45 replies to this topic

[PipoPito]

talking is useless.... LETS DANCE!!!

[Caius Casshern Sins]

This is some interesting news.

[Narcidius]

wow, this would be an interesting turn, indeed... I'm not inclined to believe it, as most of the "interviews" with "developers" that have been "leaked" (I put all of this in scare quotes in an attempt to acknowledge what everyone is constantly pointing out about the lack of any real method of confirmation) have referred to DirectX10 support only... but it would sure be nice.

i have a hard time seeing Nintendo spring for a powerful gpu... i just do. the solid, quality, efficient ones are too expensive, and the alternatives are all too risky, inefficient, etc. As you pointed out, Nintendo's hardware has been nothing if not reliable.

[10k]

This pic is confirmed as the PC version. The wii u won't look as good.

[Keviin]

Wasnt direct X for Microsoft only?

[Plutonas]

wow, this would be an interesting turn, indeed... I'm not inclined to believe it, as most of the "interviews" with "developers" that have been "leaked" (I put all of this in scare quotes in an attempt to acknowledge what everyone is constantly pointing out about the lack of any real method of confirmation) have referred to DirectX10 support only... but it would sure be nice.

i have a hard time seeing Nintendo spring for a powerful gpu... i just do. the solid, quality, efficient ones are too expensive, and the alternatives are all too risky, inefficient, etc. As you pointed out, Nintendo's hardware has been nothing if not reliable.

Which developers said that? in the last years E3? Because in January a new leak came out from Beyond3d, that nintendo changed the gpu inside the console.. To something smaller, less heat and consumption but performs better.

That means, 6xxx or 5xxx.. But I repeat, it is not certain, it is a leak.. but from a reliable forum..

[Gameboysoadvance]

Wasnt direct X for Microsoft only?

Yup. Microsoft only. Nintendo is not going to pay Microsoft licensing fees...Also, rumors have been flying about the next-xbox having a bluray drive,but, bluray belongs to Sony. Meaning that Microsoft would have to pay licensing fees to Sony. Also, there are rumors that Sony will be using DX11; they(Sony) would have to pay Microsoft licensing fees. Unless a deal has been made between Microsoft and Sony to exchange bluray for DX11, then I don't see it happening. Nintendo has nothing to offer either company so they are probably not going to pay licensing fees to neither Microsoft or Sony because those fees will only be past down to the consumer, raising the price of the hardware or software. Nintendo will probably use in-house tools or middleware similar to DX11 or better.....Nintendo will never pay Sony for anything; and as long as they(Sony) own the rights to bluray tech, Nintendo loyalist should get the idea of that technology out of their minds forever:(

Edited by Gameboysoadvance, 16 April 2012 - 09:43 AM.

[Narcidius]

Wasnt direct X for Microsoft only?

well, technically DirectX is just a set of APIs that allow software to communicate with hardware... but yes, it was developed specifically by Microsoft for Microsoft, and is proprietary. To my knowledge, Xbox/360 is the only console to actually use a version of DirectX. Sony and Nintendo have their own libraries, optimised specifically to suite their graphics cards (and OS). When people (well, me at least) talk about a console "supporting DirectX11", they are probably talking about the set of features supported by that version of Direct3D (the graphics API in the DirectX suite)... things like tesselation, multithread rendering, and some advanced blending modes.

Some of these features are really revolutionary, but they depend upon the GPU being able to receive certain kinds of programmable instructions...

I just hope that Nintendo's GPU is better than what we're being told!

[Plutonas]

tessellation is not a software feature, its a hardware feature, existed from 3xxx or 2xxx series amd cards (cant remember which nvidia series tessellation was a feature), they just used it very recently, its not because of direct x.. So basically Wii U is the first console that will use tessellation.

Edited by Orion, 16 April 2012 - 10:16 AM.

[Chinomanila]

[

Update:

Slightly Mad has denied responsibility for the Nintendo livery (but not the Wii U release), with Vittorio Rapa saying, "these are fan-produced liveries, they doesn't come officially from our game (and so the logos applied to them)."]

Interesting

[Narcidius]

tessellation is not a software feature, its a hardware feature, existed from 3xxx or 2xxx series amd cards (cant remember which nvidia series tessellation was a feature), they just used it very recently, its not because of direct x.. So basically Wii U is the first console that will use tessellation.

ok, yes... i was once again not being specific. while "tessellation" has been around for a very long time, it is MUCH more effective in the latest batch of high-end GPUs, which allow displacement mapping to work seemlessly with streamlined, instantly-scaleable tessellation processes when over a billion triangles are being rendered at any given second - the parallel units (and engine rasters) allowing for a much more dynamic programmable pipeline...

... and, while the tessellation itself is handled by hardware, it seems pretty misleading to me to say that APIs like Direct3D have NOTHING to do with its effective implementation (but that may not have been your point)...

[Plutonas]

mostly to comfort others, that tessellation is not a microsoft protected thing... it is free for all, and wii U, will use that. As many people think that this feature appeared in direct x 10-11, so it belongs to MS.. Its not true.. (direct x made use of it..) Nintendo can update their api's and use it also.. simple as that.

Edited by Orion, 16 April 2012 - 01:05 PM.

[Robotic Sunshine Commander]

wii u will probably support dx 11 type qualitys

[Caius Casshern Sins]

The wii U will will probably just used the latest version of OpenGL or variate of it.

[Narcidius]

mostly to comfort others, that tessellation is not a microsoft protected thing... it is free for all, and wii U, will use that. As many people think that this feature appeared in direct x 10-11, so it belongs to MS.. Its not true.. (direct x made use of it..) Nintendo can update their api's and use it also.. simple as that.

ah... yes, good point. i guess people do seem to think that tessellation was invented with DX11, lol (as if breaking polygons into smaller pieces was anything new)... and I definitely agree that Nintendo developers will be able to make use of some of these advanced processes (after all, many devs admitted that they could have pushed the wii a lot farther if they wanted too, even with the gpu's "fixed" pipeline, by emulating shaders using the wii processor's existing tools). out of curiosity, do you personally think that the gpu Nintendo chooses will be a capable piece of hardware, able to support the kind of demanding processes that make cutting-edge graphics really "pop" these days?

[neverwinteru]

Yup. Microsoft only. Nintendo is not going to pay Microsoft licensing fees...Also, rumors have been flying about the next-xbox having a bluray drive,but, bluray belongs to Sony. Meaning that Microsoft would have to pay licensing fees to Sony. Also, there are rumors that Sony will be using DX11; they(Sony) would have to pay Microsoft licensing fees. Unless a deal has been made between Microsoft and Sony to exchange bluray for DX11, then I don't see it happening. Nintendo has nothing to offer either company so they are probably not going to pay licensing fees to neither Microsoft or Sony because those fees will only be past down to the consumer, raising the price of the hardware or software. Nintendo will probably use in-house tools or middleware similar to DX11 or better.....Nintendo will never pay Sony for anything; and as long as they(Sony) own the rights to bluray tech, Nintendo loyalist should get the idea of that technology out of their minds forever:(

just so you know sony does not own blu ray it is just a common misconception

Edited by That Guy, 16 April 2012 - 04:25 PM.

[uh20]

I'm sure it will hit the directx11 benchmark, as for it actually running directx , no way, DirectX is only for Microsoft bozos, it will be an equivalent of opengl

[Stewox]

Lets be clear on that it's "DX equivalent" - it's not DX at all.

Consoles don't rely on APIs - developers can suck out all the features and performance the hardware has, regardless of API features. But advanced machine code programming is very hard - only a few developers have the knowledge, skills and programming resources to fully ulitise the power - these are companies like ID Software, EPIC, Crytek ...etc ; Crytek doesn't have that much of a good skills for console games obviously in design/creativity - crysis 2 disaster.

Id Software proved that with idTech5 in Rage more than any other company. It's way ahead of the competition.

Having that in mind that closed console platforms usually have the open access to all the hardware on a very low level. Comparing WiiU hardware with equivalent PC hardware is only the on-par or the minimum of the console's actual practical capabilities -

So the capabilities of the console would appear more than actually when comparing raw hardware, to the equivalent performance on PC benchmarking since becase of all the driver, API , OS overhead 40% of the performance is lost.

Edited by Stewox, 17 April 2012 - 12:40 AM.

[Narcidius]

Consoles don't rely on APIs - developers can suck out all the features and performance the hardware has, regardless of API features. But advanced machine code programming is very hard - only a few developers have the knowledge, skills and programming resources to fully ulitise the power - these are companies like ID Software, EPIC, Crytek ...etc ; Crytek doesn't have that much of a good skills for console games obviously in design/creativity - crysis 2 disaster.

So the capabilities of the console would appear more than actually when comparing raw hardware, to the equivalent performance on PC benchmarking since becase of all the driver, API , OS overhead 40% of the performance is lost.

Good point to bring up. Companies like High Voltage were able to squeeze a lot more out of the Wii's hardware because they were designing their engine from the ground up to be optimized for the Wii's exact hardware... knowing the precise CPU they were working with, they were able to tweak the code pretty specifically, even down to the level of writing some catered code in assembly language (I don't think anyone actually "writes" in machine language, do they?). They were able to imitate several of the effects that PCs produce with shaders, by using the baked-in hardware features that the Wii's GPU did have. Still, there are physical limitations imposed by "fixed" pipelines and built-in operations on the GPU... even The Conduit, while pretty "for the Wii", was nothing close to a comparable PS/360 title in terms of graphical performance.

Also, it is worth noting that, while it is technically possible to avoid using APIs at all in programming for a console like the Wii, the dev kits provided by Nintendo include APIs similar to OpenGL for graphics (which many low-end devs will use) and, as you said, very few developers producing cross-platform games are going to go through the immense effort of bypassing APIs (or even have the technical muscle to do so) when they code for the WiiU. It's just not efficient!

Here's hoping that we get some intrepid devs on the platform, who are able to squeeze every last ounce out of that GPU...