Ubisoft Entertainment, a major game developer, said that it would be able to easily port games that it creates for Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 to Nintendo’s next-generation project Café. Indirectly, the comment made by the chief executive officer of Ubisoft indicates that the forthcoming console from Nintendo will architecturally resemble the Xbox 360.

“What we see is that we will be able to leverage a lot of the work we do for Xbox 360 and PS3 when we create games for the [Cafe] platform. We will not have to redo completely the games that we create. We will be able to use all the capacity the console is giving, but also use all the work we do for the other platforms,” said Yves Guillemot, chief executive officer of Ubisoft, during quarterly conference call with financial analysts.

Mr. Guillemot sees Nintendo Café as a very powerful console that would be very successful eventually. A big question, however, is whether Café will be as successful as Wii and how successful it will be among hardcore gamers.

“The platform Nintendo is coming with is really a fantastic platform. We think that it will be really successful,” said Mr. Guillemot.

Earlier it was reported that the next-generation console from Nintendo is internally called "Cafe" and architecturally resembles Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360, but sports higher amount of compute power. Nintendo Cafe is based on custom triple-core IBM Power microprocessor and features ATI R700-like (Evergreen) custom graphics engine. The system will have 512MB or higher amount of memory.

The specifications are likely to be very preliminary and exact levels of performance are unknown. Still, DirectX 11-like graphics capabilities seem to be up-to-date, but in 2012 will rather be outdated. Nonetheless, specifically tailored games running on a triple-core processors and with DirectX 11-class graphics at even 720p resolutions should look significantly better than present.

The choice of architecture is rather logical as Nintendo will need to ensure that its new console will not only be able to play popular high-definition cross-platform games that are already available, but will also be quickly adopted by game-developers currently designing games due in 2012 and later.

The console will also feature a rather innovative game controller, which will feature a large touch-screen as well as traditional gamepad controls, according to reports not confirmed by Nintendo.

Tags: Nintendo, Cafe, Wii, Playstation, Xbox