Revolution only just above Xbox power

Nintendo bows out of the console horsepower race as the Revolution signals a move away from the maximum horsepower philosophy of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Several developers working on games for Nintendo's Revolution console have revealed that the console is not much more powerful than the original Xbox.

"To be honest, it's not much more powerful than an Xbox. It's like a souped-up Xbox," a major third party source told IGN. "But it's the controller that makes the difference and the controller is really nice."

The console philosophy is to provide innovative gameplay thanks to its wand controller and move away from the graphical horsepower of rival consoles. That game won't support HDTV, unlike Xbox 360 and PS3. There just won't be enough memory, with just 128 MB expected according to IGN's sources.

Details of the ATI graphics hardware remain sketchy. One studio said: "As soon as we find out what it can do then we'll know if Revolution will just be like an Xbox or something a little more."

"It's like another current generation platform for us," another developer said. "But it's such a nice controller that it opens up a lot of possibilities. It's very different and it's very precise."

We already knew that Nintendo didn't want to compete with MS and Sony again, but it's interesting to hear from developers about their experiences with hardware. One has to take the views with a pinch of salt though as much of the development is taking on non-finalised GameCube-based development systems.

Source: IGN

Comments

#1 - 11/12-2005 @ 04:42 : Critter

"We already knew that Nintendo didn't want to compete with MS and Sony..." Wow...Nintendo needs to wake up!

#2 - 07/01-2006 @ 00:35 : Shiro Gomi

They need to wake up from what? It's absolutely true that Nintendo is no longer in the same league as Sony or Microsoft. When I say league, of course, I'm not relating any quality issues, it's just that they're not playing the same game (also not literal). Nintendo has basically said "Okay, graphics aren't that important anymore, as long as the picture is clear and the game is fun".

That could be seen as a bad thing (I don't know how, but hey, to some people, a tremendously boring game is still cool if it looks nice), but it is a good thing in the sense that now, we're going to get games that are 100% focused on AWESOME. And I mean, awesome play styles (The controller can be used in many different ways), more originality, better ideas, refined controls, etc.

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