Revolution: "It's like a souped up Xbox"

[A Black Falcon]

ABF/ PC games require alot of RAM because of the way the game works on the PC. Doom III for example looks better on Xbox than on a high end PC, the same is applied to Morrow Wind, etc. And yet the XBox has very little RAM in comparison to a high end PC with a few gigs stuffed in. I dont pretend to know all the ins and outs of how it works, but it is far easier to develop for PC because your painters pallette is gigantic and you can pretty much do what ever you want and just slap a warning of system requirements on the box.

Actually, games that are on both PC and Xbox look better on PC unless your system is really old. Higher resolutions, texture qualities, etc. matter... (and this is why some people are making a big deal about HDTV. It's 1280x720 versus 640x480... a dramatic difference... I don't care about HDTV support right now because I don't have one and won't anytime soon, but I can certainly see how people who do have them are annoyed at Nintendo.)

As for development, I'd think PC is harder because you can't develop just for one hardware configuration... you've got to make something that works across many systems, so you need to aim at some lowest-common-denominator while making sure that it works on everything else too. Tricky, compared to just working with a set spec like you do on consoles...

I hope that by smaller company, you meant that they only focus on video games and not PC's, TV's, walkman's, etc. We all know about Nintendo's financial statements and that, looking at just the games division of Sony and MS, has a much larger bottom line.

Yes, Nintendo is more profitable, but Sony and MS'es other divisions more than make up for that money-wise... you cannot say that just Sony's game division 'counts' when you are talking about whether Nintendo can keep up with Sony monetarially, to say nothing of absurdly rich Microsoft...

I dunno about Nintendo not putting as much RAM in to Rev as previous generations. The NES had none, the SNES had none, the N64 had 4 MB (8 if you have the expansion pak) and the GC was the only one to really make the leap and now Rev is going to atleast double it. From what I understand, the RAM in a console is mostly used for preimptive loading and holding textures and models for current or soon to be used sequences for the game so that it doesn't have to re-load the textures and models (making the game run slower). But I know very little about this kinda stuff. It would make sense though that an HD system would need more RAM if it's basically being used as a cache for textures and what not.

The NES and SNES had RAM. Every computer has RAM, and consoles are computers. They just didn't have much. (for instance, the SNES has a 3.5mhz CPU...) The N64 has, I believe, a 90mhz CPU and 4MB ram, upgradable to 8MB with the ram pack. The GC has 24MB of fast ram and 16 more megs of slower ram. And revolution... 104-128mb. Not nearly as big a jump as previous Nintendo consoles, or consoles from anyone else... same for the clock speed, 'somewhere around double' is not even close to the usual upgrade.

http://www.freewebs.com/planetn/nes.html

http://www.freewebs.com/planetn/snes.html

http://members.aol.com/Dave388/n64specs.html

Ram... the NES'es ram is measured in kilobytes... the SNES has about 128kb ram... the n64 4mb (8mb with the ram pack)... GC has 40mb... each is a substantial jump. This one is a lot smaller -- the other stats, like clock speed, resolution, etc. show similar decreases in the degree of improvement. That just shows that this time Nintendo is not trying to 'keep pace' graphically, and hopes to do alright anyway... I certainly think it can. But you just can't say that this console is as big a jump as N64 to GC was, or SNES to N64, or Xbox to X360, or most other console jumps... (though it's certainly more than GB to GBC, which, despite eight years, had barely better hardware outside of the added color...)

It is true that they need a lot less RAM since they don't need to cache all those HD textures. Definitely. The fact that they aren't trying to do HD is the defining fact here... and shows clearly how different this console is from any of the major consoles Nintendo has done before. Let's hope their gamble works... because as the GC proved, Nintendo just can't play the same money game that Sony and MS can (oh, they can to a degree, but once you ramp it up, Nintendo's limited size becomes a liability and restricts them...), and they know it. Sure, Nintendo has billions of dollars in reserve, and make more almost every quarter, but if they started spending huge amounts like MS can they'd run out...

As for Sony, they're pretty much just desperately hoping to hold on to their leadership position because I think the PS division is responsible for a huge amount of Sony's profits. :)