21 replies to this topic

[Plutonas]

he is speculating from the mhz and ghz.. but newer technologies, may have less ghz but perform dozen times better than the older ones with more ghz..

[Xilefian]

I have my own view when it comes to numbers:

NAME CPU MEM GPU VIDMEM YEAR DIFF
NES 1.79MHz 2KB 5.37MHz 2KB 1983 0
SNES 3.58MHz 128KB 3.58MHz 128KB 1990 7
N64 93.75MHz 4096KB 93.75MHz 4096KB 1996 6
NGC 486.0MHz 40960KB 162.0 MHz 3072KB 2001 5
Wii 729.0MHz 90112KB 243.0MHz 3072KB 2006 5

If we find the average rate of change per year it's:
1.49685   4.22905 1.27634 3.70653
As a multiplication

It's been 6 years since the Wii came out (Which is a baby step above the GameCube)
So...

CPU 6.5GHz
RAM 2GB
GPU 1.8GHz
VRAM 64MB

These are totally unrealistic, but half the CPU and GPU speeds:
CPU 3.25GHz
RAM 2GB
GPU 900MHz
VRAM 64MB
The VRAM in this case is the RAM for rendering to frame, it is unified with the system RAM for performance reasons. 64MB is way more than enough to pump out 1080p frames at 24bit colour.

You could probably half all of those and you'll still get a system better than the 360 and PS3, so I really wouldn't be surprised if we see 1GB RAM (Although developers would be annoyed, RAM is a big issue with the PS3 and 360 it's what makes the in-game textures such a low quality).

This is a totally foolish way to look at it though, the clock speeds mean nothing these days as there are other sectors that improve performance, I wouldn't be surprised though if this is the configuration we see, developers ask for more RAM, CPU speeds these days are around 3GHz in a good PC and are creeping up to higher numbers, GPU speeds are around 900MHz, except VRAM we're seeing things at 512MB as normal, but again, with consoles if it's unified VRAM there is a rather dramatic performance increase.

Edited by Xilefian, 08 February 2012 - 10:44 AM.