43 replies to this topic

[GAMER1984]

So there is a thread on neogaf going right now http://m.neogaf.com/...=1007515&page=. And this kind of got me thinking. Xb360 has 10MB while Wii U has 32MB. My question is outside of what I know we will here the "lazy developer" why havent we seen better 3rd party efforts on Wii U? We all know xbox 360 was the preferred and best game console for 3rd party games last gen. I have heard (feel free to correct me if this is not true) that game engines were made around the xb360 and when running on Wii U said engine is only using 10MB of its eDRAM leaving the other 22MB basically sitting idle doing nothing. I just think that it seems there should be more being done with wii U hardware in this regard. I am just curious from a third party standpoint (since 360 was the preferred for 3rd parties with its eDRAM) not sure what or how Nintendo is using it.

Edited by GAMER1984, 10 March 2015 - 02:02 PM.

[3Dude]

I remember Shin en says they use about 16Mb for three 720p frame buffers so there is no screen tearing, and have tons of room to use the rest to preload a bunch of stuff, archive a bunch of stuff, use it as a cpu scratchpad...

The Wii u's edram design is a lot different than the 360's, the 360's was on a seperate daughter die with the rops, it only got its full bandwidth with the rops on that die, any other interaction, access or sending data, had to cross the 32Gb/s bridge, and a lot of latency, to get the rest of the system.

THe wii u's is embedded on the same substrate with the rest of system, so it gets its full bandwidth without having to cross a bridge, and doesnt have any of the added latency that comes with that.

The publisher incumbents who decide what games get made, and where, simply dont want the wii u to be a player in their game.

[GAMER1984]

I remember Shin en says they use about 16Mb for three 720p frame buffers so there is no screen tearing, and have tons of room to use the rest to preload a bunch of stuff, archive a bunch of stuff, use it as a cpu scratchpad...

The Wii u's edram design is a lot different than the 360's, the 360's was on a seperate daughter die with the rops, it only got its full bandwidth with the rops on that die, any other interaction, access or sending data, had to cross the 32Gb/s bridge, and a lot of latency, to get the rest of the system.

THe wii u's is embedded on the same substrate with the rest of system, so it gets its full bandwidth without having to cross a bridge, and doesnt have any of the added latency that comes with that.

The publisher incumbents who decide what games get made, and where, simply dont want the wii u to be a player in their game.

So every developer/publisher making a game for wii U has decided not to take advantage of it hardware? Would you say Wii u setup would be easier to use than 360? There are some publishers that have had like all of their games release on wii U is the eDRAM enough to so Wii U can do more than what last gen offered? Just as anaexample the lego games?

[grahamf]

Didn't we have this discussion a couple years ago, which took over a year to die down?

[GAMER1984]

Didn't we have this discussion a couple years ago, which took over a year to die down?

Possibly but I am not sure that was eDRAM specific. I am talking eDRAM in specific and how it can be or should be used by developers... and I guess why that is not happening. Would be cool if we had an updated article of some sort by current developers working on the system just to see the easr or lack thereof in development. I mean there were people on here pretty adamant wii U would only be getting better with time and pulling off 1080p 30fps games at a minimum... even though that is a little off topic from eDRAM.

[3Dude]

So every developer/publisher making a game for wii U has decided not to take advantage of it hardware? Would you say Wii u setup would be easier to use than 360? There are some publishers that have had like all of their games release on wii U is the eDRAM enough to so Wii U can do more than what last gen offered? Just as anaexample the lego games?

Pretty much. You need to understand, most of the people who do these ports, are not the teams who made the games, they dont really know much at all about the engine, or how it worked, even on the 360. They are tiny, usually only a handful of people, port teams, they simply mess with a few things, usually by turning things off, until the game runs 'acceptably' on wii u, because they arent alotted the time, or have the know how, to do much of anything else.

The few exclusives the wii u has, do use the edram, however no 3rd party game was ever given a fraction of the budget to work on production values to match what they were given on ps360, so although something like ZOmbie U, technically had far superior lighting and modeling than similar 360 games, its hamstrung budget meant repeated assets, and quick dirty work.

Criterion used the wii u hardware well, but they were the actual people who made the game, and the engine, so they knew how to change it to maximize performance on the wii u. And they did, it beat the ps360 versions hand down. Better texture, better lighting, and it could do things the ps360 versions couldnt dream of like alter the world on the fly, change traffic density, turn it off, on, at will, instantly.

They arent using it, because they dont care.

[GAMER1984]

Pretty much. You need to understand, most of the people who do these ports, are not the teams who made the games, they dont really know much at all about the engine, or how it worked, even on the 360. They are tiny, usually only a handful of people, port teams, they simply mess with a few things, usually by turning things off, until the game runs 'acceptably' on wii u, because they arent alotted the time, or have the know how, to do much of anything else.

The few exclusives the wii u has, do use the edram, however no 3rd party game was ever given a fraction of the budget to work on production values to match what they were given on ps360, so although something like ZOmbie U, technically had far superior lighting and modeling than similar 360 games, its hamstrung budget meant repeated assets, and quick dirty work.

Criterion used the wii u hardware well, but they were the actual people who made the game, and the engine, so they knew how to change it to maximize performance on the wii u. And they did, it beat the ps360 versions hand down. Better texture, better lighting, and it could do things the ps360 versions couldnt dream of like alter the world on the fly, change traffic density, turn it off, on, at will, instantly.

They arent using it, because they dont care.

Well its just sad no developer off the record or anything has stood up for the Wii U instead of letting the underpowered status hover above it. I would like to before Wii U is replaced see one third party dev try and fully take advantage of the system and its capabilities. Not just graphics I truthfully dont care if a game is 720p but push to system and what it can do. I always thought the eDRAM was being underused. Sad that is the case. I wonder if project cars will even release also betting that fast racing neo will look better.

[3Dude]

Well its just sad no developer off the record or anything has stood up for the Wii U instead of letting the underpowered status hover above it. I would like to before Wii U is replaced see one third party dev try and fully take advantage of the system and its capabilities. Not just graphics I truthfully dont care if a game is 720p but push to system and what it can do. I always thought the eDRAM was being underused. Sad that is the case. I wonder if project cars will even release also betting that fast racing neo will look better.

Criterion has.

'The difference with Wii U was that when we first started out, getting the graphics and GPU to run at an acceptable frame-rate was a real struggle. The hardware was always there, it was always capable. Nintendo gave us a lot of support - support which helps people who are doing cross-platform development actually get the GPU running to the kind of rate we've got it at now. We benefited by not quite being there for launch - we got a lot of that support that wasn't there at day one... the tools, everything.

There's a switch in our build pipeline that says 'use PC textures' and we flipped that and that was all. I can take no credit for that, it was literally ten minutes' work... we are using PS3/360 geometry. It's just the textures we upgraded.

Tools and software were the biggest challenges by a long way... the fallout of that has always been the biggest challenge here. [Wii U] is a good piece of hardware, it punches above its weight. For the power consumption it delivers in terms of raw wattage it's pretty incredible. Getting to that though, actually being able to use the tools from Nintendo to leverage that, was easily the hardest part.

When they first looked at the specs on paper a lot of developers said, 'Well, you know this is a bit lightweight' and they walked away. I think a lot of people have been premature about it in a lot of ways because while it is a lower clock-speed, it punches above its weight in a lot of other areas.

So, I think you've got one group of people who walked away, you've got some other people who just dived in and tried and thought, 'Ah... it's not kind of there,' but not many people have done what we've done, which is to sit down and look at where it's weaker and why, but also see where it's stronger and leverage that. It's a different kind of chip and it's not fair to look at its clock-speed and other consoles' clock-speed and compare them as numbers that are relevant. It's not a relevant comparison to make when you have processors that are so divergent. It's apples and oranges.

[Chronos21]

It sounds as Criterion speeks only about the CPU in this interview, maybe i'm wrong. I wonder what kind of a performance boost can the eDRAM give to the whole system?

[GAMER1984]

It sounds as Criterion speeks only about the CPU in this interview, maybe i'm wrong. I wonder what kind of a performance boost can the eDRAM give to the whole system?

Yes and I have read these quotes many times. Good on them for sticking up for the U. I am hoping someone could do that in this day. That was like what2 years ago. It sucks that so many just dismissed what they were saying I guess only because we kept getting so many underperforming 3rd party titles along with just titles in general that developers claimed Wii U couldnt run. Man nintendo next console and its architecture/power setup will be very interesting to say the least.

[3Dude]

It sounds as Criterion speeks only about the CPU in this interview, maybe i'm wrong. I wonder what kind of a performance boost can the eDRAM give to the whole system?

Well, Shin en uses it to store 3 720p framebuffers, to completely eliminate screen tearing.... And has like half of it still left over to use with a bunch of other stuff.

[megafenix]

Actually what

 

I remember Shin en says they use about 16Mb for three 720p frame buffers so there is no screen tearing, and have tons of room to use the rest to preload a bunch of stuff, archive a bunch of stuff, use it as a cpu scratchpad...

The Wii u's edram design is a lot different than the 360's, the 360's was on a seperate daughter die with the rops, it only got its full bandwidth with the rops on that die, any other interaction, access or sending data, had to cross the 32Gb/s bridge, and a lot of latency, to get the rest of the system.

THe wii u's is embedded on the same substrate with the rest of system, so it gets its full bandwidth without having to cross a bridge, and doesnt have any of the added latency that comes with that.

The publisher incumbents who decide what games get made, and where, simply dont want the wii u to be a player in their game.

actually what shinen mentioned is that 16MB of edram on wii u is enough for 1080p with double buffering

http://hdwarriors.co...ined-by-shinen/

 

"

Manfred Linzner of Shin’en:

‘Wii U eDRAM usage is comparable to the eDRAM in the XBOX360, but on Wii U you have enough eDRAM to use it for 1080p rendering.

In comparison, on XBOX360 you usually had to render in sub 720p resolutions or in mutliple passes.

Even if you don’t use MSAA (MultiSample Anti-Aliasing) you already need around 16Mb just for a 1080p framebuffer (with double buffering). You simply don’t have that with XBOX360 eDRAM. As far as I know Microsoft corrected that issue and put also 32MB of Fast Ram into their new console.

We use the eDRAM in the Wii U for the actual framebuffers, intermediate framebuffer captures, as a fast scratch memory for some CPU intense work and for other GPU memory writes.

Using eDRAM properly is a simple way to get extra performance without any other optimizations.

 

"

 

the xbox 360 edram+ROPS and other components had an internal bandwidth of 256GB/s, the bridge between the gpu and the edram was limited at 32GB/s

 

 

So obviously the wii u edram has more than 256GB/s otherwise the porting wouldnt be so easy, right now speculation goes for 563.2GB/s or more, not to mention that if xbox 360 10MB was barely enough for the 720p with double buffering and wii u 7.1MB of edram is enough to hold 720p with double buffering then clearly the wii u edram must pack much more bandwidth

Edited by megafenix, 12 March 2015 - 08:13 PM.

[GAMER1984]

Actually what

 

actually what shinen mentioned is that 16MB of edram on wii u is enough for 1080p with double buffering

http://hdwarriors.co...ined-by-shinen/

 

"

Manfred Linzner of Shin’en:

‘Wii U eDRAM usage is comparable to the eDRAM in the XBOX360, but on Wii U you have enough eDRAM to use it for 1080p rendering.

In comparison, on XBOX360 you usually had to render in sub 720p resolutions or in mutliple passes.

Even if you don’t use MSAA (MultiSample Anti-Aliasing) you already need around 16Mb just for a 1080p framebuffer (with double buffering). You simply don’t have that with XBOX360 eDRAM. As far as I know Microsoft corrected that issue and put also 32MB of Fast Ram into their new console.

We use the eDRAM in the Wii U for the actual framebuffers, intermediate framebuffer captures, as a fast scratch memory for some CPU intense work and for other GPU memory writes.

Using eDRAM properly is a simple way to get extra performance without any other optimizations.

 

"

 

the xbox 360 edram+ROPS and other components had an internal bandwidth of 256GB/s, the bridge between the gpu and the edram was limited at 32GB/s

 

 

So obviously the wii u edram has more than 256GB/s otherwise the porting wouldnt be so easy, right now speculation goes for 563.2GB/s or more, not to mention that if xbox 360 10MB was barely enough for the 720p with double buffering and wii u 7.1MB of edram is enough to hold 720p with double buffering then clearly the wii u edram must pack much more bandwidth

 

and this is what pisses me off no one is really showing what it is capable of. I hope Retro next game is not a donkey kong game and something more realistic because the hater always use artstyle as to why Wii U games look good. I want something gritty to shut them up.

[megafenix]

and this is what pisses me off no one is really showing what it is capable of. I hope Retro next game is not a donkey kong game and something more realistic because the hater always use artstyle as to why Wii U games look good. I want something gritty to shut them up.

well, you could show them games like fatal frame, deus ex revolution and such, a good example to show them that wii u is no old tech is with this example between final fantasy with directx11 improvements against fatal frame

 

Ask them, if this is directx11

 

 

 

 

then this is directx10?

 

 

 

 

enjoy some gameplay here

 

this is also a good example, but surely people would say that cartoony games dont count

Edited by megafenix, 12 March 2015 - 08:44 PM.

[Raiden]

[GAMER1984]

well, you could show them games like fatal frame, deus ex revolution and such, a good example to show them that wii u is no old tech is with this example between final fantasy with directx11 improvements against fatal frame

 

Ask them, if this is directx11

 

 

 

 

then this is directx10?

 

 

 

 

enjoy some gameplay here

 

this is also a good example, but surely people would say that cartoony games dont count

 

Yeah it just sucks reading those qoutes by Shin'en yet COD:Ghost on Wii U was sub HD. I just wish the small group of third party games that do grace Wii U did more of the hardware. Also Nintendo should not let this happen. They should have port teams that monitor ports releasing on their hardware and jump it when a team cant even get native 720p on Wii U.

[3Dude]

Actually what
 
actually what shinen mentioned is that 16MB of edram on wii u is enough for 1080p with double buffering
http://hdwarriors.co...ined-by-shinen/
 
"
Manfred Linzner of Shin’en:
‘Wii U eDRAM usage is comparable to the eDRAM in the XBOX360, but on Wii U you have enough eDRAM to use it for 1080p rendering.[/size]
In comparison, on XBOX360 you usually had to render in sub 720p resolutions or in mutliple passes.[/size]
Even if you don’t use MSAA[/size] (MultiSample Anti-Aliasing) [/size]you[/size] already need around 16Mb just for a 1080p framebuffer (with double buffering). You simply don’t have that with XBOX360 eDRAM. As far as I know Microsoft corrected that issue and put also 32MB of Fast Ram into their new console.[/size]
We use the eDRAM in the Wii U for the actual framebuffers, intermediate framebuffer captures, as a fast scratch memory for some CPU intense work and for other GPU memory writes.[/size]
Using eDRAM properly is a simple way to get extra performance without any other optimizations.[/size]
 
"
 
the xbox 360 edram+ROPS and other components had an internal bandwidth of 256GB/s, the bridge between the gpu and the edram was limited at 32GB/s

 
 
So obviously the wii u edram has more than 256GB/s otherwise the porting wouldnt be so easy, right now speculation goes for 563.2GB/s or more, not to mention that if xbox 360 10MB was barely enough for the 720p with double buffering and wii u 7.1MB of edram is enough to hold 720p with double buffering then clearly the wii u edram must pack much more bandwidth

The picture you posted blatantly shows you are wrong. In fact, its in the last part of the text you quoted.

The 360 did not have 256Gb of bandwidth to the edram, the edram had 256Gb of bandwidth to itself, and the rops, on the daughter die, across a bridge, from the rest of the system, if anything else wanted access to that edram, it had to cross the bridge at 32Gb/s for the request, and back again, waiting on the added latency of crossing the bridge to the daughter die. The 360's edram didnt have enough capacity, so it had send the framebuffer in over chunks, the latency was horrible, and the bandwidth sucked because there was a 32Gb a second bridge between the edram and the system.

Its not bandwidth that makes the wii u's edram smoke the 360's, its the fact it has 3x the capacity, is within immediate access of the entire system instead of gated off on a duaghter die, and so it had none of the latency.

There are 3 factors that affect the performance of ram, you want all three to be as high performing as possible, but realistically, you usually can only get to choose two that will be high performing, bandwidth is just one of them. Capacity and Latency are just as important, and depending on the situation, can be far more important than bandwidth.

Shinen uses that Wii u edram to store 3 720p framebuffers for fast racing neo (And thats only using half of it, and already over the 360's capacity a time and a half). The 360 couldnt dream of doing that even if its bandwidth on that edram and rops was 500 Petabytes. It doesnt the capacity, and it has too much latency.

[megafenix]

 

The picture you posted blatantly shows you are wrong. In fact, its in the last part of the text you quoted.

The 360 did not have 256Gb of bandwidth to the edram, the edram had 256Gb of bandwidth to itself, and the rops, on the daughter die, across a bridge, from the rest of the system, if anything else wanted access to that edram, it had to cross the bridge at 32Gb/s for the request, and back again, waiting on the added latency of crossing the bridge to the daughter die. The 360's edram didnt have enough capacity, so it had send the framebuffer in over chunks, the latency was horrible, and the bandwidth sucked because there was a 32Gb a second bridge between the edram and the system.

Its not bandwidth that makes the wii u's edram smoke the 360's, its the fact it has 3x the capacity, is within immediate access of the entire system instead of gated off on a duaghter die, and so it had none of the latency.

There are 3 factors that affect the performance of ram, you want all three to be as high performing as possible, but realistically, you usually can only get to choose two that will be high performing, bandwidth is just one of them. Capacity and Latency are just as important, and depending on the situation, can be far more important than bandwidth.

Shinen uses that Wii u edram to store 3 720p framebuffers for fast racing neo (And thats only using half of it, and already over the 360's capacity a time and a half). The 360 couldnt dream of doing that even if its bandwidth on that edram and rops was 500 Petabytes. It doesnt the capacity, and it has too much latency.

 

 

well, in the interview with hd warriors you can clearly read that shinen mentioend they need 16MB for 1080p with double buffering, and recently they did mention they are using 3 720p framebuffers on fast racing neo but they did not say it takes 16MB, in fact a 720p framebuffer on wii u edram, according to shinen, takes about 3.6MB for each of them

 

here, you can confirm that on their twitter

https://twitter.com/...639073798500353

 

"

Shin'en Multimedia ‏@ShinenGames  1 de jul.

@eubank_josh Even having all three buffers in EDRAM would be no problem as they are only 3 x 3.6Mb of 32Mb.

 

"

 

Thats about 10.8MB of edram for the triple buffering with 720p buffers, so, what they use the rest of the 21.2MB of edram(not to menion that there is another tiny edram of avout 2MB and 1MB of sram according to the photo)?

well, just keep reading and you will see that they also use edram for the g-buffer(you need this bufer to store the lighting information of the deffered rendering), intermediate buffers and other stuff

Edited by megafenix, 13 March 2015 - 07:26 AM.

[3Dude]

well, in the interview with hd warriors you can clearly read that shinen mentioend they need 16MB for 1080p with double buffering, and recently they did mention they are using 3 720p framebuffers on fast racing neo but they did not say it takes 16MB, in fact a 720p framebuffer on wii u edram, according to shinen, takes about 3.6MB for each of them

 

here, you can confirm that on their twitter
https://twitter.com/...639073798500353
 
"
Shin'en Multimedia ‏@ShinenGames  1 de jul.
@eubank_josh Even having all three buffers in EDRAM would be no problem as they are only 3 x 3.6Mb of 32Mb.
 
"
 
Thats about 10.8MB of edram for the triple buffering with 720p buffers, so, what they use the rest of the 21.2MB of edram(not to menion that there is another tiny edram of avout 2MB and 1MB of sram according to the photo)?
well, just keep reading and you will see that they also use edram for the g-buffer(you need this bufer to store the lighting information of the deffered rendering), intermediate buffers and other stuff

I remember that twitter conversation.

Those things are all true, but they are made possible because of the higher capacity of the wii u edram, not because MS pr made a fake claim to a 256 Gb/s bandwidth that they couldnt use for anything they were trying to insinuate, and that we should use that as a basis for the wii u's bandwidth, which is what you constantly come back to say.

Your reasoning is that the new console must have better bandwidth than a half truth claims ms pr made about the 360, ignoring the fact its the Capacity and latency that are far, far, far more important in this case.

[megafenix]

I remember that twitter conversation.

Those things are all true, but they are made possible because of the higher capacity of the wii u edram, not because MS pr made a fake claim to a 256 Gb/s bandwidth that they couldnt use for anything they were trying to insinuate, and that we should use that as a basis for the wii u's bandwidth, which is what you constantly come back to say.

Your reasoning is that the new console must have better bandwidth than a half truth claims ms pr made about the 360, ignoring the fact its the Capacity and latency that are far, far, far more important in this case.

latency is important, i know that since the gamecube era, but bandwidth is important factor too, you can read documentation about the importance of bandwidth for deffered rendering using the g-buffer which is very demanding, do not ignore that fact either

Edited by megafenix, 13 March 2015 - 09:04 AM.