Nintendo is doing really badly now. They have just posted their first yearly loss since like 1960 something.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Xbox is not going anywhere Microsoft has more than enough money to keep it in the marketplace. Sony is also very entranched now. Heck Xbox is starting to pick up the pace in Japan while GC stays pretty much even. In europe GC is all but dead and in North America it's not doing so hot either. Yes they sold more consoles but at a considerably higher loss per system since the price drop.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			The boost that did will die off in a couple months (some people are probably seeing this as the consoles last days, kinda like what happened with DC).
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Nintendo is not pushing any software out the door. And the only stuff that sells is their own, which doesn't make 3rd parties very happy. Just take a look at any gaming mag and you will see that a good majority of the "big name" games out there are being made for PS2 and Xbox only. Hardly ever do you see one for GC as well. 
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Personally to me it looks like Nintendo is doing the same thing Sega did with DC. Not enough mass market games to attract the non-hardcore public. Really the only thing keeping Nintendo as good as they are is the GBA. But it's starting to loose a bit of steam since it has in recent times gotten a bit of a "snes port" look to it.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			As far as hardware I have to hand it to Microsoft for designing one of the best consoles ever. The Xbox is the kind of console that all makers should be creating. It's powerful, full of GOOD features and MS actually did their reserach and listened to customers (as with the controller). Heck I'd say the Xbox is the best console (hardware wise) if only it had a proper VGA output on it. Yes the design might not be to everyones liking but then again I'm not too fond of the design of the GC, PS2 and yes even Saturn.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Also about Sony's new portable. I DON'T WANT NO FUCKING PDA CRAP IN IT. Look at what Nokia did with the Ngage. I want just a console (yes an mp3 player would be nice and easy to do with memory stick).
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Anyway, Nintendo IS now losing money on each GC. Before the price drop, they were basically breaking even. Personally, I'd prefer to play NEW games on the current systems than remakes of games I could just as easily play on my NES, SNES, etc.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Reality check. 
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Originally posted by racketboy@Nov 7, 2003 @ 04:59 PM



 wow that's a long post



luckly there were paragraph breaks... 
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Xbox is undoubtedly the most powerful of the three. I can't believe you'd even take a swing at that. Having the fastest CPU doesn't matter for a 3D gaming console. By that kind of reasoning, Gamecube is pathetic, underpowered.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Also, you claim the Xbox suffers from high-latency memory. That's not true, what is your basis for comparison here? Does the Dreamcast suffer from insanely high memory latency? If anything, an RDRAM-based solution (like PS2) would have more trouble with that, since the technology was designed for high bandwidth and the latency is often higher than comparable DDR SDRAM - this was one of its faults. Obviously having the highest aggregate memory bandwidth isn't all-important either, or PS2 would kill GCN and Xbox easily.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			As for the controllers, a controller-s is very similar in analog and dpad location to a GCN controller. But the buttons on a GCN controller are just strange... I prefer a more orderly, standard layout of some sort.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Not all of the GCNs memory is MoSys 1T SRAM, though much of it is. The sustainable latency isnt uber-low.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			The Xbox may be UMA, but the other components that share the memory aren't going to be using it nearly as much as the GPU - which is obviously efficient enough, since it solidly trounces the GC in performance.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			It also allows developers great flexibility. The CPU, a 733Mhz Intel chip, provides good performance while being very bandwidth efficient. At MOST it'd use up to 1GB/sec. I've looked at the performance of the GCN's 485Mhz IBM "Gekko" chip, and its not outstanding. In fact, it looks pretty weak standing at around 1125 MIPS, for starters.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Originally posted by Des-ROW@Nov 8, 2003 @ 11:17 PM



 The EmotionEngine is more powerful than the Gekko or the XCPU ^^! 
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			QUOTE (Des-ROW @ Nov 8, 2003 @ 11:17 PM)



The EmotionEngine is more powerful than the Gekko or the XCPU ^^!



Yeah, and the MegaDrive is more powerful than the Dreamcast... 
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Originally posted by Cloud121@Nov 9, 2003 @ 12:45 AM



 Yeah, and the MegaDrive is more powerful than the Dreamcast...  
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			It just can't show them to you or do anything with them.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Yes or no, are you saying that the Gekko chip is more powerful than a 733Mhz PIII with 128KB L2 cache? Remember, PIII has some features it can take advantage of too, like SSE. The XGPU is still overall more powerful than the flipper, and I'm not saying flipper is a slouch. Yes each one might excel at certain things, but the nvidia chip is more powerful overall. I'm not an nvidia/intel/ms fanboy. Far from it. But I can't believe you'd hammer the Xbox's hardware. Do what everyone else does and attack the software instead.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Anyway, 6.2ns is only for the 3MB total frame buffer + texture cache. As Gameboy said, hardware texture compression greatly helps modern GPUs, but there's still a limit. The 24MB of main memory is still decent, but has a sustainable of around 10ns. Then there's the 16MB "A-memory", which is 81Mhz DRAM, very slow. That said, I think the GCN's hardware is very efficient and great for the manufacturing cost.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			 Yeah, and the MegaDrive is more powerful than the Dreamcast...
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Kinda like the Xbox with Microsofts original claim of "300 Million Polygons per second", and then later 125million...
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			Not defending Microsoft or anything here, but IIRC that original 300 million claim was vertices, not polygons.
		
		

	

	
	

		
		

			I think this is the favorite BS marketing tactic of 3D console makers (except Nintendo; they've actually given real-world performance estimates on their spec sheets) - give your vertex processing capablility and don't say anything about fill rate, giving a big impressive number that means nothing by itself.