185 replies to this topic

[Goodtwin]

I was convinced the OS update would happen alongside the Wind Waker Bundle release, but that has come and gone with no update.  Its time to get this thing out.  Now that the Wii U can download and update on its own, there is no reason to hold out simply because you want to fix everything all at once. 

[Abcdude]

Add in game notifications and the option to turn off automatic updating and i'd call this the best update to date.

[Pjsprojects]

Update delay until 2020. Please understand.

[MatrixChicken]

What part of "End of September/beginning of October" don't you guys understand?

[Arkhandar]

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.

 

FLOP comparisons are useless unless you're also putting other variables into the equation. And 500 to 600 GFLOPS... please.

 

The Wii U is no powerhouse (neither is the Xbox One nor PS4, no matter how much EA wants you to believe it). The Wii U is a system based on experience, not pretty graphics. If you want a real powerhouse buy a PC.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Like I said before, name one console that has EVER had a CPU clock increase via a firmware update other than a portable (which wasn't overclocked, it was actually UNDERclocked in the first place to save battery power).

 

The Xbox One had its clock speed increased from the "theoretical" specifications, not overclocked, because it wasn't finalised yet.  You test what its safe to clock at once you have final silicon.  If Nintendo WERE able to suddenly bump up the clock rate it would suggest they didn't do that testing before launching the console, which is very VERY unlikely, it will be clocked as high as they considered safe for reliability and that's it. 

 

Its not like we even know how hot it could potentially run at when executing a fully optimised game, because no developer has maxed it out yet.  Plus, you can't judge how hot the cores are running at based on the outside of the case or the heat coming out of it, as that depends on how much the case in insulated and how efficient the heatsink is.  The heat coming out of my PC doesn't seem that hot, but the CPU cores are still actually running at only 10C short of the rated maximum when fully loaded.  With such a tightly integrated chip as the Wii U, it could very well be that say the embedded RAM is already running at close to its maximum temperature and the CPU cores not, but overclocking the CPU would overclock the RAM too pushing it over the limit.  Its just not that simple.  The reason you can on PCs is because they ARE clocked down from their maximum potential, to fit a specific price bracket, consoles are not - they are pushed as close to the limit as practical because its more cost effective to do that.  The Xbox 360 being a prime example of where they actually pushed TOO hard and long term reliability of the console suffered.

 

I still firmly believe the biggest issue with the Wii U is its hobbled by only having the optical drive to pull data from, so open world games have high latency when streaming in data.  That and the internal memory is clearly carp (hence the frame drops for downloaded games and slower download speed over an external HDD/memory stick).  Neither of those things can be fixed now, the design is final.

[Arkhandar]

Like I said before, name one console that has EVER had a CPU clock increase via a firmware update other than a portable (which wasn't overclocked, it was actually UNDERclocked in the first place to save battery power).

 

The Xbox One had its clock speed increased from the "theoretical" specifications, not overclocked, because it wasn't finalised yet.  You test what its safe to clock at once you have final silicon.  If Nintendo WERE able to suddenly bump up the clock rate it would suggest they didn't do that testing before launching the console, which is very VERY unlikely, it will be clocked as high as they considered safe for reliability and that's it. 

 

Its not like we even know how hot it could potentially run at when executing a fully optimised game, because no developer has maxed it out yet.  Plus, you can't judge how hot the cores are running at based on the outside of the case or the heat coming out of it, as that depends on how much the case in insulated and how efficient the heatsink is.  The heat coming out of my PC doesn't seem that hot, but the CPU cores are still actually running at only 10C short of the rated maximum when fully loaded.  With such a tightly integrated chip as the Wii U, it could very well be that say the embedded RAM is already running at close to its maximum temperature and the CPU cores not, but overclocking the CPU would overclock the RAM too pushing it over the limit.  Its just not that simple.  The reason you can on PCs is because they ARE clocked down from their maximum potential, to fit a specific price bracket, consoles are not - they are pushed as close to the limit as practical because its more cost effective to do that.  The Xbox 360 being a prime example of where they actually pushed TOO hard and long term reliability of the console suffered.

 

I still firmly believe the biggest issue with the Wii U is its hobbled by only having the optical drive to pull data from, so open world games have high latency when streaming in data.  That and the internal memory is clearly carp (hence the frame drops for downloaded games and slower download speed over an external HDD/memory stick).  Neither of those things can be fixed now, the design is final.

 

Just one correction there. The internal memory is far from being carp. That's just how flash memory works: very low write speeds and moderate read speeds.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I have to disagree as you seem to be forgetting that I pointed out that it performs BETTER with a USB memory stick. That suggests a huge flaw with the internal memory speed either due to the FLASH itself being bad or some other bottleneck. This is not a top of the range memory stick by any means.

It should NOT be the case that I could have bought the Basic Wii U with a USB memory stick and it perform BETTER for the same price than if I bought the Deluxe. I feel completely and utterly ripped off because I "thought" having the extra memory built-in would be BETTER than going for the lower model and adding a USB stick. Its not an unrealistic expectation, as the whole OS is running on it you expect them to use something decent. However the OS loading speed would also tend to suggest its VERY slow performing FLASH memory, or has some serious IO bottleneck going on.

The sheer fact they reserved 1GB of OS memory also suggests to me this was a cop-out, so they could keep as much of the OS in memory as possible to compensate for the dreadful memory speed. Of course, they haven't done that yet, it is in fact what this very firmware update is all about.

I could be wrong, but I simply cannot see any other reason why the whole OS loads so slowly and downloading to the internal memory is half the speed of using a USB stick.  When you look at what the Xbox 360 OS can do without quitting a game, on a TINY amount of OS memory, it just doesn't add up that Nintendo needs so much AND still performs so poorly.  Enabling the web browser while in game doesn't need THAT MUCH extra RAM. 

 

Its pretty clear they cut corners, not least reserving a ton of RAM because the OS was rushed and unfinished so they weren't sure how much they would ultimately need, compounded by the poor FLASH memory performance.  I dearly HOPE they prove me wrong, I paid for this POS Deluxe after all, I want it to perform to the quality I expected.  When you consider how much more I will be getting on the PS4 for only £50 more, its disgusting.

Edited by Alex Atkin UK, 27 September 2013 - 01:11 AM.

[Eye_Of-Core]

OS is most likely the problem, do you seriously think that Wii U's OS is not the problem I mean when it was updated then games were less laggy and had less frame drops and more stable frame rate. Look at Windows and Linux based OS'es, the first one is bloatware and the second one is more streamlined and less of a resource hog also we need to take in account that this is really the first real OS that Nintendo is working on and their first home consoles that is multi core and first Nintendos platform that has three cores compared to 3DS that has two main cores and DS that has main core and secondary weaker core.

 

If the problem is the RAM alocated to OS why they don't alocate it all and when game is running then cut it down to lets say 512MB of RAM usage...

[Alex Atkin UK]

I hope you are right, but I fear its the whole package.  The FLASH is slow, the OS is clunky and the online services are dreadfully inefficient.

 

Its a similar problem on PS Vita, it has to work on current PSN which is a bunch of hacks due to how much it has had to evolve to keep up with Xbox Live.  It effectively needs to launch PSN 2.0 with a much more optimised infrastructure to bring it up to (hopefully surpass) Xbox Live performance.  This appears to be exactly what they are doing with PS4, but there is little evidence that Nintendo are doing the same. 

 

Seeing as they were launching a brand new console with a brand new online service, its not unreasonable to expect them to be well optimised for each other.  The one thing Microsoft got right with Xbox was the infrastructure.  The whole service is integrated with easy API access to everything, it makes it practically seamless and speeds up the whole interaction.  It seems PS3, PS Vita and Wii U all constantly are authenticating you in and out of the services, which slows things down, whereas Xbox 360 with its seamless integration doesn't have to - when you are logged in YOU ARE LOGGED IN.  Want to buy a game, bam there you.  Its just hugely frustrating coming from that to Wii U, it was excusable on Wii but should have been vastly improved on Wii U.

 

Miiverse is neat, but its no substitute for what the other consoles have been doing and that leaves it FAR behind what the next-gen consoles will be doing.  I wouldn't even care, as long as its at least up to current-gen standards for interaction speed.  When they talked about being able to just suspend the game and jump in to Miiverse, it made it sound like it would be instantaneous.  It SHOULD be (not least because messaging on Xbox Live is and it has far less resources), but its not.  But everything they promoted it as being is at odds with how they implemented it.  Just the time between choosing to boot and game and actually seeing it start up is unusually long by todays standards, its too much like the Wii.

 

Its not the only case where I wonder what Nintendo are thinking though.  For example on the 3DS you are limited to only 10 streetpass hits at a time due to it needing to be able to work in the background while gaming, which is fair enough.  However I was recently at a convention where it was filling up that list quickly and I realised how utterly useless the system is at events like that.  It takes too long to do anything as once you have those 10 and work through the games, you already have another 10 lined up and so are missing hits.  Logically, even if it can only hold 10 at a time internally you should be able to choose to move those hits to the SD card so you can get as many as possible BEFORE dealing with them, because the games can take a long time to play and you just end up trying to rush through them not enjoying them.  Heck, if you are playing StreetPass games at the time then surely it can spare more resources to new hits, saving them to SD directly, than if you were playing retail games?

 

This is not helped by things like StreetPass Garden where EVERY time you enter the game it spends AGES reminding you what you should be doing, what seed you planted, basically just telling you stuff you already know and are TRYING to do, but its slowing you down.  The way it insists on slowly panning between elements, Nintendo seems to be all about slow pacing, embellishing on the details, which is fine when you are not in a hurry or your first time playing but completely impractical long term.  Of course its even worse on 3DS because you might have limited time to play and it wastes half of that time.

 

It just feels like Nintendo focus on all the little components that in themselves ARE neat, but once they have to all work together it falls apart because they are not optimised to work like that.

[Arkhandar]

Do you honestly believe that Nintendo would rather pay for an extra gig of ran than a better flash storage unit? It's just an utter lack of optimization.
Iwata himself admited in the Wii U Iwata Asks that once they had developed all these Wii U services, they had a really a bad time sticking everything together into the OS. That not only translated into an horrible UI, but also resulted in wasted hardware resources, which is probably the case with the internal memory speeds and the 1GB of RAM allocated to the OS.

Eye_Of-Core, on 27 Sept 2013 - 12:06 PM, said: OS is most likely the problem, do you seriously think that Wii U's OS is not the problem I mean when it was updated then games were less laggy and had less frame drops and more stable frame rate.

Source?

Edited by Arkhandar, 27 September 2013 - 05:36 AM.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Of course they were hoping that optimisation would compensate and likely reduce the OS footprint so we get more RAM for games.  Its generally the case that RAM is cheaper than FLASH memory though so it most certainly WOULD make sense to double up the RAM to compensate for using cheaper FLASH memory.

 

In todays RAM chip sizes it would be silly NOT to have at least 2GB RAM as its cheaper to go for a popular RAM size (being produced in larger quantities)  than to pick a smaller one that might not be popular, so actually costs more per megabyte. You can't just reduce the number of chips to reduce the size either as the number of chips is directly related to the bus width and memory bandwidth.

 

There is also the fact that some of that OS RAM will be a filesystem cache.  So technically it IS being used for games already.

Edited by Alex Atkin UK, 27 September 2013 - 08:23 AM.

[Eye_Of-Core]

Do you honestly believe that Nintendo would rather pay for an extra gig of ran than a better flash storage unit? It's just an utter lack of optimization.
Iwata himself admited in the Wii U Iwata Asks that once they had developed all these Wii U services, they had a really a bad time sticking everything together into the OS. That not only translated into an horrible UI, but also resulted in wasted hardware resources, which is probably the case with the internal memory speeds and the 1GB of RAM allocated to the OS.

Source?

 

Why do you need source, if you own a Wii U then you should have experienced that hands on... Many people noted that games load faster and ran better.

[Goodtwin]

The OS during games is really just a kernel, so the OS is actually very small when playing games.  Now if your referring to the OS in terms of its applications like its main menu, internet browser, Miiverse, and so on, then perhaps those application are a bit bloated.  I personally feel that any performance improvements to games likely came from patches for those games, and not the update from Nintendo.  Maybe overall stability came from that update, like problems with games freezing, but most of those issue were resolved for me prior to the update from Nintendo.  Nintendo Land was almost unplayable for me for a while, constantly froze, but then worked flawlessly after a patch.  I honestly dont think the flash memory could really effect in game performance unless it was insanely slow, but that would probably cause it to crash, not drop frames.  I doubt developers are streaming in assets that they need so quickly, I would assume everything the game could possible need for many many frames would already be in the ram.   

[Arkhandar]

Why do you need source, if you own a Wii U then you should have experienced that hands on... Many people noted that games load faster and ran better.

 

I'm sorry, I call that fanboy BS. I own a Wii U since day one and I can confirm that that's just wishful thinking.

[Eye_Of-Core]

I'm sorry, I call that fanboy BS. I own a Wii U since day one and I can confirm that that's just wishful thinking.

 

I am sorry that I can't stop you from going full r*****, if that was wishful thinking then there would not be droves of people of forums claiming that after OS update that their games had no stuttering and/or frame drops eg more consistent frames. You most likely did not noticed, you are probably only a few or never owned couple of games like that had issues with frame rate and got resolved after OS update.

 

Game performance can be affected by OS, don't be in denial you tech illiterates.

[Arkhandar]

I am sorry that I can't stop you from going full r*****, if that was wishful thinking then there would not be droves of people of forums claiming that after OS update that their games had no stuttering and/or frame drops eg more consistent frames. You most likely did not noticed, you are probably only a few or never owned couple of games like that had issues with frame rate and got resolved after OS update.

 

Game performance can be affected by OS, don't be in denial you tech illiterates.

 

Like Goodtwin said, the OS during games is really just a kernel. Either the was a complete a disaster before the update (which is definitely not true) or the "more consistent frames" are just wishful thinking. I'm sorry, but that's the truth.

 

I own both Zombi U and AC, which were both "reported" to have better frame rates after the update. Did you know what I noticed after the update? Nothing. And believe when I say I have a good eye for these things. I'm more of an "fps whore" rather than a "graphics whore", per se.

 

Just one last thing. Insulting other writers isn't going to make it true.

[Eye_Of-Core]

I am sorry that you continue to fail...

[grahamf]

I really don't give a sonic rainboom about all of this perceived performance issues/improvements. What I want to now about the next update is this:

 

When exactly is it coming out? Can we nail it down to a week?

What are the noticeable improvements? (User interface changes, account and file management changes, unanimously agreed-on performance improvements, etc)

Edited by grahamf, 27 September 2013 - 04:19 PM.

[Arkhandar]

I really don't give a sonic rainboom about all of this perceived performance issues/improvements. What I want to now about the next update is this:

 

When exactly is it coming out? Can we nail it down to a week?

What are the noticeable improvements? (User interface changes, account and file management changes, unanimously agreed-on performance improvements, etc)

 

Don't worry, it's coming. And surprise! It wasn't delayed (again).

 

Nintendo announced that there will be extended Nintendo Network server maintenance from September 30 to October 1. This means, you guessed it, the update will arrive between October 2 and 4. Yay!

http://www.nintendo....work_status.jsp

 

Emily Rogers also confirmed this in her twitter account saying that the "Wii U firmware update is sooner than you think".

https://twitter.com/Emi1yRogers

 

Now, this updated will obviously bring performance improvements, but that's just for the OS and system apps such as Miiverse, Nintendo eShop, etc. It won't affect game performance whatsoever, just as previous updates never did. So, don't get your hopes up for anything "earth-shattering". We're getting exactly what we were promised back in January. 

Edited by Arkhandar, 28 September 2013 - 03:42 AM.