Food for thoughts about flipper

[Buggy Loop]

#1 Flipper output 648Mpixel with trilinear filtering. Nv2a output 1000Mpixel with bilinear filtering. If nv2a want to match flipper's filtering quality, it has to move to trilinear filtering and therefor cut its fillrate by half. Now its 648 vs 500

#2 Flipper's texture cache can store compressed textures with s3tc and apply the textures on the compressed texels with virtually no performances drop. Nv2a has to decompress the textures before sending them into the cache. Flipper's cache was already huge, with compressed textures in it (which is the first gpu to REALLY support it in the cache) we are now looking at a cache that is 48 times bigger than nv2a's cache. That means higher res textures (when developers start to understand the console more, zelda at spaceworld will certainly show plenty ) and best of all, less stalls and cycles miss, which hurts fillrate and bandwidth ALOT.

#3 Thanks to #2 and 1t-sram, Flipper's 648Mpixel is actually achievable, thats a 95 to 99% effiency. Nv2a, on the other hand with its small cache and obvious risk of many stall and cycle miss, will not even come close to 70% (and thats being good..) of its fillrate effiency. Flipper have have far more less risks to wait for a texture cause of its cache size, but even if a stall happen (which will be quite rare in fact) 1t-sram's low latency will feed the needed texture into the cache pretty fast, basicly, a stall on flipper is almost non-existant.

#4 while nv2a can just stick to bilinear to have faster fillrate, flipper, even if it would go with bilinear, would see no fillrate improvements over trilinear. Not really a big deal since most developers will use trilinear or anisotropic filtering on both xbox and gamecube.

#5 thats only the tip of the iceberg about flipper's effiency, there are much more features that are still kept away from public, but its leaking little by little. ArtX was just GENIUS with flipper's design. ATI was very smart to buy them, they know damn well how to use transistors to their advantage and have good effiency overall. Something nvidia lacks in both, they just cram more transistors in there but are not changing its core architecture much, and they dont even know what effiency means so

[MyTMouse]

Not only that but Flipper allows for 8 texture layers/sec compared to only 4/sec. in the Xbox. Developers everywhere are extremely impressed at how well the GameCube can move through huge textures with almost no delay at all. Imagine what they could have designed if the GameCube was aimed at the $299 price point the other consoles have

[Atarion]

Can you just imagine what ArtX is going to do with future generation Radeons? I'm getting a bit o' wood just thinking about it!

[JasonQG]

Originally posted by Atarion
Can you just imagine what ArtX is going to do with future generation Radeons? I'm getting a bit o' wood just thinking about it!

File that one under too much information.

[MyTMouse]

LOL what gets me is that the Flipper can be made so cheaply. The whole GameCube including 486MHz Power PC CPU, Flipper (with 3.1MB embedded RAM), 1T-SRAM, Proprietary DVD-disk drive, etc. can be sold for $199. How much do PC graphics cards cost? They can't even touch what a GameCube or Xbox can do. I feel jipped now There should be PC graphics cards out now that can do 100 Million+ polys/sec. for less than $200

[BumblebeeTuna]

The reason that consoles are so much cheaper is due to the fact that they sell millions upon millions of them. Unfortunately that's not the case with graphics cards. My bet is there are 40 to 50 consoles (from a given mfg.) sold for every high end graphics card sold. How many GF3's do you think have been sold worldwide since its release?? My guess is less than 200,000 (I may be way off here). The more you sell, the cheaper you can sell it...

Cheers

[dsherman]

I beleive that we may see alot of Flippers versitilities in the Radeon 2. it will be far superior. Just wish the Game cube had hard drive and a high speed access. just remember the most superior consols don't always win.

[Buggy Loop]

Yup, why a console is so cheap is cause they make big deals with companies to give them big supplies.

Here is what nintendo did. Gave IBM 1 billion to manufacture gekko and get a good price for it. 3Billions to BUILD Nec plants in tokyo DEDICATED to building gamecubes and that it will cost cheaper to manufacture. a 4 billion $ investment just to drop the price to about 50 to 100$ less in manufacturing, it doesnt seem much but remember that the IBM and NEC deal is for more than gamecube, nintendo also made deals with them for their next gen console, so its not wasted money. In the long run, its better for them, they sell hardware cheaper than sony and microsoft (especially MS, xbox cost 440$ to manufacture, gamecube is estimated at 219$ and will drop severely next year)

Anyway, about the hard-drive, trust me, there will be one, look at the high speed port at the bottom.. Nintendo will only use it when they need it, which mean when they'll have a MMO game. They'll sell it cheap and even pack it in "killer" games. It split userbase a little but if a gamer knows he have to buy it to play a massive multiplayer game that interest him, he'll get it. Its not the type of games that joe blow will rent for a few days, only hardcore gamers or mainstream gamers with half a clue will even bother to pay for an ISP anyway to play online.. I prefer paying less personally, i'll get the HD and modem when a game will interest me. consoles are mostly single player imo, internet wont be a big success for consoles, look at seganet..

[MyTMouse]

Still though, there's no way that PC cards are worth the price they charge...it's insane!

[rcf84]

Radeon LE $68 not bad

[MyTMouse]

true true but I'm talking about like my Radeon VIVO..it was $399 OEM when I got it in November..or $600+CDN for GeForce 3's...not worth the money. Well Obviously I thought my Radeon was a good purchase or I wouldn't have it

[CowboyBebop]

I think your wrong about the hard drive that's what the SD cards are for and if you think about it, that's a lot more advanced than a fixed hardrive with moving parts. More things to worry about failing on you SD cards will just get cheaper and cheaper and while your friends are lugging around entire systems to a gaming marathon I'll have my stamp sized harddrive in my pocket...... somewhere.......... what did I do with that darn thing.

[MyTMouse]

The SD cards are the best! I can't wait to pick up a 32 or 64MB one

[rcf84]

Originally posted by Atarion
Can you just imagine what ArtX is going to do with future generation Radeons? I'm getting a bit o' wood just thinking about it!

ArtX is making the R300 or you say the Radeon 3

[dsherman]

Nintedo is playing this smart. They are not takeing a loss on their console. sony and microsoft are takeing a huge loss in selling their console. and they are going to have to take a bigger loss just to be competitive. Not everyone wants or needs a hard drive or a modem. where it's standard in the xbox may hurt them. nintendo made a great console, made it in-expensive, and stripped it down and is going to make a little profit. The systems are then customizable for what you want to play. I am not an economist but I think that puts nintendo in a better position. and If I were an investor I would invest in nintendo instead of sony or microsoft.

[pHiSh]

Has anyone read the interview with Greg Buchner on the front page of Rage3d here? Very nice read...

[MyTMouse]

Nintendo is taking a small loss on their console ($219 to produce...$199 to sell) well wholesale is actually $192. They can afford to drop their prices a lot more than Sony or MIcrosoft will be able to