
Ultra 64 Hardware Specifications.
[[*]SGI Index Page] [[*]Ultra 64 Index] 
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Nintendo Ultra 64 Hardware Specs List

Obviously, the specs of the NU64 are what many people are interested 
in, but Nintendo have not yet released very many officially confirmed 
specs. The PR Manager for the Nintendo Ultra 64 at Nintendo told 
me that they would be making some announcements during the E3 Conference,
but in the event very little was said because of the delay in the 
release date. The PR Manager has told me since that the NU64 will 
be unveiled, "...at the Shoshinki Show in Japan over the Thanksgiving 
weekend (November 23).".

It's pretty easy to find rumour, hearsay and speculation as to what 
the NU64 will be able to do, but at the end of the day the magazines 
can quote very few finalised and confirmed facts. My main complaint 
is that many magazines print far too much complete rubbish; sometimes 
it's under-hype and sometimes it's over-hype.

As a result, this page has confirmed hardware specifications only 
(I used to have an 'unconfirmed specs' section, but I decided to 
remove this).

In other words, what I will have here are specs which are all direct 
from Nintendo and/or SGI sources.

What I have added is a section designed to dispell some myths which 
have been printed in various magazines, on the grounds that over-
hype is probably worse than under-hype in the long-term. 
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Confirmed Hardware Specifications


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Approximate System Power: Reality Engine quality.
(source: George Zachary of SGI. See
his quote in the [*]New Scientist
article from the [*]articles page).

Main Controller Processor: 64 bit MIPS RISC CPU (probably the
[*]R4300i but this isn't known for sure.
Iam sure it isn't the R4200).
100 MHz (minimum)
100 MIPS

My main reason for believing the controller to be the R4300i
is the following extract from the R4300i home page:

"The MIPS R4300i microprocessor extends the benefits of
RISC's performance to consumer electronics. The R4300i
microprocessor also delivers high performance to existing
embedded and computing applications at a low cost. The
low cost and high performance provided by the R4300i are
needed for the latest consumer applications such as
interactive television and games."

Graphics Processor: 100 MFLOPS? (source: Nintendo magazine)

Iam waiting to see if www.nintendo.com
will provide a complete spec list. Nothing
so far though, which is daft. If they're
not going to say anything until November,
then their specs page should be removed.

Graphics Hardware Features: Load Management,
Tri Linear MIPmapped Interpolation,
Anti-Aliasing.

([*]here is an explanation of these terms)

System BUS: Speed: 500MHz
Bandwidth: 500MB/second transfer rate.

Colour: 24 bit, 16.8 million

Audio: CD quality

Supported Resolutions: PAL (European TV Standard: 768x576),
NTSC (USA TV Standard: 645x486),
SVGA (1024x768).

(HDTV resolutions are suspected, but
are as yet unconfirmed and unlikely)

Silicon Cartridge ROM size: From: 32 megabits (4MB)
To: 800 megabits (100MB)

Silicon Cartridge: Access Time: 2 million times faster than a CDROM drive.
Bandwidth: 30MB/sec transfer rate (I previously said
500MB per sec but I now think this is
wrong. At least, I'll leave it at 30MB/sec
until I can find again whatever piece of
info it was that made me think it was
500MB/sec).

System Cost: US Retail Price of below $250.

Cartridge Cost: $50 upwards.


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'Edge' magazine said the controller processor was clocked at 105.58MHz. 
From the above data, it seems very likely that the processor is the 
[*]R4300i, made by [*]MIPS Technologies, a subsidiary of [*]Silicon 
Graphics Inc [[*]Euro-mirror]. However, no one knows for sure yet 
whether this is the case. See below for my reasons as to why I think 
the main controller is not the R4200. 
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More info as I get it. 
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Myths, Rumours and Chinese Whispers...

Yep, the magazines have been having a field day! Never have I seen 
so much unconfirmed guesswork and rubbish in all my life. Here I 
will dispell some of the untrue things which have been said about 
the Ultra 64.


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NextGen, Audio Visuality and Edge said the U64's textured-polygon
rate is 100000/sec! That ain't much.


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Well, after much badgering and hassling of people at SGI, I still 
can't get any reliable statement on this figure. George Zachary's 
New Scientist quote implied a figure of 600000/sec, but I have been 
told by several people involved with the NU64 that it is not as high 
as this (though it is higher than 100000/sec), which is a shame to 
say the least as this means that (I have to say) George's quote in 
the New Scientist article is misleading. Overall, George would not 
give any precise details because he is not allowed to, but here is 
what he did say: 
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"There is a HUGE difference in the realism between "over 100,000
real-time, anti-aliased, tri-linear mip-mapped interpolated,
gouraud-shaded, perspective-correct, z-buffered, lit, blended
[and the rest of the poly features] polygons" and Sony's 360K
quote. They compare absolutely different numbers."


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and: 
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"If you look at NU64 press release back in 1993, we stated over
100,000 full featured polygons per second. Not 100,000 exactly.
But at least 100,000."


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George said that full details would be released when the NU64 is 
unveiled in Japan on November 23rd. It's too long a time to wait,
IMHO. However, since the 3DOMk2 (the NU64's main rival) will not 
be out until 1996 as well, at least the public will have an opportunity 
to judge properly beforehand. I still say that there should be a 
full disclosure now though because the M2 is looking very good at 
the moment. How can I rant and rave on rec.games.video.advocacy without 
full specs? :D More info as I get it.


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Edge (and others) said the controller is an R4200.


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The U64's main controller is very unlikely to be the R4200; the target 
market of the R4200 is portable notebooks and low-cost desktop systems 
- a very different target market to the R4300i (see above). Further,
if there was a 105MHz R4200 in existence, I would have thought that 
the [*]relevant page at MIPS Technologies would have mentioned it 
by now. :)

I must emphasise again, however, the no official info has yet been 
released as to what the NU64's main controller actually is, so don't 
go believing the magazines' info as if it's fact, because it isn't. 
I currently believe that it's the R4300i because that is the most 
likely candidate based upon the info given at the [*]R4300i Home 
Page as well as the fact that the oft-quoted 100MHz clock speed matches 
that of the R4300i.


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NextGen and GameFan said it will have 64bit sound!


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This is complete rubbish. There is no such thing as 64bit sound. 
The best that exists is 20bit which is used in recording studios. 
The human ear cannot detect better than this. Some people have emailed 
me saying that mags actually said it would have a 64bit sound chip. 
This would be fine, but I am going by what I see in terms of rumour 
and hype on the newsgroups and several people definitely quoted mags 
as saying that the NU64 has 64bit sound which is a very silly statement 
for a mag to make. I've been told that EGM says this in it's June 
issue.


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NextGen said the U64 will have 64 sound channels.


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This depends on what they mean by sound channels. If they mean physical 
output channels, then no way can 64 be correct as 7 are needed at 
most for good surround-sound, 2 for standard stereo. If they mean 
internal mixable channels (voices), then maybe, but I'll be surprised 
if it's as high as 64. Mind you, the PlayStation has 24 channels 
and the Saturn has 32, so maybe 64 channels for the U64 is correct. 
We'll see.


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NextGen said it can do real-time ray tracing!


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This statement is wrong mainly because it's meaningless. Ray-tracing 
is a technique which relies heavily on raw floating point computing 
power. It is not something which the U64 is designed to do (the U64,
just like the other new consoles, excels at [*]hardware texture mapping). 
'real-time ray tracing' is also meaningless because any machine can 
do 'real-time' ray-tracing (eg. my old 8 bit, 4MHz, 64K RAM, BBC 
Micro model B can do real-time ray-tracing... in a 4 by 4 pixel window 
using only two colours!). See what I mean? The compuational work 
needed for ray-tracing varies greatly with the desired level of detail 
and complexity (eg. number of depth levels). To give you some idea: 
my colleague at work renders many ray traced images every week for 
his PhD related sonar work. On the 486DX33 PC in the lab here, a 
640x480 image at a moderate level of detail takes several hours to 
render. On the Sun Sparc 4 which he uses most of the time, it takes 
some 35 minutes. On the 134MHz 64MB RAM SGI Indy I use it takes about 
3 to 5 minutes depending on whether I'm using the machine at the 
same time or not. In other words, there's just no way that the NU64,
or any of the consoles, will be able to do high quality (eg. Babylon 
5) 'real-time ray-tracing'. You need something like an [*]SGI Power 
Challenge [[*]Euro-mirror] to do that.


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NextGen said the Reality Immersion Co-processor goes at 80MHz.


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This is completely unconfirmed. As I write this, SGI have released 
no precise specs on the R.I. chip at all. The same goes for the DSP. 
We will just have to wait and see.


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NextGen said the NU64 would be able to output at 1200x1200!


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This is a very peculiar figure and one which I find very unlikely 
(if only because 1200x1200 is a square 1:1 ratio and will not fit 
correctly onto any future/existing TV/monitor). I regret to say that 
EGM has now apparently used this figure as well (probably nicked 
it from NextGen. *sigh*).

It is known that the NU64 can output in 1024x768 SVGA, and that it 
supports PAL (770x576 European TV standard) and NTSC (645x486 USA 
TV standard), but nothing is currently known about support for HDTV-
quality resolutions. There are three HDTV standards: 1920x1035, 1920x1152 
and 1600x1200. It is not currently known whether the NU64 will be 
able to output any of these resolutions (all the [*]SGI article actually 
says is that the console will ensure 'future compatibility with HDTV'. 
ie. it doesn't explicity say that the machine can output in either 
HDTV standard; ie. we don't know whether the HDTV output will just 
be the 1024x768 output scaled to fit, or genuine HDTV output). The 
high-res TV standard of 1600x1200 is very new, so I would be surprised 
if the NU64 supports that since there are so few TV's and monitors 
in existence which can display it. Basically, I'm trying to point 
out that, as far as high-res modes go, we just don't know yet for 
sure. SVGA yes. HDTV? I doubt it, but wait and see.

Incidentally, I've seen a lot of posts on the rgv* groups (mostly 
from people in the USA) saying that HDTV resolutions are pointless 
because most TVs can't display more than 400 lines. To this I would 
respond with these points:

- this 400 line figure refers to the US NTSC TV Standard of 645x486. 
This format is, as far as I know, the smallest anywhere. There are 
several TV standards around the world (NTSC, PAL, HDMAC, HDTV, SECAM).

- in Japan, HDTV is very common indeed and laserdisc is practically 
standard there (as opposed to VHS elsewhere). The NU64 is a Japanese 
product first and foremost.

- HDTV is now becoming quite common in parts of Europe (the EEC is 
currently running its '16:9 Programme') and HDTV sets have come down 
in price quite sharply in the last 2 years in the UK alone (from 
$3000 to $1200. Still too much, but until there are digital HDTV 
channels and/or laserdisc become even cheaper, the prices will remain 
high); laserdiscs have come down in price quite a lot too.

- one way of gently forcing nations into better TV standards is by 
creating a demand for them. If the public start owning game consoles 
that can output in SVGA and upwards, the public are going to start 
wanting HDTV. Good thing too, IMHO. :)


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NextGen said the U64 has a 64bit RISC data path!


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A data path is just a data path and has nothing to do with RISC, 
CISC or CRISC at all. Too many mags spout figures and words without 
even knowing what they mean (Audio Visuality provides a good example; 
in their January 1995 issue they state that MFLOPS stands for 'millions 
of floating points per second'. Argh!).


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Iheard that the U64 will come ready-boxed with a snazzy UNIX Operating
System and a 200MB hard drive!


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The part about the operating system is is complete and utter rubbish. 
The NU64 doesn't even have an operating system (see the [*]New Scientist 
article for more info). As for the harddrive, I would be very surprised 
if this were true. I'd have thought it more likely that flash memory 
cards would be used for position-saving, etc., although New Scientist 
reports that Nintendo is developing a 1.2GB writable CD system for 
the NU64, to be made available in 1997 (ie. not available at launch). 

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More rumours, mis-information and total tosh dispelled as I see it! 
:) 
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[[*]SGI Index Page] [[*]Ultra 64 Index]



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