Tales of Vesperia Wii Rumor

[LJkAze]

Rikiya Koyama on his blog today accidentally appears to have leaked out this information; lol I hope it true man and it would piss off alot of people ^_^

http://blog.livedoor.jp/rikiya_no_kimochi/archives/998161.html

[DuskShark]

Rikiya Koyama on his blog today accidentally appears to have leaked out this information; lol I hope it true man and it would piss off alot of people ^_^

http://blog.livedoor.jp/rikiya_no_kimochi/archives/998161.html

*reads link*

We already have it on the PS3 and Xbox 360. I pray that this is an misunderstanding.

[Cless]

Whether or not this is true, I absolutely don't see the point of trying to downport the game to the Wii, except to make a tiny minority happy.

At the very least, it's going to require them to rebuild the engine completely from scratch and made with the Wii in mind. Else they'll end up with another technical disaster akin to ToP GBA or ToS PS2...or worse. Sounds like far more effort than it would be worth. Even though the PS3 version itself appears to be a very good port, they couldn't even get it to run at the full 1280x720 resolution that the 360 version did.

[Cless Aileron]

I'm just thinking this is some misunderstanding.  The moment I read that rumor, I was all, "Does not compute" over that.  I mean, I do picture it being as watered down if that were to happen, just like when Capcom decided to throw Dead Rising on the Wii and everything I heard about it.

Not getting the point of a Wii version.  Heck, a PC version makes more sense but realistically, that's not happening.

[pedrocasilva]

Whether or not this is true, I absolutely don't see the point of trying to downport the game to the Wii, except to make a tiny minority happy.

At the very least, it's going to require them to rebuild the engine completely from scratch and made with the Wii in mind. Else they'll end up with another technical disaster akin to ToP GBA or ToS PS2...or worse. Sounds like far more effort than it would be worth. Even though the PS3 version itself appears to be a very good port, they couldn't even get it to run at the full 1280x720 resolution that the 360 version did.

that's not necessarily true you know, I bet the game on the X360 never used more than one core (the equivalent of the PS3 PPE), well, the Wii is not that unpowered when it comes to cpu, and it's cpu has a short stage execution pipeline, so it can actually compete with these consoles when it comes to single core and general processing... which is what this game engine inner guts are using.

And it's PowerPC, so it really shouldn't be that hard to run on the Wii. The graphics of course are another question, because the Wii has a proprietary GPU and shaders/cel shading effects would have to be recoded, and textures had to be extensively reconverted; that said, there's not much, if anything, Vesperia does graphically, that the Wii couldn't, providing they do the port right.

I'd buy it, but I sure hope they aren't using team ratatosk for the port job. I also think it would be better to move on and start doing the next team symphonia game as a multiplatform effort with the wii as the lead platform, than port a two year old game now... But I don't think it's a bad move, just one that to be done should have taken place alongside with the PS3 version... (and by it's turn I think the PS3 version should have been made alongside the X360 version, but let's not kick that dead horse again)

I'm just thinking this is some misunderstanding.  The moment I read that rumor, I was all, "Does not compute" over that.  I mean, I do picture it being as watered down if that were to happen, just like when Capcom decided to throw Dead Rising on the Wii and everything I heard about it.

Dead Rising Wii was a quick and dirty job, ousourced to a utter crap developer named TOSE and made on the premise of a game that maxed out all 3 cores on the X360 (it would be hard as nails to port to PS3, which is why it didn't happen)

This game didn't push any of the consoles it was on, and when it was unveiled people actually thought it was a pretty Wii title.

[DeadlyAnGeL91792]

i bet a vesperia ps3 localization will happen before they ever do that.

[Cless]

This game didn't push any of the consoles it was on

If this is the case, then then one would expect the PS3 version to be identical in every way. You'd think the 3D would render in full 720p...but it runs in 576p. It couldn't even reach true 1080p on the lead platform. It couldn't reach 60FPS all over the place...out of battle sequences are 30 across both platforms. The rest of the game allegedly runs about the same the 360 version, except perhaps with some slightly increased loading times in places. I'm sure there's more going on under the hood than is obvious.

Just looking at the spec sheet, a single core of the Xenon CPU absolutely annihilates Wii's Broadway. It's a lot like comparing a Pentium III 733MHz to a single core of the 3.16GHz Core 2 Duo E8500. If that wasn't enough, there's also the issue of the unified 512MB GDDR3 RAM vs. 64MB GDDR3 + 24MB SRAM (how both are used is kind of ambiguous). It's at least clear the 360 version of the game used all this to its advantage to keep consistent performance and absolutely minuscule load times without going ridiculously overboard like so many other games. A simple port of the engine and hugely downscaled asset approach is not going to result in a nice port at all. At least not one that performs well and still looks acceptable.

They've also previously mentioned in interviews that the 360's resources allowed them to do more things. I've noticed that quite a number of areas in Vesperia are larger (and more detailed) than those of Symphonia and Abyss. A number of dungeons and town exteriors are loaded in their entirety, so they feel a lot less segmented. Symphonia and Abyss also do a lot of things from an overhead camera angle while Vesperia often has those where you can see deep into the background. Of course, there's also the link encounter feature where you can encounter over ten enemies at once (and this is processor intensive, because there's an isolated place in the game where a link encounter can actually cause some minor slowdown).

[pedrocasilva]

If this is the case, then then one would expect the PS3 version to be identical in every way. You'd think the 3D would render in full 720p...but it runs in 576p. It couldn't even reach true 1080p on the lead platform. It couldn't reach 60FPS all over the place...out of battle sequences are 30 across both platforms. The rest of the game allegedly runs about the same the 360 version, except perhaps with some slightly increased loading times in places. I'm sure there's more going on under the hood than is obvious.

That was seriously overblown. Just like last gen, it wasn't abnormal at all that games weren't actually 640x480, but actually 640x448, and that pixel difference regarded as imperceptible, some lines can be omitted to the same result on HD sets and a lot of games do it.

Now, PS3 and X360 are different consoles, so it can be like the whole RE5 fiasco, where RE5 on X360 could be upscaled to 1080p and on PS3 it couldn't. X360 can do the upscaling for free, the PS3 can't. So what warrants us that the X360 doesn't actually run at 1280x576? nothing.

Incidentally, the 640x448 ratio would suggest 1280x672 would be the equivalent, which means they only have 96 less pixels vertically than they "should".

I mean:


or:




The HUD is pixel perfect with the X360 one, except it's supposed to have less resolution going for it

I seriously call bullshit, on the PS3 resolution thingy. PS3 version is fine and didn't loose any detail in my eyes... even if you analize each frame thoughtfully.

Just looking at the spec sheet, a single core of the Xenon CPU absolutely annihilates Wii's Broadway. It's a lot like comparing a Pentium III 733MHz to a single core of the 3.16GHz Core 2 Duo E8500. If that wasn't enough, there's also the issue of the unified 512MB GDDR3 RAM vs. 64MB GDDR3 + 24MB SRAM (how both are used is kind of ambiguous). It's at least clear the 360 version of the game used all this to its advantage to keep consistent performance and absolutely minuscule load times without going ridiculously overboard like so many other games. A simple port of the engine and hugely downscaled asset approach is not going to result in a nice port at all. At least not one that performs well and still looks acceptable.

You're looking at them on paper... that's something you really shouldn't do.

CPU's in particular... Broadway is like Gekko, a short execution pipeline CPU, cattered for General Processing and effectiveness, which put's it with a 7 stage pipeline. CELL and Xenon? they're stripped down cores in order to achieve their current 3.2 GHz chips (each Xenon core is basically a PPE) and have 30 stage pipelines without cache miss prediction... but that mades it so that each core performance (Xenon's) is roughly about double the performance of a original XBOX. It's no core 2 duo, despite it's frequency. Incidentally Wii is also regarded to roughly to double GC's performance when it comes to general processing.

Dhrystone v2.1 - DMIPS

PentiumIII 866MHz: 1124,311
Gamecube 486 MHz: 1125
Pentium4 2.0AGHz: 1694,717
PS3 Cell PPE 3,2 GHz: 1879,630
PowerPC G4 1.25GHz: 2202,600
Wii 729 MHz: 1125x2? DMIPS=2250
Pentium4 3.2GHz: 3258,068

It's not bad, of course, and 3 cores of this on the X360 are not bad at all, considering what's out there... but realistically it's no general processing powerhouse, or even a core 2 duo. If the game only uses one core... it's not "unrealistic" to suggest the Wii could keep up with it's inner workings easily. (of course graphics are another question, but Vesperia isn't a system pusher for those systems)

As for RAM... that requires that all textures get recompressed/converted, naturally.

You speak of a 512 MB unified bank, but the PS3 already has 256+256 MB of different RAM types and it worked just fine.

Now, I'm not saying conversion is easy and painless, but I'm saying it can be done; 88 MB is way less than 512 MB, sure, but it's not like this game had awesome textures going for it, if they were to do it properly they'd have to adapt it thoughtfully, instead of just getting a program to convert/downsample all textures at once (that would only lead to a bad conversion)

They've also previously mentioned in interviews that the 360's resources allowed them to do more things. I've noticed that quite a number of areas in Vesperia are larger (and more detailed) than those of Symphonia and Abyss. A number of dungeons and town exteriors are loaded in their entirety, so they feel a lot less segmented. Symphonia and Abyss also do a lot of things from an overhead camera angle while Vesperia often has those where you can see deep into the background. Of course, there's also the link encounter feature where you can encounter over ten enemies at once (and this is processor intensive, because there's an isolated place in the game where a link encounter can actually cause some minor slowdown).

Fair enough, but Tales of the Abyss and Symphonia didn't push the systems they were on either. Same is true with Vesperia, you could always pull more juice out of either platforms, and that said... the Wii is not a PS2 or GC, by default that extra power could be used for larger areas as well.


Now, I don't know if this port is being done, if at all; I'm just saying it could be done.

[Carnivol]

If memory serves me right;
The PS3 version of Vesperia renders all 3D in 1280x576 (while 360 does 1280x720). You can't look at the HUD for comparison, as it's probably part of a 2D overlay put on top of the already scaled 3D render. Someone's probably done a proper comparison in the frame buffer threads on Beyond3D or feature on Digital Foundry. (Know there were demo comparisons, at least. Which more or less confirmed the above.)

What allows you to accurately see what resolution something runs in is through good ol' clean screengrabs from the game combined with some of that pixel counting.


As for Vesperia Wii. I'd say it's very much doable, and probably only (at first glance) at the cost of visual appearance. The easiest way would probably be to set a team on the task of converting all graphical assets to the Dawn of the New World engine, along with a team to handle all the functionality. The DOTNW engine should be more than good enough for a "respectable" Wii porting effort (and to be honest, DOTNW had one thing going that I really think Vesperia lacked way too often - Proper, fluid character animation during most cutscenes).



Also, the whole "pushing the system" thing is a bit of a wonky expression (in general) as even the most poorly optimized of games may technically "push the system to its limit."

[Datschge]

The HUD is pixel perfect with the X360 one, except it's supposed to have less resolution going for it

You fell for the standard trick of this gen's HD games: the HUD is in 720p, while the actual 3D assets are rendered in a lower resolution. The worst offender of this is SO4 on Xbox 360: crisp 720p HUD combined with near SD resolution 3D in battles.

[Carnivol]

You fell for the standard trick of this gen's HD games: the HUD is in 720p, while the actual 3D assets are rendered in a lower resolution. The worst offender of this is SO4 on Xbox 360: crisp 720p HUD combined with near SD resolution 3D in battles.

Street Fighter IV does a resolution swap in the 3D rendering in the PS3 version during the cinematic angles in Ultra Combos too, if memory serves me right. While all overlaying assets still remain in 720p.

[pedrocasilva]

If memory serves me right;
The PS3 version of Vesperia renders all 3D in 1280x576 (while 360 does 1280x720). You can't look at the HUD for comparison, as it's probably part of a 2D overlay put on top of the already scaled 3D render. Someone's probably done a proper comparison in the frame buffer threads on Beyond3D or feature on Digital Foundry. (Know there were demo comparisons, at least. Which more or less confirmed the above.)

What allows you to accurately see what resolution something runs in is through good ol' clean screengrabs from the game combined with some of that pixel counting.

and:

You fell for the standard trick of this gen's HD games: the HUD is in 720p, while the actual 3D assets are rendered in a lower resolution. The worst offender of this is SO4 on Xbox 360: crisp 720p HUD combined with near SD resolution 3D in battles.

The 2D overlay would have a point if we weren't talking about the actual output resolution for the game, which is how they reached those numbers (I think!), like said X360 can re-scale stuff on the fly before outputting it, whereas on the PS3 it's not "free" (could be done with a SPE, still, but it wasn't). This of course is just a hypothesis meant to create reasonable doubt here, the games could indeed have that different resolution, but like said, the omission of lines in the signal is not unheard of (640x448) and it's certainly not unheard of on HD titles (and some fill those lines for output while not actually rendering them, by scretching the frame before outputting it); the aforementioned omission "ratio" used in the SD games would equal the resolution 1280x672 (I did the math) so really, compared to it the 1280x672 is missing 96 pixels in height compared to what would be advisable. it's not something that's easy to notice, and the fact that both games use techniques to blur/give that pastel look  it should be even less noticeable than if it was a really crisp, high contrast looking game.

As for Vesperia Wii. I'd say it's very much doable, and probably only (at first glance) at the cost of visual appearance. The easiest way would probably be to set a team on the task of converting all graphical assets to the Dawn of the New World engine, along with a team to handle all the functionality. The DOTNW engine should be more than good enough for a "respectable" Wii porting effort (and to be honest, DOTNW had one thing going that I really think Vesperia lacked way too often - Proper, fluid character animation during most cutscenes).

I'm afraid to say I don't think that would be a smart choice, just like using that engine, as is, wasn't a smart choice for that game itself.

That engine is Tales of the Abyss Flex Range engine and was ported back from the PS2 thus is unoptimized as hell (it already was, on the PS2), cleaning all that mess, optimizing it for a more graphically intensive game and reconverting assets for it would be a gargantuan task, and the recipe for a bad conversion; they'd be better of porting the new engine itself, since it was written with PowerPC in mind from the get go and the cpu should be able to cope with it and then working on the graphic subengine calls and TEV pipeline effects instead of shader model compliant effects... than converting it into that engine; they'd be better off digging their original build for it, that being the GC build of ToS.

Also, the way they improve their battle systems seems to be hardcoded and thus untransferable, reason why I suspect they opted to go with the engine they did with DotNW (had they used the GC ToS build those slowdowns/loadings would be unexplainable); DotNW developed it's own flavour when it comes to LMBS,  and thus, reworking it to match Tales of Vesperia battle system and camera would require a lot of fine tunning; IMO using the Vesperia engine would be a much better choice, and would ensure better results when porting. (I'll even say that if it was DotNW engine I wouldn't want it)

It would turn into a reconversion of assets into another engine instead of a port.

Also, the whole "pushing the system" thing is a bit of a wonky expression (in general) as even the most poorly optimized of games may technically "push the system to its limit."

I agree. Let's just say that Tales of Vesperia wasn't a tech driven game given the HD console nature.

I'm sure with some good optimization it could pull 1080p on both PS3 and X360, for instance; more intensive games have done it.

[DeadlyAnGeL91792]

its not coming to wii guys.

http://www.vg247.com/2009/11/09/tales-of-vesperia-not-coming-to-the-wii-says-voice-actor/

[DuskShark]

its not coming to wii guys.

http://www.vg247.com/2009/11/09/tales-of-vesperia-not-coming-to-the-wii-says-voice-actor/

YESH!

[Cless]

That was seriously overblown. Just like last gen, it wasn't abnormal at all that games weren't actually 640x480, but actually 640x448, and that pixel difference regarded as imperceptible, some lines can be omitted to the same result on HD sets and a lot of games do it.

You said it wasn't "pushing" anything on the consoles it's on. I guess it depends on your definition of what "pushing" is. The way you presented things made it sound like it should be capable of achieving maximum performance (full 1080p/60FPS) effortlessly.

Anyway, Carn and Datschge already covered the 576p stuff (there was a reason why I specifically said 3D).  Now here's the link where the PS3 version was found to run at 576p: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-tales-of-vesperia-showdown-blog-entry

I can say that I didn't see notable difference myself when I played the PS3 demo. I even tried a comparison where I kept switching between both versions (both HDMI feeds; made sure the 360 was also outputting pure 720p). I suppose a huge part of that was the fact that it a takes a few seconds for the stupid HDMI handshake to go through, so a direct comparison was difficult. Too bad I don't have HD capture equipment.

CPU's in particular... Broadway is like Gekko, a short execution pipeline CPU, cattered for General Processing and effectiveness, which put's it with a 7 stage pipeline. CELL and Xenon? they're stripped down cores in order to achieve their current 3.2 GHz chips (each Xenon core is basically a PPE) and have 30 stage pipelines without cache miss prediction... but that mades it so that each core performance (Xenon's) is roughly about double the performance of a original XBOX. It's no core 2 duo, despite it's frequency. Incidentally Wii is also regarded to roughly to double GC's performance when it comes to general processing.

(Reputable) sources? I did find an Anandtech article mentioning the 7-stage pipeline for the Gekko, but I am having trouble finding a solid number for the 360. All I find is "disappointingly weak compared to the Pentium 4 and Athlon 64" which doesn't really tell me anything.

You speak of a 512 MB unified bank, but the PS3 already has 256+256 MB of different RAM types and it worked just fine.

No one really knows how things were distributed on the 360's the unified memory, but there is evidence that they probably used over 256MB for things other than graphics on it. They had to approach some things differently with the PS3:

It no longer does the "let's load the battle engine + assets into memory in the first battle to eliminate any further battle load times until the game is quit" in the PS3 version, at least. All battles take a little longer on average to load. They managed to cut them down from the 360 version's initial battle load time by a very respectable amount, but it's still nowhere near as speedy as the second battle and on in the 360 version. (FWIW I recall Dawn of the New World doing Vesperia 360's battle loading technique to an extent, but full battle load times were re-encountered at every map load point. I guess the system's limited memory probably needed that space for scratch in the map loading routine)

Now, I'm not saying conversion is easy and painless, but I'm saying it can be done; 88 MB is way less than 512 MB, sure, but it's not like this game had awesome textures going for it, if they were to do it properly they'd have to adapt it thoughtfully, instead of just getting a program to convert/downsample all textures at once (that would only lead to a bad conversion)Fair enough, but Tales of the Abyss and Symphonia didn't push the systems they were on either. Same is true with Vesperia, you could always pull more juice out of either platforms, and that said... the Wii is not a PS2 or GC, by default that extra power could be used for larger areas as well.

As for RAM... that requires that all textures get recompressed/converted, naturally.

I believe those old interviews did mention that they had to design a lot more art than they did for previous titles, which would make sense with the areas being larger and more detailed. Needless to say, that requires more resources.

I'm just saying it could be done.

I never said it couldn't be, myself. I just don't believe an intact, accurate, well-performing conversion is possible by simply retuning the assets and recompiling the existing source code. It would need a new engine built from the ground up, at minimum.

(and to be honest, DOTNW had one thing going that I really think Vesperia lacked way too often - Proper, fluid character animation during most cutscenes).

Not really relevant, but trying to port Vesperia to the DotNW engine isn't going to magically add motion capture.

its not coming to wii guys.

http://www.vg247.com/2009/11/09/tales-of-vesperia-not-coming-to-the-wii-says-voice-actor/

Glad this was put to rest. Another source: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3176841

[pedrocasilva]

You said it wasn't "pushing" anything on the consoles it's on. I guess it depends on your definition of what "pushing" is. The way you presented things made it sound like it should be capable of achieving maximum performance (full 1080p/60FPS) effortlessly.

Fair enough, I meant it wasn't a tech driven game, and thus the transition for the PS3 was "easy" or "easier" than most. And as a consequence, assuming it really uses just one X360 core, and on the PS3 it barely uses the SPE's (if at all) then the Wii could cope with the engine just fine on a software level.

X360 and PS3 might be somewhat similar in potential, but I'm sure you know and agree getting stuff that uses the specific hardware features too far to transition can be hell. That's the main reason Dead Rising never got ported, for instance. Capcom got carried away and filled up the whole 3 Xenon cores with AI, of course the PS3 couldn't cope with it without rewriting lots of stuff, since it only has one core and then the dreadful SPE's.

In Capcom words, they don't believe in third party "exclusivity" for the sake of it, but they believe in "tech exclusivity" which is were Dead Rising fits. of course Dead Rising 2 will be multiplatform, but it was written from the ground as such.

Anyway, Carn and Datschge already covered the 576p stuff (there was a reason why I specifically said 3D).  Now here's the link where the PS3 version was found to run at 576p: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-tales-of-vesperia-showdown-blog-entry

I can say that I didn't see notable difference myself when I played the PS3 demo. I even tried a comparison where I kept switching between both versions (both HDMI feeds; made sure the 360 was also outputting pure 720p). I suppose a huge part of that was the fact that it a takes a few seconds for the stupid HDMI handshake to go through, so a direct comparison was difficult. Too bad I don't have HD capture equipment.

I've read the article when it came out, I still have doubts seeing that the way they measured the output should have sacrificed the HUD as well, but my point wasn't saying that the PS3 version isn't running at less reasolution, it was more on the lines of "what if it isn't? who'd notice?"

I certainly wouldn't mind it at all.

(Reputable) sources? I did find an Anandtech article mentioning the 7-stage pipeline for the Gekko, but I am having trouble finding a solid number for the 360. All I find is "disappointingly weak compared to the Pentium 4 and Athlon 64" which doesn't really tell me anything.

There were articles covering that a while ago, if I do recall correctly there was a very good anandtech article going into detail with it... But it was taken down and I can only salvage rewritten parts of it at first glance:

If any of you read Anandtech’s short-lived article that made the points of “the real-world performance of the Xenon CPU is about twice that of the 733MHz processor in the first Xbox” and that “floating point multiplies are apparently 1/3 as fast on Xenon as on a Pentium 4”, the problem here is that it’s not making the distinction between the profiles of single operations and the total throughput of the CPU.  There’s no question that single threaded performance of next-gen CPUs will almost invariably be much slower than that of current PC CPUs.  It’s not that the operations themselves are slow so much as there are more incurred delays between operations.  As I said, we’ve got loads of transistors in our PC CPUs to keep a high IPC going.  Both Xenon and PS3 have largely forgone that extra hardware and instead opted to use the extra transistor space to get more functional hardware in place.  This kills single-threaded performance, but the fact that it can run MANY threads means that overall throughput can still be very high.

Source: http://psinsider.e-mpire.com/index.php?categoryid=4&m_articles_articleid=153

That, and this:

Prescott is used on the recent Pentium and Celeron chips and has a 31 stage pipeline, coupled to a separate 8 stage fetch/decode front end. (Earlier Northwood and Willamette cores use a 20 stage pipeline with the 8 stage front end.) Together the total pipeline length comes in at 39 stages - over twice the length of the current AMD K8 pipeline. In fact, the next longest pipelines outside of Intel aren't even out yet: Cell and Xenon are both around 21 stages long. The benefits of a long pipeline are in raw clock speeds. It's no surprise that NetBurst is the only chip currently shipping in speeds greater than 3 GHz, and Cell and Xenon are slated to join that "elite" group of processors in the future.

While a lengthy pipeline allows for high clock speeds, it also introduces inefficiencies in cases where a branch prediction misses. When that occurs, everything following the branch instruction has to be cleared from the CPU pipeline and execution begins again - a penalty of as much as 30 cycles in the case of Prescott. (Of course, it could be even longer if there's a cache miss and main memory needs to be accessed, but that delay would occur with or without the branch miss so we'll ignore it.) In order to avoid the full penalty of a branch misprediction (39 cycles), Intel decoupled the fetch/decode unit from the main pipeline and turned the L1 cache into a "trace cache" where instructions are stored in decoded form. The trace cache is actually a very interesting concept and certainly helped improve performance. It basically allows many instructions to skip 1/4 to 1/3 of the standard pipeline. While Intel no longer holds the performance crown, it wasn't until the launch of the K8 that Intel really lost the lead.

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2492&p=2

I don't know if Cell and Xenon have front end stages on top of the CPU, like Pentium 4 did, but I know I heard it was really close to the 30 stages (while not exceeding them). I also know both Xenon and Cell have no cache miss prediction (and their cache miss reaches 5%, which can great to some considerable bottlenecks) or branch prediction going on, stuff that Pentium 4 had. Having a lot of stages will always have a price on performance, as Pentium 4 proved while on the market, it ran at higher frequencies, sure... but AMD's performance with their regular 17 stage cpu's could outpace it with less MHz, first Pentium 4 CPU's weren't high performers clock by clock with later Pentium 3's (let alone P3 tualatins who kicked Pentium 4's butt) and of course... people will remember how Northwood CPU's at the same clockrate as Prescott ones actually outpaced them slightly, because they had less stages. I also recall the reason why prescott had more stages was solely related to how much cache it had (double that of northwood) which amounted to the aforementioned front end stage increase, I don't know where the cache gets in, on CELL/XENON.

Intel eventually went back, and core 2 duo cpu's actually have less stages than the netburst architecture (pentium 4/pentium D).

IBM cpu's elsewhere weren't doing 3.2 GHz at the time, far from it (and they had 17 stages), let alone while using regular cooling and of course... not with 3 cores going for it, so the recipe for that really was simplifying the cpu complexity itself, making it less effective from a general processing standpoint, and getting it a huge pipeline to boot.

No one really knows how things were distributed on the 360's the unified memory, but there is evidence that they probably used over 256MB for things other than graphics on it. They had to approach some things differently with the PS3:

It no longer does the "let's load the battle engine + assets into memory in the first battle to eliminate any further battle load times until the game is quit" in the PS3 version, at least. All battles take a little longer on average to load. They managed to cut them down from the 360 version's initial battle load time by a very respectable amount, but it's still nowhere near as speedy as the second battle and on in the 360 version. (FWIW I recall Dawn of the New World doing Vesperia 360's battle loading technique to an extent, but full battle load times were re-encountered at every map load point. I guess the system's limited memory probably needed that space for scratch in the map loading routine)

I believe those old interviews did mention that they had to design a lot more art than they did for previous titles, which would make sense with the areas being larger and more detailed. Needless to say, that requires more resources.

That I don't know

I never said it couldn't be, myself. I just don't believe an intact, accurate, well-performing conversion is possible by simply retuning the assets and recompiling the existing source code. It would need a new engine built from the ground up, at minimum.

I somewhat agree, of course a simple recompilation would never suffice, then again I disagree on a "new engine" being needed; Capcom just managed to port Framework MT (a very multi-thread heavy engine) onto the Wii for instance, this Tales engine seems to be using only one core all across platforms and even if it's workflow can't fit on the Wii's RAM it can always be worked out through optimization. From a tech standpoint (leaving graphics aside) I don't see it doing much more than what ToS engine did last gen, albeit with bigger areas and possibly more enemies on screen (and this, ignoring visuals)

I even think that, if such optimization took place, and the engine was maintained as a multiplatform one, the HD platforms could benefit from it in newer projects.

I think it would be doable; writing a engine from ground would just defeat the purpose.