful GPU / CPU you could probably change the rendered resolution up to 720p or even 1080p.
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I think this would be massively awesome. And come to think of it, if the new console used a 4770, that would be a pretty formidable machine, albeit still old by today's standards.

EDIT: Plus, you guys whining about DX11, consider this: would you really want an HD 4850 class GPU doing native 1080p with tessellation? Do you know how badly that would kill performance? It would be totally unacceptable for a console.
 
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@lloose: Your right it doesn't work like that, consoles don't even use DirectX. All DirectX is, is a communication system that allows hardware to communicate with other hardware and software. consoles use only what the GPU they are using has. As the link in my previous post states its called programming to metal where they program not to the direct3d software specs but to the hardware itself. Its the lack of the DX API that makes the consoles seem to keep up with PCs. its why consoles from 2005 are keeping up with PC hardware today its because as stated in the interview the GPUs are not being used to their fullest and are actually bottle necked by the DX API. no such bottle neck exists with consoles. It even states that if they made crysis on X360 then it would probably have played 5 times better than on PC
 
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