I'm just gonna leave this here.

Anyone expecting a major bump in graphical fidelity from any of the three console makers or 3rd party publishers should just stop holding their breath right now.  It isn't going to be the bump that we saw from gen 6 to gen 7 at all.  It will all be very minor enhancements.  Games will look better, and artists will have more room to create, but it isn't going to magically enhance the graphical fidelity to over 9000!!!!

I forgot about the third pillar, lol. I figured then that it was a fancy way of saying transitioning into a different demographic before expanding the product across the entire demographic. Including GBA BC made me think this way.

I did not know they expected immediate success with the Wii. I presumed they expected to expand into the blue ocean while offering the established market something the competition was not. Hence all of those Wii's gathering dust next to the HD Twins awaiting exclusives.

So,launching in 2012 makes sense with regards to the global economic recovery, yet 2011 fit better with Nintendo's product cycle.

What I have problems understanding, from an R&D standpoint, is how the architecture could not be finalized by E3 2011, with dev tools and software being developed from then on? I believe everything in it existed at this point, may be wrong. Clock speed would be all that remained.

I appreciate routerbad and yourself for being so generous with your time in regards to discussing these concepts.

No problem at at all.  

The real reason why they didn't have final hardware much earlier will probably never be known.  Technically, none of the components existed until Nintendo and IBM developed them.  They are based on previous architectures, like Power7, PPC, and AMD Unified Shaders, but the final product is anything but.  

The target hardware for the wii u early on was rumored to be something like a high end HD4XXX series GPU, with a pure Power7 CPU.  Because of all of the difficult R&D that needed to be done to develop a wireless video standard with broadcom that worked with zero lag and no tearing, artifacts, etc, the GPU had to be designed at the same time to work flawlessly with that standard.  My guess is that it took them longer to develop the tech behind the gamepad than anything else, and that the GPU was finalized once they were settled on that.

Also, as 3Dude pointed out in another thread, they wanted eyefinity, which only debuted with very high end 5XXX series GPU's, and made more broadly available for HD6XXX.

    I hope it turns out really good. Without specific screens, and an influx of GAF rumors, one can get a little concerned that the Wii U version would be on a completely different level. Then again, the GAF group presumes the PS4 will be ultra efficient, and the Jaguar cores will all be available to games. Oh, and that the cores are fast, lol.

Very, VERY few GAF members have a grasp on what the Jaguar cores are actually capable of, these are the same people that thought that a low clocked chip with high IPC and efficiency couldn't exist precisely until the PS4 clocks were announced.

the game look

 

 

Probably much better.

 

there is a lot of purchase intent for this game.  Even in alpha, it looks amazing and will whet the appetite of anyone looking for an RPG/mecha/monster hunter type of game.  the original X chronicles was miscalculated by Nintendo and they released only so many copies in the U.S. because they weren't sure how that kind of game would go over here.  Now there is pent up demand.  the game has a cult following and looks to be building on that with mainstream appeal.

 

Time will tell.  But it has serious potential.  It will likely sell systems if it is marketed properly.

 

Perhaps that is related to the confidence they have behind their E3 Direct announcements.

Not to mention they have been sending Wii U marketing directly to Wii consoles.

 

E3insider.com is a site owned and operated by the organizers of the E3 conference itself.  They give viewers a backstage pass, so to speak, to all of the highlights of the happenings on the show floor.  They commonly list games that will be making an appearance at the conference on the site several days before the show floor opens, complete with a platform listing.

Activision Blizzard has been mum on whether their latest installment of the critically acclaimed Call of Duty franchise would be making its way onto Nintendo’s next generation system, but the landing page for Call of Duty: Ghosts on E3 Insider lists Wii U as one of the release platforms for the game.  This may ease the angst many fans of the series were experiencing as the announcements came and went without a single mention of the Wii U, and those fearing more backpedaling on support from the publisher due to lackluster COD: Black Ops II sales.

Given that EA has confirmed they will not be bringing their flagship first person shooter Battlefield 4 to the Wii U it would make even more sense for Activision to continue with their own support, and Call of Duty can enjoy very little competition from other similar games on the platform.

What are your thoughts on this revelation?  Will you be looking forward to Ghosts when it launches later this year?  Sound off in the comments below.

[Source: E3 Insider]

 

http://nintendoenthu...-by-e3-insider/

[UPDATE] The reference has been pulled.

I didn't suggest it was limited to 10.1, just thats the last directx revision we can use until dx11. We know its OpenGL 4.0, and that does put it above dx10.1 but not quite dx11. I haven't seen any confirmation the Wii U GPU would be compatible with dx11, let alone dx11.1.. is there a source? I'm not calling you out, I just never seen anything regarding it

 

11.1 would indicate that its at least a Radeon 7000 in the Wii U. i haven't seen anything that would suggest Nintendo went with a 7000 series GPU (The highest i have it pegged as is 6000 series).

 

If this is the case then there is no reason why the Wii U couldn't display the same level of effects (performance withholding) as the PS4.. I mean as far as we know rumors have suggested that Microsoft went with a Radeon 6000 series (so far every rumor about the xbox 1 has turned out to be true). I just find it hard to believe Nintendo went with a more advanced GPU than Microsoft. That is fantastic news if true.

My mistake, DX11 equivalents.  It should also support OpenGL4.1.

Also, keep in mind that 11.1 added nothing new other than minor efficiency enhancements over 11.0, mainly in the areas of GPU compute and video processing.  It still has every rendering feature at its disposal that the PS4 will, but as you said, performance withholding. It won't be capable of as much all at the same time technically (so far as we know) but it won't be much of an issue other than with regards to framerates, LOD to a small extent, etc.

Anyone who thinks the Wii U's GPU is the same as the 360/ps3 are completely delusional.

 

The GPU in the Wii U is far more modern, newer shaders (appear to be 90% larger than that of r700 series), more effecient texture compression, built in tesselator, more advanced lighting effects, post fx processing.

 

The GPU in the Wii U has been confirmed to have a similar feature set as Directx 10.1 (Nintendo is actually using OpenGL 4 specification which is more advanced than Directx 10.1)

 

While the GPU's in the PS360 were made way back in 2005, which the equivalent of Directx 9 level of effects.

 

i'm not even talking about power (it should be at least 2x ps360 gpu's anyhow), but as far as feature set its a very modern GPU.

 

You should probably do some reading up the crappy old 7800 cards (The equivalent that is in the x360).. You can pick up the very lowest end Radeon 6000 card for dirt cheap that will run circles around it, with modern feature set to boot. At the moment nobody has pin pointed what the GPU in the Wii U is based on, but we do know it can handle any modern effect found in 2011 built cards, so at the bare minimum its a Radeon 5000 series, which again is several GPU generations ahead of the PS360.

It is capable of DX11.1 equivalents.  The notion that it is limited to 10.1 features only came from a GDC panel where they were talking specifically about Unity engine and what it is currently capable of on Wii U, they also confirmed that as Unity for Wii U is updated over the next few months, it will support the full Unity 4 Pro feature set.

That seems to be the most logical, yet it appears as though there is either an established engine on another platform, or the game already exists on another platform.

I hope if Watchdogs is Wii U/360/PS3, that Wii U is lead. Otherwise, I hope the rumors are true and the game is ported from the PS4 to see how comparable the machine is.

We already know it won't be.  They are using two separate teams to develop the x86 and PowerISA versions of the game.  The team that is making the Wii U version will downport to PS360, the other team will make it for PS4 and XBone

Having hardware eyefinity support helps with that.

Its almost like thats what eyefinity does, and that almost sounds lkle the reason nintendo wanted eyefinity.

You'd think they, like, had a plan or something.

hmm I just thought of this.

 

The PS4 and Xbone both don't support BC because they couldn't handle the code written for the PS3 and Xbox360 hardware, not because they're weak but because the architecture is so different.

So my guess would be if devs were to port games from this gen to the next the Ps4 and 360 in a similar fashion they do for wii u they would suffer from hick ups as well? 

Seeing as the CPU both of the other consoles went with is not only much weaker than PPE (on a core per core basis and only with regards to SIMD) and that they moved from RISC to CISC it would take a lot more work than it does even on the Wii U, which at least has decent SIMD given the performance we do see in ports using only two cores at times.

 

Worst thing is, a lot of these posts were made by the same person, djlewe. Can't we just stop these doom and gloom threads with incorrect spelling, punctuation and all and just wait for what Nintendo has to offer? 

 

 

 

 

That was where the assumption came from, dijewe was trolling the boards hard with these types of threads for nearly a month.

Third party publishers like Activision expect the same thing to happen with the other consoles.


No, they expected the Wii to be a success. They launched the DS as a test for the causal market. When that sold, the HD console you speak of ceased development and they finished the Wii concept.

That's why the DS was called the third pillar, and they said the Game Boy brand wasn't dead. You seen any new Game Boys lately? (still hoping for a return someday lol)

They didn't kill the Wii intentionally, it just ended up doing that. Nintendo made a lot of mistakes, but the graphics didn't suffer because of gamepad development. The only thing that hindered graphics is it was released in 2012. If it was released in 2013, it would be on the same level as the others and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

However, Nintendo released in 2012. And you know what? The difference between these three consoles, aren't that huge if a gap like Wii vs PS3 & 360.

Pretty much what I was saying.  Well put.

Maybe there's not much money in the gamepad or it requires too many resources, but it would be cool if more than one could use it. I would think that a family would want more than one.  I realize they don't want to cannibalize their 3ds sales, but it would be cool if the gamepad also could be a portable system to a degree at least- maybe play eShop games on the fly....I would think that with hardware components perpetually dropping in price, some additional functionality would not be out of the question- at minimum there should be some Wii U/3ds integration....

 

I would think that when Apple TV comes out, people will be able to use their iPads as a controller for what they see on TV.....I think to a degree Nintendo made this controller in anticipation of that

They've already said that Wii U supports more than one gamepad, but it will come at a performance cost, because the GPU has to render three separate images at the same time, which is probably the reason they went with an SD screen for the gamepad, much less burden on the framebuffer and the GPU in general.

This wasn't leaked, this was posted up at Disneyland.  They were posters of already announced/shown games.  It was to promote the Nintendo Summer Showcase in the area, where people were able to play demos of available titles.

This wasn't leaked, this was posted up at Disneyland.  They were posters of already announced/shown games.  It was to promote the Nintendo Summer Showcase in the area, where people were able to play demos of available titles.

This is beyond hilarity.  Don't act like none of you who were around for the bit wars as a kid didn't do this exact same thing talking about why Mario was better than sonic.

I was going to mess with you a bit BC you were getting mad at something stupid but you ddnt get mad and defensive at my post lol

Well that's not very nice .  Also, I did get defensive, so I took a break, and cooled off.  I'm not beyond getting a little butthurt, lol.

I wasn't trying to start a fight over such a simple question and wasn't trying to troll. I have been all over the internet trying to see why this would be and as someone said it is noticeable in some games. It hasn't bothered me as of yet and i have a array of games for the wii u so far. It was simply just a question. Its easier to go on to a nintendo forum then another forum where all you get is people bashing the wii u.

No worries, my apologies for the assumption.

I have been searching A$$, if you didn't like my question you don't have to post on it. Troll huh lol how old are you? 12 prob! everyone else thanks for your post. Its kinda what i figured just laziness. 

I also just want to point out, since you said you couldn't find it.

Developers were originally given the final hardware Dev units late last year and were required to port a game with zero experience on a new platform (all of the chips are custom) and with literally no tools at the outset.

I wouldn't blame it so much on laziness, as I would Nintendo not being prepared to launch the system when they did.  The OS was buggy and slow, the tools were not there, the dev units had just been finalized.  Nintendo has to shoulder a bit of the blame as well.

Also, throughout the dev cycle, most games were only ever able to run on two cores, meaning that the third core of the CPU (which the game engines, being ports themselves from PS360, relied heavily on) was not in use.  Only a few games ever ended up making use of the third core by launch.

It wasn't Nintendo's brightest moment, but the good news is that they quickly made the proper fixes, and are still providing updates to boost system performance as well as iterating and refining their tools for developers and providing more hands on support to them.

Not a new console. Sega talking to hardware partners would raise flags. It's probably game related, maybe some sort of online thing.

A wild possibility... Maybe Sega is helping Nintendo with their online, and its called Sega Spectrum?

Probably not BUT one can dream.

That would be awesome, some sort of Wii U tie in.  I think its more related to the arcade market, though.  Sega still talk to hardware partners regularly as it is, they just don't do home consoles.  They still have an arcade business.

You need to slow your roll. He was just asking a question.

Please, this forum is cluttered enough with useless threads asking the same questions over and over.  His question was actually answered in a thread on the front page of "new items" and several in the first page of the hardware thread.

Also, I answered the question, by posting several topics in which his very question is investigated in detail, and apologized for the misunderstanding.  I could have just deleted my previous post, but that would have been dishonest.

Guys,

 

I honestly believe the following:

 

1. Nintendo's exit with the Wii hampered Wii U excitement.
2. Confusion over the controller compounded with #1 has a lot to do with less enthusiasm. 
3. Nintendo honestly believed the gamepad would be the next Wii Controller with consumer response. 
4. Item #3 hampered focus from graphic fidelity to gamepad integration and focus. Hence the lack of tools (possibly one, non-intentional reason, but this could explain why things were so poor at launch).
5. Finally, items 3&4 led third parties to believe functioning software, with gamepad integration, would provide a decent ROI. Given the low install base and probable attachment ratio, the investment did not need to be too high to begin with.  

Now, this is really item 6, and this deserves it's own paragraph. Publishers have watched year over year decreases in game sales. They anticipate the PS4 and Xbone to reverse this trend. Hence forth, they are spending as little as possible to bring ports to a new market (Wii U), while holding back until the 'big boys' launch. At this point, the Wii U's install base is bigger, and they know that one of two things will happen:

 

1. The new consoles will face shortages, which will increase Wii U sales.
2. The Wii U install base will grow.

Why post this in a thread about the Wii U's technical prowess? I think everyone can see why, but if not, allow me to conclude:

 

Ports from the Xbone are coming. The architectures are too similar, and the costs of developing for the PS4/Xbone will be too great to not have the game on every platform possible (these new games will not be like the PC games of console ports on very high, but rather, new, more ambitious titles).  The game market will not explode to the levels we saw in 2007-2009. The tablet did not exist, and the overall gaming options that you can get, for free, on PC were not as sophisticated (for casuals). Plus, the market is always changing, as people age and demographics shift (my 7 year old wanted an Ipad Mini over a Wii U:(). 

 

The point? This is a business. Money is the final arbiter. If I have this figured out, you can bet Nintendo does too.

They didn't think that the Wii U controller would cause the same amount of excitement as the Wii did, but they were under heavy pressure by investors to release new hardware, and fast, because sales of the Wii were declining rapidly.

Now, they had a general idea of where they would like to go with it hardware wise, but they weren't finished revising the hardware until mere months before launch.  As a matter of fact, it was the week of e3 2012.  This left them with little time for optimizing and revising the OS, stress testing and getting a solid feel for the hardware and how it performed in real world operations (theoreticals don't really help with the actual kit), or get decent tools out to developers who needed them to work on games with very little time to push to market.

I have been searching A$$, if you didn't like my question you don't have to post on it. Troll huh lol how old are you? 12 prob! everyone else thanks for your post. Its kinda what i figured just laziness. 

4 posts and starts a thread asking why Wii U has framerate drops that are only noticeable with high speed cameras, no, not a troll at all.  If you honestly are not trolling, my apologies.  However, there are literally hundreds of "why wii u performance sucks" threads, and the issues with ports are discussed in pretty much every single hardware thread on the forum.

Also, check my profile or post history before you start trying to call me out on my age, son.  You know what they say about assumptions.

Oh, and

http://thewiiu.com/t...-lack-of-power/

http://thewiiu.com/t...wered-and-says/

http://thewiiu.com/t...because-of-ps4/

http://thewiiu.com/t...nintendos-doom/

http://thewiiu.com/t...-more-powerful/

You're welcome!

No I think its a racer so its not a very demanding game. But let's say that the Crysis 3 port was released on Wii U and it showed higher resolution, better frame rate and overall better visuals then I believe people saying the Wii U is underpowered would be less than it is now.

It might not be a very demanding game, but the 360 and the PS3 would not be able to run the game as it is configured for Wii U.  Really all they took advantage of was more RAM, the rest was just butter.  The frames are smooth.

I think there is some truth to this- games will start running more smoothly as developers become more familiar with the system.  Nintendoland is really smooth and crisp.  Madden '13 is a little choppy at times.  If they were going to make a madden '14, I'd imagine it would be smoother.

I'd hope so, Tiburon were given less than 6 months to port Madden.  Same with all of the other early ports.  The large publishers didn't have final devkits until midyear, which gave them little time to get crackin on the ports, and even less time to actually understand what the system has and how it works.  I place most of the blame for that on Nintendo, but a little honesty from publishers about it would have been nice.

Its pretty easy to that that Wii U is more powerful and if used to its fullest should blow ps3 and 360 out of the water. With that said why is it getting such bad Frame rate drop in so many games? When compared to the 360 an ps3 in many games they are getting better frame rates then the Wii. Why is this? is it just bad porting? I was told that Assassins creed 3 was able to run 60fps but after seeing fame test it runs at 30fps and drops well below this at times. Not bashing the Wii U at all in fact i love it, i also have a 360 but its not collecting dust since i bought the Wii U. And now my friends are thinking about getting one. But still i just was hoping someone could shed some light on this.

 

Thanks

First, nice try, troll.  Second, use the search feature or GTFO!

No the Wii U is not underpowered, but Nintendo alone can't prove it isn't,even if the graphics of Retro's new game blows minds, people will still say the Wii U is weak simply because the game was produced by a first party Nintendo developer, Nintendo needs a really good looking third party game to break the perception that the Wii U is underpowered

It already has that, in Need For Speed.  People will never be satisfied because all they have is their confirmation bias and they aren't going to let it go no matter how good a game looks or who makes it.  Similarly, many of those people who are Sonic fans were super hyped when Sonic was rumored for Xbox One, but now Sonic is irrelevant and overdone because it is Nintendo exclusive.  People will find any way they can to believe stupidity so long as it confirms what they thought all along with some of this stuff.  "Obscure, incorrect information stating that the Wii U CPU has fewer DMIPS than PS3?  I'll take it!"