It was only yesterday that the launch of IGN's Revolution channel quenched our insatiable thirst for solid Revolution data with some admittedly underwhelming yet nonetheless progressive technical specifications. The day after, they're following up on their Revolution revelations with even more info gleaned from developers working with near-final dev kits. So while this is all still subject to change, unless the Hollywood GPU ends up utilizing some form of quantum computing, don't expect any radical deviations.
First up, optical media. We've garnered some excellent commentary in our recent thread regarding Xbox 360 disc capacity, with several people citing the Revolution and its supposed 12GB discs. As it turns out, this isn't the case… by a long shot. Single-layered Revolution discs will hold 4.7GBs of data, tops, while the dual-layered variety tops out at 8.5 gigs. What will this mean for the content of Revolution games? That'll depend on the remainder of the Revolution's hardware, as well as the tools that are made available to the developers. For further elaboration, check out that 360 post if you've got an hour or so to spare, or just skip right to the meat.
Next up, memory. Initial appraisals set the Revolution's memory capacity at or around 128MBs; according to IGN, that number's been lowered to 104MBs—88 megs of 1T-SRAM and 16 megs of D-RAM. Developers have also noted that they have access to the Rev's built-in 512MBs of onboard flash memory, though flash is no replacement for dedicated RAM. The amount of memory aboard the Revolution's mysterious Hollywood GPU has yet to be determined, though many developers have placed the number at 3 megs. Of course, the apparent lack of this key hardware component may very well be responsible for the best news I've heard all day: the price.
Out of all the developers that IGN talked to, none expected the Rev to debut at a higher price than $150, with a few venturing as low as a $99 price point. Regardless, even at $200 the Revolution would undercut the cost of the Xbox 360 by 50%, since we all know that Core bundles do not count. And since nobody expects the PS3 to be cheap by any stretch of the imagination, I think I'm truly beginning to believe that Nintendo could pull off this whole "supplement rather than subsititute" thing they've got going on. Will Nintendo's decision to forego bleeding-edge hardware in favor of extreme affordability and ease of use succeed in swaying the untapped nongamer demographic? Perhaps more importantly, will the Revolution set a precedent wherein all future console generations are judged upon interface overhauls rather than polygons per second?
[Thanks, Hutchi]
