Nintendo has historically used last-generation technology in their consoles, which resulted in performance that was inferior to competitors' consoles. This was the case with GameCube, DS, Wii, 3DS, and Wii U, all of which were outpowered by Sony and Microsoft systems.
It looks like that practice is about to change with Nintendo's next generation console. Nintendo started distributing the software version of the "NX" development kit to qualified publishers and developers this week. We had a brief chat with a senior developer at a major game publishing company based in the U.S., and according to him, Nintendo NX is going to have very impressive hardware. Based on the development kit, the sheer processing capabilities of the hardware (which still hasn't been finalized) are going to be "incredibly powerful" and quite possibly faster than whatever Sony and Microsoft have in store. Specifically, one software demo included with the kit crunches so many polygons that it's currently impossible to run at 60fps using a current-generation Intel (we're assuming a Core i7 Skylake) CPU and a nearly top-of-the-line graphics card (no specifics provided, but they probably used a single graphics card).
Given that analysts are now predicting a holiday 2016 launch date for the NX, the only logical conclusion is that Nintendo is working with an established chip giant to design and create a highly specialized CPU and GPU combination that will outperform modern-generation hardware.
All of this sounds great, as long as the architecture is not too proprietary. We would hate to have a situation similar to N64, where Nintendo ships powerful hardware that underperforms under real-life conditions because extremely specialized hardware is too difficult to develop for and does not lend itself to easy porting of popular development frameworks out of the box. Either way, this will be a clear change from the Wii and Wii U generations, and we are looking for more details about what else the development kit includes.
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