New Nintendo DS May Have GameCube-like Power

nintendo may have been milking the DS but Sony has Milked the PSP more and it still hasn't caught up to the DS.

It would've been amazing to see the Tegra 2 in this thing, but unfortunately it looks like that was just a rumor. I've heard other more reliable sources lately (including this one) indicating that the DS2 will perform similarly to the GameCube, and will possibly be backwards compatible (making porting of old games simple). Whatever will be powering the DS2, it will more then likely be slower then the Tegra 2.

when was the last time you saw Nintendo builds a "powerful" gaming system?

but then again, achieving game cube graphics is nothing so especial, Tegra can produce xbox quality graphics...

If this came out around the end of the year it would be a real bust in the chops for all the people that purchased the DSi in the last year.

To anyone not excited about this: Go play Wind Waker, Metroid Prime, or MGS on the cube. Yes, the Xbox could do bump mapping and the PS2 had particle effects down. Everything else though, the gamecube was better at.

make a flippin smash bros for gameboy darn it!

i can't believe im saying something good about gamestop but...

...if they offer the trade in ur dsi for ds2[or whatever], i might get on that

OOOOOoooo. Well, Nintendo isn't going to loose out graphically to the iPhone I guess. Perhaps we will see developers cater a little more towards the hard core gamer compared to the current DS. We'll just have to wait and see.

God, not another DS. The second screen is a useless gimmick. Just give us one big one.

So it should be able to play Wii games? Nintendo has a brilliant strategy! Unify their entire lineup so if you buy one game, you can play it on any system...

They wouldn't do that, they would lose too much money on games, that is basically cutting their actual game selling in half, and since most companies make most of their money from the game and not the system that would be bad for them.

wow...
I would hope it would have AT LEAST the power of a gamecube!

fyi, most of the new smart phones coming out are much more powerful than gamecube gen platforms. the ds2 should have more power than the wii...

HOW? Sony has pretty much ignored the PSP. PS3 is at the forefront- blu-ray takes priority over the PSP for them.

Well, there WAS the Nintendo64, the only known console to not be obsolete compared to PCs at release.

Though the main problem with Nintendo's consoles is not the lack of processing power, (they've actually held close pace to their competitors; once you strip away the powers of the Xenon and Cell that are impossible to use with games, they're not much beyond the Broadway) but rather that Nintendo has been irritatingly stingy on putting in RAM. The Game Cube came with perhaps a so-called total of 43MB of RAM, but only 24MB of it was general-purpose main memory; 3MB was actually GPU cache, and 16MB was slow memory only good for buffering from the disc. Similarly, the Wii only stacks on another 64MB.

My main hope is that Nintendo might fix this sort of problem; they're mostly afraid of RAM prices going up, but this is getting kinda rediculous.

Last time I read about that, M$ and Sony were doing it that way... Console wise at least. Nintendo always makes money when selling a console, always.

Now, future revenues are impacted with that, but still Nintendo games sell a great deal, so Good overall for them

Cheers!

The next gen consoles from MS and Sony better put at least a couple GBs of GDDR5 memory and DDR3 main memory in their systems

So the power of the Wii then

no shocker to me that Nintendo next handheld will have the power around GC.

the Gameboy color had the power of the NES, game boy advance had the power of the SNES, and the DS has (if i remember right) just slightly more power than the N64. Seams to fit perfectly.

Hmmm..... Last time, I would have to say the NES.

TBH, more likely is that it'll use all-GDDR5; the higher transfer rate can be used to compensate for the narrow interface widths that consoles usually have to settle for. Remember that for the 360 and PS3, the GDDR3 had a 128-bit interface; and the PS3's XDRAM had a 64-bit one; larger interfaces would've required far steeper prices to cram more pins in a more complicated chip package, and spend much more on a more complicated PCB to hold all the leads; these are costs that Moore's Law would never reduce. Much better to instead take the more chip-heavy end, as revisions to console hardware will cut production costs much more rapidly over time.



In all honesty, that's what was CLAIMED, but each handheld was actually a tad weaker, particularly later on. I'd say that perhaps the DSi is comparable to the N64, but the original DS... Was far weaker. ARM architectures tend to be less capable on a per-clock basis than ANY other architecture. Plus, the N64 not only had a more potent CPU, it had a full dedicated GPU, that was capable of handling both bilinear filtering and multi-texture blending, but also even hardware transform & lighting. The DS doesn't even really have its own dedicated GPU.

The "DS2" might make this different, particularly if they opt to take a higher-end Tegra chip.

They just keep finding more ways to generate additional revenue. The money involved amazes me.

sounds awesome.

the GC probably has the best library of games of any console. id love to play eternal darkness, mario sunshine, zelda or RE4 on a handheld.

the DS was a disappointment, and i sold mine due to the lack of decent games being released, but if we see alot of GC ports, the DS2 may be worthwhile.

The N64 was quite the little power house. =D

More inetrested when Sony will release a PSPgo N2000. I actually want it even smaller.

hope PSP2 come sooner~

Name the TOP selling games in the past 10yrs. They are not the most graphically and special effects games in its time. Some of those games are still highly played. Eye candy does not make a good game - example Crysis.

I think nintendo are tring to get rid of all the gamecube cpu's and gpu's they bought, wii sale are starting to slow down, so they need somthing else to put them in.

For consoles, RAM is not an issue. When working with single purpose hardware, with highly optimized code, its rare you would ever need any significant amount of RAM. 64MB is actually more then enough to handle most everything you need for a game (graphical data aside).

Cool, is the ACCELEROMATOR the steampunk version of the ACCELEROMETER... maybe?

2 words for ya: Loading times.

You seem to know your stuff for the most part, but the handhelds being weaker than their counterparts isn't true at all. The Game Boy Color was more powerful than the NES, it's more like what the NES would've been designed as if they'd have known what people would attempt to do with it graphically. Did you ever see any sprite flickering? It also had a much larger color palette. And the Gameboy Advance is capable of much more than the SNES. The SNES was a 16-bit console with extremely limited 3d capabilities enabled through on-cartridge programming. The GBA had all that and much more built in to the hardware, and was 32-bit. It was capable of early ps1-level 3d. As for the DS, it's clearly as good as, if not superior to, the N64. The most notable difference is a total lack of fog, thank God.

The GCN came out on September 14, 2001. If the new system is released next year, which it probably will if at all, then it will be 10 YEARS since the GCN was first introduced. If Nintendo can't make a portable version of a 10 year old console, they are complete failures.

In order to take full advantage of better physical hardware the software needs to be more complex and costly as well. Nintendo is a business and they make most of the premier titles for their consoles themselves so it's wise to do things the way they have been.