Nintendo: Project Cafe - Wii U

[Niode]

There's no reason for the Wii-U to not look better than the PS3 and 360. It will be arriving 5 to 6 years after those consoles.

If it looks significantly better, wouldn't they have made that an emphasis point of the E3 presentation?

Hardware isn't finalised. Third parties didn't have working demos. It was only announced to have been going around third parties a couple of months ago. Not enough time to develop a demo. Nintendo are very third party focused this time around, displaying something they had been working on before the third parties even got a whiff of the console wouldn't be fair and make third parties look bad. Pissing off third parties is not their modus operandi this time around. Thankfully.

I wasnt aware of PS3 games looking worse than 360. I remember your statements being true near the beginning of the PS3s cycle. It's now quite the opposite from what I hear. Often higher res textures and better lighting on the PS3. And less choppy. But my words mean little as I am not speaking from personal experience.

With the exclusion of Castlevania LoS and L.A. Noire (to be fair I prefer the more natural lighting of the 360 version than the unrealistic hard lighting of the PS3 version but that's just me) pretty much every single game on both PS3 and 360 has been inferior on PS3. Higher res textures are impossible due to the PS3s fixed limit of 256MB video ram. The 360 will always have the advantage here purely because it is system wide 512MB, so more RAM can be dedicated to textures (Textures are massively RAM dependent, more RAM = better textures. It's as simple as that). The only thing the PS3 has over the 360 is a slightly better pixel shader (due to it using a 7800GT derivative compared to the 360's x1900 derivative) but that comes at the expense of overall vertex performance therefore leading to more screen tearing or less objects on screen. These are facts and not opinions. There are tricks to getting more out of the PS3, but the same can be said for the 360, it's just that devs don't need to use them to get the same or better performance out of the 360.
http://www.eurogamer.net/archive.php?pl ... e=face-off

[Rocketman]

As an owner of an Xbox 360 and quite a large number of X360 games I can safely say that PS3 has outperformed my beloved 360 graphics wise.

Compared to games like Gears of War 2, Halo: Reach and CoD: Black Ops, games like Resistance 2 and KillZone 2 look much better then any game I've seen on 360. Though I'm sure Gears of War 3 and Halo 4 will give 360 that last push, graphics wise.
But I think next year the capabilities of the PS3 will begin to run circles around Xbox 360 - pushing Microsoft to release information on Xbox 720.

I'm excited to see what they can do with the Wii U in terms of video capability. Metroid Prime in true 1080p? I can't wait. Well... I can, but I don't want to.

[Niode]

As an owner of an Xbox 360 and quite a large number of X360 games I can safely say that PS3 has outperformed my beloved 360 graphics wise.

Compared to games like Gears of War 2, Halo: Reach and CoD: Black Ops, games like Resistance 2 and KillZone 2 look much better then any game I've seen on 360. Though I'm sure Gears of War 3 and Halo 4 will give 360 that last push, graphics wise.
But I think next year the capabilities of the PS3 will begin to run circles around Xbox 360 - pushing Microsoft to release information on Xbox 720.

Because all of a sudden Sony will flip a magical switch that will allow the PS3 to have more horsepower? Not gonna happen.

[Rocketman]

Because all of a sudden Sony will flip a magical switch that will allow the PS3 to have more horsepower? Not gonna happen.

Because the PS3 is more powerful then the Xbox 360 and can outperform it? Will happen.

[dsheinem]

As an owner of an Xbox 360 and quite a large number of X360 games I can safely say that PS3 has outperformed my beloved 360 graphics wise.

Compared to games like Gears of War 2, Halo: Reach and CoD: Black Ops, games like Resistance 2 and KillZone 2 look much better then any game I've seen on 360. Though I'm sure Gears of War 3 and Halo 4 will give 360 that last push, graphics wise.
But I think next year the capabilities of the PS3 will begin to run circles around Xbox 360 - pushing Microsoft to release information on Xbox 720.

Because all of a sudden Sony will flip a magical switch that will allow the PS3 to have more horsepower? Not gonna happen.

^This. Cross-platform stuff usually looks better on the 360 (or, occasionally, on par). Very rarely does it look better, and usually then it is b/c the PS3 was the lead development platform. The cross-platform games I buy on PS3 are mostly because I am interested in free multiplayer or prefer the DS3 for that particular game - it isn't because they look better than they would on the 360. If Sony could change that, they would have a long time ago...

Niode, surely you must concede that PS3 exclusives look prettier than 360 exclusives, right? I mean the Uncharted and Killzone games easily surpass Halo and Gears...

[fastbilly1]

Oddly, both the Wii and the Wii U seem like transitions between hardware/graphics generations.

Maybe Wii U games will look great by the end of their lifecycle, maybe not - it depends in large part on whether third party developers stick around. I can't recall any of the late Wii titles blowing me away in terms of graphics compared to an earlier game like, say, Metroid Prime 3.

Fair enough. They are like transition consoles graphicswise. Personally, most games released since halfway through last gen look good enough to me. Granted I still play Half Life and Descent so my opinion on graphics is skewed.

[isiolia]

Because all of a sudden Sony will flip a magical switch that will allow the PS3 to have more horsepower? Not gonna happen.

Because the PS3 is more powerful then the Xbox 360 and can outperform it? Will happen.

The problem is more that the PS3 has a bottleneck in form of limited VRAM, as was already mentioned.
In terms of the CPU, the Cell is definitely a more powerful setup - but a lot isn't relying on the CPU. Offhand, you have stuff like the surface deformation stuff you see in a lot of system exclusives, but otherwise not much.

Most of the Cell's cores are relatively specialized. Like, if you look at the Folding@Home results for it, it seems like it's extremely powerful. Until you look at the details, where it does a subset of calculations, basically in line with what can be fed to graphics cards on the PC with similar results.

I like the PS3 - own two in fact - but the system still ballparks in the same range as the 360.

What it does have is a much stronger lineup of exclusives coming down the pipe (and from the last year or two as well), which IMO is really the bigger deal.

Niode, surely you must concede that PS3 exclusives look prettier than 360 exclusives, right? I mean the Uncharted and Killzone games easily surpass Halo and Gears...

I tend to only find the exclusives on either one to look particularly great with smart/artistic use of the console's capabilities anyway. *cough*gloriousPCmasterrace*cough*

There were some segments of Uncharted 2 that were darn impressive in that regard though.

[Niode]

Because all of a sudden Sony will flip a magical switch that will allow the PS3 to have more horsepower? Not gonna happen.

Because the PS3 is more powerful then the Xbox 360 and can outperform it? Will happen.

But it isn't though. That's exactly my point. Sony like to think it's more powerful but in actual fact it isn't. The CELL is very good at some things but utterly fails at others. Suffice to say the CPU in the 360 is a better all round chip as far as standardised instruction sets goes (why the 360 can have PC ports extremely pain free for the developer but the PS3 can't). On paper they are the same CELL is a 6 threaded CPU, the 360 CPU is a 6 threaded CPU.

@DSHeinem I agree, Naughty Dog achieved some phenomenal visuals with Uncharted 2, but that is essentially a first party developer who have had access to the tech the longest out of all the devs at Sony. They are a very canny bunch of developers that know how to squeeze the most out of limited resources. When a game is built from the ground up with the limitations of the system in mind you can achieve some great things. However, the same can be said for the 360.

[optmusprimenumber]

I haven't looked through this entire thread yet... but having recently seen actual pictures and videos of the actual controller I can only think one thing: any game that is Sci-Fi or involves advanced technology could be seriously awesome with that controller. Splinter Cell for instance with his arm mounted PDA... not to mention all it's other uses as sub-screens and maps and whathaveyou... I'm guessing some of what I just said has been discussed somewhere in here, but I think it's gonna be pretty damn cool.

[Xeogred]

Several pages later,

@ Ack

You bring up a lot of great points yourself and many I can agree with, so I don't have a lot to add. Your points just really further emphasis though (to me), that Nintendo has alienated some of their old fanbase and I'd probably throw myself in that pile. I'm just not interested in them like I used to be growing up and nothing they're doing thesedays is looking to recapture that old love. Times are changing of course, but if I've been arguing and throwing out some points in this thread here myself, I'd hope that kind of shows I still do want Nintendo to be awesome or to really like them again, but it doesn't look like it'll be happening anytime soon.

As for the touch screen, yes it's a tough step for developers, but its also an interesting one, and if it proves popular enough, expect Microsoft and Sony to take notice and make their own.

Definitely something I do not want to happen. As a side peripheral it'd be fine, but yeah I'd rather not have stuff like this as the primary controller.

But Nintendo has repeatedly done well with outdated harder and usually prefers to behave like the trendsetter. That way they hit a larger market of folks, and Sony and Microsoft just come off as copying them. And the huge market of non-traditional gamers that came in for the Wii just shows that folks who haven't in the past been interested in this hobby don't necessarily care about graphics. Also better hardware doesn't necessarily mean better games, as we here in the retro gaming community should know. As for waiting for MS and Sony's game plans...haven't they both stated that they don't want new consoles for several years? That is their game plan. So that gives Nintendo some time to make new sales and continue to shoot for that market of folks who probably don't really care what Sony and Microsoft are making (or have even heard they make video games).

Good stuff here and I can certainly agree better hardware doesn't automatically = better games. But yeah, still... I like what dsheinem said here.

Admittedly though as I've said before, that long lasting joke has sold over 86 million units.

It's true and I can't deny it. It's like a surreal nightmare I can't wake up from, lol. But isn't it also true that many buyers were very quick to move on and not really look back? It tends to sound like that. Personally from the start I was not excited about motion controls at all or how much Nintendo hyped up the Mii thing for awhile and just everything they wanted to do with the Wii, and well years later now it looks like I was right (for myself) and the Wii turned out to be pretty weak in my eyes. The other part of your paragraph there:

Considering how much money they made, I don't think they're too worried about the traditional game market anymore. Instead they're shooting for the folks who were never really into games but took an interest in things like the iPad. Nintendo has the name-recognition, the sales base, and the money to do what they want, and while it could backfire on them, it could also turn out hugely successful.

Again just kind of further emphasis to me that Nintendo isn't what I want them to be anymore and so it's just time to move on or something.