185 replies to this topic

[Eye_Of-Core]

I did some research, released it this forum and will most likely make a new thread with updated information's.

 

Evidence points out that Nintendo is going to allow/unlock shaders on the Wii U that were detectable in Wii mode via hacks, eg currently 3rd party developers can access 320 SPU's that has 352Gflops performance while the September/October update should give full usage to 960 SPU's and 1056Gflops or 1.05Tflops of performance and maybe push Wii U's power consumption higher eg from 40 watts to 70 watts if 40 watts power consumption was w/ shaders that were all active or inactive if inactive then we can expect higher power consumption.

 

About Wii U's storage, it has flash based that is twice to two and a half times faster than USB 2.0 or HDD's inside Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

 

At least with Wii U you can have good old school way of playing your games, put a dvd in and play without installs.

Edited by Eye_Of-Core, 23 September 2013 - 07:35 AM.

[Pjsprojects]

So your saying the October update unlocks some unused part of the WiiU that suddenly makes it triple the flops and more able to compete with Xbone?

Surly not, why would Nintendo let everyone think the.WiiU was a low power usage console that's 'just' powerful enough for near on a year of its life.

[Eye_Of-Core]

So your saying the October update unlocks some unused part of the WiiU that suddenly makes it triple the flops and more able to compete with Xbone?

Surly not, why would Nintendo let everyone think the.WiiU was a low power usage console that's 'just' powerful enough for near on a year of its life.

 

I don't know, Nintendo has tendency to lock some things and then unlock them later like on DS and 3DS.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Wow, Nintendo can suddenly unlock the console to use more power than the Wii U PSU is able to output?  That's a bloody clever trick.   Sadly, its not going to happen.

 

When I compared the Wii U power consumption against the maximum the PSU is rated to output, the ratio was around the same as the Wii power consumption against its PSUs rated maximum.  That suggests to me that the Wii U is drawing close to its design power already.

 

The ratio (around 60% of the PSUs rated load as I recall) makes sense if Nintendo were taking into account PSU aging which seems likely, as Nintendo are known for making very reliable hardware that just keeps on going for years and years.

 

So yes the load may increase once developers really start tapping into all the hardware, but I don't think a firmware update is going to magically unlock more SPUs.  For one thing, the scan of the chip has been extensively examined and 320 SPUs was decided to be the most likely MAXIMUM based on its structure.  If it had double or triple that number, I'm pretty sure the experts would have seen that.

Edited by Alex Atkin UK, 23 September 2013 - 08:12 AM.

[Eye_Of-Core]

[The ratio (around 60% of the PSUs rated load as I recall) makes sense if Nintendo were taking into account PSU aging which seems likely, as Nintendo are known for making very reliable hardware that just keeps on going for years and years.]

 

http://www.tomshardw...ing-calculators

 

We can ignore it and Nintendo could rated it 75 watt with in mind that PSU ages so it could be higher. it is maybe 5% in its entire life time.

 

[When I compared the Wii U power consumption against the maximum the PSU is rated to output, the ratio was around the same as the Wii power consumption against its PSUs rated maximum.  That suggests to me that the Wii U is drawing close to its design power already.]

 

I must disagree.

 

[So yes the load may increase once developers really start tapping into all the hardware, but I don't think a firmware update is going to magically unlock more SPUs.  For one thing, the scan of the chip has been extensively examined and 320 SPUs was decided to be the most likely MAXIMUM based on its structure.  If it had double or triple that number, I'm pretty sure the experts would have seen that.]

 

Did you forgot that the GPU inside Wii U is heavily customized and I know it is VLIW4 base plus there are no VLIW4 GPU's of any kind using eDRAM or having exactly 320 SPU's. Nintendo is known for doing heavy customizations to the GPU and they will not waste any mm^2 of silicon thus they will resort to removing features and some obviously unneeded also I looked at die shot and I can't find on what eletroscope it was taken and can we even see a single transistors? If it was taken on eletroscope that can go below 40nm then we could have seen individual transistors and other features.

 

Also it is 40nm and made on more mature and refined process than original VLIW4 Radeon HD 6000 series, there was a rumor it is based around HD e6850 and very first alpha Wii U devkit had Radeon HD 4870.

 

Wii U's GPU is 146mm^2 and we remove eDRAM and small eDRAM block and we have 100mm^2 for GPU and Radeon HD 6850 is 250mm^2 and has 960 SPU's and having just 320 SPU's would be 83mm^2 though we know it is customized and not off-shelf GPU so I am sure there will be more SPU's and we know that GPU is produced at mature 40nm Advanced CMOS at TSMC so performance is higher and power consumption is lower.

 

Gah i won't argue with you.

[Arkhandar]

I did some research, released it this forum and will most likely make a new thread with updated information's.

 

Evidence points out that Nintendo is going to allow/unlock shaders on the Wii U that were detectable in Wii mode via hacks, eg currently 3rd party developers can access 320 SPU's that has 352Gflops performance while the September/October update should give full usage to 960 SPU's and 1056Gflops or 1.05Tflops of performance and maybe push Wii U's power consumption higher eg from 40 watts to 70 watts if 40 watts power consumption was w/ shaders that were all active or inactive if inactive then we can expect higher power consumption.

 

About Wii U's storage, it has flash based that is twice to two and a half times faster than USB 2.0 or HDD's inside Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

 

At least with Wii U you can have good old school way of playing your games, put a dvd in and play without installs.

 

So now Nintendo can unlock something that doesn't even exist? Priceless.

[Eye_Of-Core]

So now Nintendo can unlock something that doesn't even exist? Priceless.

 

That is just a theory, they could be more SPU's and we don't have any die shot of Radeon HD 6000 series and we don't know how many transistors it has nor how much it has been customized, what is the real difference between the GPU in Wii U and off-shelf GPU. Nintendo may implement/unlock option to reduce OS usage from 1GB to 512MB if necessary so developers could use 1.5GB plus they can bump clocks higher for either CPU and/or GPU.

 

I know that Wii U's CPU has Power7 memory architecture though I don't know if its available for 3rd party to use a feature/"shortcut" between CPU and GPU, Wii U's CPU uses eDRAM for L2 caches and Wii U's GPU uses eDRAM as VRAM so using same memory means that Wii U has unified pool of memory or hUMA/HSA like architecture and that will allow to offload AI pathfinding, level rendering and other things to GPU and reduce load to CPU that has been doing tasks that worked better on GPU.

 

Also Nintendo could asked AMD one piece of technology that AMD has but never really tried to use in a commercial product, I forgot the name of it but it allows much higher density of transistors and it is planned to be used in near future by AMD so AMD may used a chance with Nintendo to use this relatively unproven technology/process on Wii U eg Wii U is a lab rat for it.

 

http://media.bestofm...U-350382-13.png

 

AMD calls it high density it was created by ATI and AMD bough it in 2006, ATI now AMD designed GPU's for Gamecube, Wii, Xbox 360 and now Wii U, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

[Arkhandar]

That is just a theory, they could be more SPU's and we don't have any die shot of Radeon HD 6000 series and we don't know how many transistors it has nor how much it has been customized, what is the real difference between the GPU in Wii U and off-shelf GPU. Nintendo may implement/unlock option to reduce OS usage from 1GB to 512MB if necessary so developers could use 1.5GB plus they can bump clocks higher for either CPU and/or GPU.

 

I know that Wii U's CPU has Power7 memory architecture though I don't know if its available for 3rd party to use a feature/"shortcut" between CPU and GPU, Wii U's CPU uses eDRAM for L2 caches and Wii U's GPU uses eDRAM as VRAM so using same memory means that Wii U has unified pool of memory or hUMA/HSA like architecture and that will allow to offload AI pathfinding, level rendering and other things to GPU and reduce load to CPU that has been doing tasks that worked better on GPU.

 

Also Nintendo could asked AMD one piece of technology that AMD has but never really tried to use in a commercial product, I forgot the name of it but it allows much higher density of transistors and it is planned to be used in near future by AMD so AMD may used a chance with Nintendo to use this relatively unproven technology/process on Wii U eg Wii U is a lab rat for it.

 

http://media.bestofm...U-350382-13.png

 

AMD calls it high density it was created by ATI and AMD bough it in 2006, ATI now AMD designed GPU's for Gamecube, Wii, Xbox 360 and now Wii U, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

 

Please stop, you're just humiliating yourself.

 

Nintendo could indeed allocate more RAM to devs, but that's it.

 

There is no "locked power". Forget it. Just enjoy the damn games.

[Nollog]

I remember people speculating about "locked power" based on the PSU rating on this forum a while back.
I lol'd then and I'll lol now.

[Eye_Of-Core]

There are two most realistic possibilities...

 

1. They bump the clocks of CPU and GPU

 

2. They increase speed/reading of the drive if possible

[Alex Atkin UK]

There are no realistic possibilities, because its not realistic to think that Nintendo would lock away bits of the hardware, it makes no sense.

 

The most important time for the Wii U to show its own against the competition was at launch, therefore it would be suicide to deliberately limit the developers from accessing 100% of the hardware.

 

Yes the OS may increase in efficiency, the dev kits improve over time, the developers learn how to get more out of the hardware, but there is zero chance some extra hardware will suddenly magically appear out of thin air.

 

The only time I am aware of a console being locked down was the PSP, which was purely down to battery life concerns.  It was more important for people to perceive it as having a decent battery life than to unlock all its power, it already had enough improvements over the competition without that extra power.  They then unlocked it later knowing that they had the customer base and there were now options for extending that battery life.

[Arkhandar]

There are two most realistic possibilities...

 

1. They bump the clocks of CPU and GPU

 

2. They increase speed/reading of the drive if possible

 

[Eye_Of-Core]

It seems you two guys are in denial, are you pretendos?

 

DS and 3DS had locked hardware features and later when it was unlocked, either games and OS performed better. Wii U at maximum consumes 40 watts while PSU is 75 watts so they have head room to increase clocks, specially clocks of the GPU. We know that Wii U's OS was kinda wonky and now it is okay, so Wii U could be rushed and if that is the case then maybe some features were not been usable and stable because of OS.

[Arkhandar]

It seems you two guys are in denial, are you pretendos?

 

DS and 3DS had locked hardware features and later when it was unlocked, either games and OS performed better. Wii U at maximum consumes 40 watts while PSU is 75 watts so they have head room to increase clocks, specially clocks of the GPU. We know that Wii U's OS was kinda wonky and now it is okay, so Wii U could be rushed and if that is the case then maybe some features were not been usable and stable because of OS.

 

I'm sorry, but you're the one in denial.

 

Look, I have a Wii U and I like it. Of course, there are some (major) things that need to be addressed but what you're suggesting isn't going to happen.

 

Iwata himself clarified that the although the PSU is rated at 75 watts, the Wii U is only going to receive a maximum of 45 watts, because that's how PSU's work. That's it. It's a well balanced system, already working on its max on the hardware level.

 

Now on the software level, OS optimization wouldn't really give anything special in extra performance, believe me. Optimizations needs to be done by developers on a game by game basis, not in the OS. That's already optimized, even though what you see (the UI) is still slow as carp.

 

PS: DS didn't have any locked power, and Nintendo only gave developers the option to disable Wi-Fi to get more power from the CPU. No locked hardware features. Sorry.

[grahamf]

What I'm asking is: Why bother? The Wii U is pretty powerful as it is. Performance issues are primarily due to developers being unfamiliar with the architecture and won't be helped as much by modest clock boosts.

Edited by grahamf, 25 September 2013 - 09:36 PM.

[Eye_Of-Core]

How can I be in denial? Nintendo them self proclaimed that September/October update is "speed/performance" update and they can further optimize Wii U's OS also how you can act like hypocrite and think that I don't know that performance of games in the end must be done by game developers? You think I am tech illiterate or your ego is so big that you are blind?

 

Why it would not be possible to bump the clocks? Nintendo can and it is not limited by PSU/power brick since if it can only do 45 watts then it would be a 45 watt PSU/power brick and not a 75 watt and guys at Neogaf measured power consumption of Wii U with tools that are worth over 2000$ and it showed that Wii U consumes 40 watts, Eurogamer measured with much cheaper and less reliable tool and they got 33 watts... It is 40 watts and they have enough room to bump the clocks by 10 to 20 percent on both CPU and GPU, please don't talk about PSU/power brick degradation because it is debunked. As long as Wii U maximum power consumption is around 67.5 watts in theoretical 10 year life span then I can say the PSU situation will be just fine

[Goodtwin]

Although its unlikely that there will be any performance boost, it is possible.  The Wii U runs pretty darn cool, and is nowhere near is max power use.  So it is possible that Nintendo could bump clocks speeds a bit if they wanted to, and of course they could add some available ram.  I personally think 512MB of ram should be enough for the other apps.  If  Miiverse or the Internet browser are using more than 512MB then they need to be cleaned up.  We arent talking about a big increase in clock speed if they were to do that.  Maybe a 10% boost.  Dont get your hopes to high for this though, its unlikely. 

Edited by Goodtwin, 26 September 2013 - 05:38 AM.

[tboss]

perfence boosts from OS optimization, at best i can see wii emulation features locked for wiiU games, and even then that probly wouldnt even be a 10% boost. allocating ram would probly be the best way to improve, the ram blocks are sperated andn that should help if the gpu/cpu can draw info from both simultaneously. Other than that they will have to optimize the game to get better preformance. There is a overclock possiblity but unlikly from nintendo.

 

best claim to the actual power itself was all related to efficiency, (getting more out of the SPU's than usuall), or the anilist misted/confused GPU parts, which would not add power but mean the current power is higher than the official, which doesn't change much. I dont see wiiU past 450 with 350/320 being the most likly # followed by odd #'s of SPU's/ect. in the blocks.

[namkotje]

One feature I really would like to see is rendering Wii games to 720p/1080p while using Wii mode.

To bad, this dream would never be real. 

[Eye_Of-Core]

It seems that Wii U's OS is not perfected yet, games downloaded digitally suffer from frame drops and I can only point out to the OS and September/October update could be major patch for OS. I was searching the internet for more information on Wii U's GPU and I found this;

 

http://www.ign.com/b...775697/page-199

 

So couple of guys at IGN forums did some research, had some findings and speculated... So guys at Beyond 3D that say Wii U's GPU is 176Gflops are way off, guys at NeoGAF had a rough estimate based on amount of SPU's that it has 352Gflops and guys at IGN forum considered if some things are cut and if it is based around Radeon HD 6000 series that it could have 500 to 600 Gflops performance of 2x Xbox 360 or 3x PlayStation 3 GPU performance.