From our other sites
The story
A thread on 5ch’s hardware-wars (Geha) board blew up after quoting a remark from former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, made back during GameCube development: “For users to feel a game is ‘clearly different,’ you need 10 times the CPU and 100 times the GPU processing speed.” The thread covered how, despite the GameCube actually outperforming the PS2 at the time, it looked worse on paper because of how polygon counts were reported publicly, and how today’s Switch 2 and PS5 only differ by a few times in raw performance. Opinions were split on whether the spec race still means anything now.
[Interviewer] And the result of that was the GameCube’s specifications, is that right?
[Iwata] That’s right. The GameCube was built to be a console where graphics come out easily, where you get near-peak performance without even tuning for it, and where software is simple to make.
And the very first priority in developing the GameCube was “breaking away from numbers-ism and spec-ism.”
Source: ascii.jp / Original article here
What people said
And the result was that dev resources got stretched thin, customers gravitated to the cheaper option, and it squeezed the Wii U out as a home console.
The answer they landed on was the Switch — decent performance, works as a home console, and portable too.
Just go buy a PS6 already.
He was one of the developers.
From an average consumer's point of view, you can't tell the difference in CPU power, so just boosting SSD performance alone is enough to trick people into thinking it's way better.
For reference, they should've said 'by Sony's own metric, we can push 90 million too.' That part was a clear marketing failure.
The PS6 is a machine that uses AI to render cleverly.
They scaled the numbers way down going from PS4 to PS5, so that take was right. At the very least, the cost-effectiveness is low.
So does that mean the Wii U was pointless too?
That's just nostalgia goggles talking.
Even if it breaks after release, Capcom will probably just do what they did with the PC/PS version and say 'not our problem.'
Only Xbox scaled their numbers down drastically. The PS5 is doing great — on track to break 100 million units sold this fiscal year.
If you make it more powerful than the PS4, lowering the numbers from the PS4 defeats the whole point.
It's the magic power of AI!
Even 'far more powerful' only amounted to about 1.5x, so of course differentiating was hard.
Launching nearly two years later and still only being 'far more powerful' isn't much to brag about. And even with that edge, it couldn't beat the PS2's fill rate, so in titles that leaned heavily on effects and raw polygon counts, it sometimes actually ran at a lower frame rate than the PS2.
Wasn't Symphonia's downgrade because the PS2 lacked multi-texturing, so it had to burn extra polygons just to fake shadows?
Should we talk about how, in a later interview, they said another six months would've let them hit 60fps there too, but they prioritized the release deadline instead?
> in titles that leaned heavily on effects and raw polygon counts, it sometimes actually ran at a lower frame rate than the PS2
Did that really happen? Can you name a specific title?
Finding Nemo is a famous one, right? It got roasted constantly on the hardware-wars board back then too.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Iwata’s remark comes from an interview given during GameCube development (ascii.jp), reflecting Nintendo’s design philosophy of “breaking away from numbers-ism and spec-ism.” At the time, the GameCube actually outspecced the PS2, but because the method used to calculate polygon counts differed, it looked worse in official materials — commenters in the thread point out this was a marketing failure. Today’s Switch 2 and PS5 are different hardware generations, yet the performance gap between them is only a few times over, a fact rooted in the broader slowdown of semiconductor progress. Some in the thread argued that a gap this small can be closed with software-side tricks like AI-assisted rendering, raising the question of whether Iwata’s “feel over specs” argument still holds up today. That said, issues the thread didn’t touch on remain, such as how accurate AI rendering really is and its effect on power consumption.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “Nintendo’s Iwata: ‘To make software where you can perceive it as clearly different, you need 10x the CPU and 100x the GPU processing speed’.”
Leave a Reply