Back in 1986, I owned both a Nintendo Entertainment System and an 8MHz Tandy 8086 PC. At the time, the NES offered a wider variety of games that were simply more fun to play (who could forget 2-player Donkey Kong or The Legend Of Zelda?). PC hardware progressed rapidly along with the skills of talented developers, and we now have titles like Quake III and Unreal Tournament that were developed for the PC and ported to gaming consoles.
Now that PC graphics have seemingly matched console machines in terms of raw graphics power, console makers have started looking toward the more aggressive PC graphics industry to power upcoming console products. We've already seen Sega utilize the PowerVR 2 tile-renderer in the Dreamcast. Additionally, Microsoft has announced their partnership with NVIDIA for the XBox, which is rumored to be using a variation of the graphics chip that will come to be known as the NV25.
Now it's Nintendo's turn.
With a projected shipping date of July '01 in Japan and October '01 in the United States, there is no doubt that Nintendo's project will compete against both the Playstation 2 and the XBox. Will the GameCube, as Nintendo calls it, pack a punch powerful enough to pound its competitors in overall sales and immersing game play? We won't know for another six months, but we were able to sit down with one of Nintendo's partners, ATI Technologies, to discuss some of the specifications of the GameCube and how its architecture is designed to compete.
The architecture of the GameCube is by no means simple, so we'll break it down piece by piece. Also note that our information is preliminary - not all of the details regarding the Cube have been released so this overview will be relatively broad.
