December 6^th, 2005 (12:50am) - After interviewing several developers, IGN posted new information today about the Nintendo Revolution’s anticipated graphical capabilities. While the news is based on the early development kits and not the final hardware, a developer is quoted as saying that the initial estimation of the system’s power is above that of the current Xbox but not by a wide margin. Also notable is that the developers do not seem to have anything to pass on about "Hollywood," the yet to be finalized GPU of the system. Obviously when this critical component is shipped and included in later development kits, we will have a clearer idea of the Revolution’s graphical capabilities and what kind of improvement Hollywood may bring.

This news seems to fit with what Nintendo has implied through previous statements: that the focus of the Revolution will be its innovative control system, sleek footprint, sensible pricing, and game experiences that cannot be found on other systems. Support for HDTV and staying on the bleeding edge of graphics technology does not seem to be on the Nintendo’s Revolution to-do list. The system is also said to have up to 128MB of RAM, which doubles the Gamecube’s RAM, but that’s a fraction of what the next-gen systems will have. The Xbox 360 has 512MB of RAM, for example.

The article states that developers remain interested in the potential of the system and the possibilities that the new control method brings, which is praised both for its precision as well as its originality. However, there does seem to be some developer concern that porting assets from other next-gen platforms will be difficult, since the technical divide may end up being quite large. This might mean that risk-averse studios could shy away from porting to the Revolution. On the other hand, this could also mean that the development costs for the console may end up being a bit cheaper which may attract studios wary of the constantly inflating price of console development.

You can read more about these developments in IGN’s article here.