Anubis

@fulluphigh

Order of magnitude: "In its most common usage, the amount being scaled is 10 and the scale is the (base 10) exponent being applied to this amount"

I know full well what it means and yes, contemporary hardware is that much faster.

@PN04

" All this guy is talking about is a lack of RAM for Petes sake! "

And if you knew ANYTHING about technology you'd understand that 512 MB of total memory is absolutely abysmal in the modern age, much in the same way 32 MB couldn't cut it back in 2005. The current generation consoles will be 6 and 7 years old this fall; I hate to burst your tech illiterate bubble, but that makes them dinosaurs compared even to low end contemporary hardware.

An RTS in the vain of Shogun 2 requires a large amount of memory to run with acceptable performance; having to draw over 1400 units on screen (each with the same geometric complexity and texture quality of an NPC found in a game like AC), dynamically animating them, and then laying it all over a complex map with dynamic weather simulation is a memory intensive task. When it's all said and done, Shogun 2 might very well use 4 GBs of memory (system and video memory). There are other factors that must be considered as well, notably that the 360's CPU and GPU are several orders of a magnitude slower than the mid-range desktop processors and videocards required to play it with acceptable performance. It's fairly accurate to say that the game will not run on a 7 year old platform with a tiny amount of memory without having to vastly simplify everything about it (thus defeating the purpose of porting it in the first place).

Of course, you're a total dunce when it comes to how hardware is used and works, so all of this is naturally lost on you.

@liquidsoap89

"Rovio seems like the type of company not willing to push their own boundaries"

Rovio purchased the company's gaming arm (which has all of what, two titles to its name?), but the bulk of Futuremark remains unchanged; they'll keep rolling out hardware taxing benchmark suites just as they've always done.

@Papaspud

Ya know, it could very well have been The Situation if you were to ask him about anything other than his abs or partying.

@Diet Kane

It can, but I heard Mine Sweeper stutters worse than George W. Bush during a White House press conference.

@Faceless Troll

It's two to three times faster than your card, falls within a similar TDP, and can drive contemporary games across multiple monitors with 3D enabled. Having said that, you aren't the target demographic it's aimed at. Unless you have a monitor with a resolution of 2500x1440 or higher, actively play games in stereoscopic 3D, or refuse to a see your framerate dip below 60 at the highest levels of image quality, it's overkill for your needs.

@Faceless Troll

It's actually pretty reasonable for a enthusiast class product (the halo product isn't slated for release until later this year) and it'll force AMD to stop their $550+ shenanigans with the HD 7000 line; Kepler offers the same or better performance with a much better TDP.

@nerdydesi1

Don't forget the heat. First generation Fermi cards ran extremely warm.

@(Unverified)

"the next gen consoles will cost about 500$ and do a whole lot more than a single graphics card though."

Really? The HD 6670 that Next Box's GPU is based on is somewhere around 6-10x slower than an HD 7970 or GTX 680 when it comes to overall shader power, EVEN SLOWER when tessellation or GPU compute is considered; direct to metal programming can't mitigate such a massive gulf in performance. Just one of these cards was enough to drive The Samaritan at a solid, v-synced 60 FPS with FXAA enabled (traditional MSAA or FSAA cause a stupendously massive performance penalty in games with a partially or fully deferred renderer) at a high resolution.

@Foetoid

"I'm not being a fanboy, its plain logic that if the Wii was a HD console comparable to the 360/Ps3"

The problem with your logic is that the Wii-U offers little more over the current generation outside of its tablet and a resolution bump. Next generation Microsoft and Sony consoles will be packing DX11/OpenGL 4.2 compliant hardware, and they will be offering hardware features that Nintendo's console flat out does not. Developers will then use these features as the backbone for their game's visual makeup; hardware tessellation, GPU compute driven post processing effects (DOF, tone mapping, any number of AO models), and vastly improved lighting (global illumination, real time surface reflections) are going to be used heavily. The Wii-U will be forced to use approximations of those effects, much as the current crop of consoles do.


If they're capable of offering even close to the same image quality delivered in The Samaritan, Nintendo will once again have a console that would've been potent in the previous generation but is relatively weak in the new one. Next-gen engines will not be able to be ported down (UE3 doesn't work on the Wii, UE4 won't work on the Wii-U) because they physically can't, and this will limit the number of 3rd party games on it. Why would I plunk down $300 for a Wii-U if I can get a Next Box or PS4 that offers the games I want to play with better image quality, better online connectivity, and multimedia features? The Wii-U could outsell them combined, but that's largely irrelevant if the system lacks 3rd party support (as it does now).

Oh and as far as, "but in reality, graphically the consoles are virtually identical" is concerned, no, they aren't for the reasons I gave above. Native resolution is just a facet of a game's overall image quality and there are many, many more that play an equally important role. Ignoring them because it supports your argument is disingenuous at best, fanciful fanboy crap at the worst. I said it before and I'll say it again: you need to do a little more research on the subjects before you talk about them.