77 replies to this topic

[3Dude]

but that was what made it significant the guy did this before people knew the name of the cpu. he said what the CPU was going to be before anyone knew. i guess I was thinking of another forum. I thought he did post here one time though... I guess not.

 

I remember what you are talking about, so seeing that it wasnt here, I agree with you on it being another forum.

[GAMER1984]

I remember what you are talking about, so seeing that it wasnt here, I agree with you on it being another forum.

 Yeah would have been cool to pick that person brain... he had to work for either Nintendo or someone who helped develop the CPU

[Chronos21]

Hi guys i'm new here, but i've read since 1 year your comments. As many of you i'm too interessted in WiiU specs, but nobody knows about it (besides developers with a devkit) But there is one thing, that i can post here. Maybe it can give us some insight. Its nothing groundbreaking, or really new, but it shows that this system has enough power, and isnt only on par with PS360

Here is a post from a guy in eurogamer, who claims to be a developer. He sounds reasonable in my opinion. So the following posts are quotes from him

"It's interesting to see the Wii U's CPU being called "weak" all the time without qualification. There is a significant difference to developing for PowerPC hardware which is most likely the issue Ubisoft deal with here. You can do pretty stellar things on the Wii U hardware as a whole, and its design is strongly in favor of a kind of pseudo-PS3-SPU approach using 3 hardware threads plus compute shaders with the totally capable GPU, but it's still not port friendly without a lot of specific attention. TBH I've been impressed Ubi have put out the kind of port quality they have been.

There are things you can do on Wii U that carry far lighter footprints in certain settings, the lowest hanging fruit being SIMD ops for certain math. 2D vector math is stupid fast on the U, for instance. But overall it's pretty far from a "preconfigured PC" like the PS4 or the One.

Sidenote: I think it's interesting to see how far the PS3 has come. Remember the early days when games attempted to use the RSX "traditionally" and hit the brick wall of alpha blending time and time again? The amount of ludicrous slowdown on early PS3 games whenever something transparent appears make the more recent, SPU-tricksy games look like they arrived from the far flung future.

Regardless I think it's pretty uninteresting whether or not they'd shove a "next gen" game onto the Wii U. It's just not that system. I'd rather play a "next gen", heavyweight, grunty muscly game onto my PS4, and leave the Wii U to oddities and smaller things. Plenty of room for both."

"Nintendo counts on developers to know how compute shaders and parallelism work to alleviate the CPU issues (which are real). The GPU is, relatively speaking, a powerhouse and if you use it without care you are completely missing out on the intended design.

The thing that has bothered me the most with Wii U dev isn't "power" but simply that it's a weird idiosyncratic system that makes it hard to do things in traditional ways."


"As a developer, now having some (admittedly recent) insight into how the system is architected, anyone who complains its underpowered have very specific expectations of what a games system should be doing. I think it's, in one way, fair to expect every system under the sun to be designed to do the same things, I mean, they are in direct competition, but in this case there are going to be things that system A is built to do that system B will have a tougher time at and vice versa. The horrible Silent Hill 2 HD update Konami did for the PS3 struggles with rendering fog like the PS2 did, for instance, because of both the higher resolution render target and the basic fact that the PS3 is basically worse than the PS2 at rendering alpha blended surfaces. Think about that.

I can't get into more detail, but I for one, being an indie with a pretty small team and some specific ideas, have more than enough legroom to spare on the system, and I'm just plain excited to be working with a touchscreen with so little latency (wtf are you talking about, last gen touchscreen, TRY doing art on a capacitive screen) and such a potent legacy."

So these are the quotes. The username is Sunjammer on eurogamer, if you want to search him. As i said, he sounds reasonable and i would like to read your thoughts about this statements^^

Edited by Chronos21, 23 January 2015 - 08:49 PM.

[Raiden]

[Chronos21]

What do you mean with your gif, buddy?

[Raiden]

It's been discussed to death no one will ever agree. It never mattered anyway. It's a dead horse that keeps being beat and this topic was dead for good reason until some dude necro bumped it.

[Chronos21]

Ah, then i'm sorry bro This wasnt my intention with the post.

I still see everywhere hate on WiiU and his "weak" specs and thought, that on a WiiU only forum i could discuss some stuff about it. And with 3Dude you guys seem to have one that knows what he's talking regarding tech stuff.

[3Dude]

Hi guys i'm new here, but i've read since 1 year your comments. As many of you i'm too interessted in WiiU specs, but nobody knows about it (besides developers with a devkit) But there is one thing, that i can post here. Maybe it can give us some insight. Its nothing groundbreaking, or really new, but it shows that this system has enough power, and isnt only on par with PS360

Here is a post from a guy in eurogamer, who claims to be a developer. He sounds reasonable in my opinion. So the following posts are quotes from him

"It's interesting to see the Wii U's CPU being called "weak" all the time without qualification. There is a significant difference to developing for PowerPC hardware which is most likely the issue Ubisoft deal with here. You can do pretty stellar things on the Wii U hardware as a whole, and its design is strongly in favor of a kind of pseudo-PS3-SPU approach using 3 hardware threads plus compute shaders with the totally capable GPU, but it's still not port friendly without a lot of specific attention. TBH I've been impressed Ubi have put out the kind of port quality they have been.

There are things you can do on Wii U that carry far lighter footprints in certain settings, the lowest hanging fruit being SIMD ops for certain math. 2D vector math is stupid fast on the U, for instance. But overall it's pretty far from a "preconfigured PC" like the PS4 or the One.

Sidenote: I think it's interesting to see how far the PS3 has come. Remember the early days when games attempted to use the RSX "traditionally" and hit the brick wall of alpha blending time and time again? The amount of ludicrous slowdown on early PS3 games whenever something transparent appears make the more recent, SPU-tricksy games look like they arrived from the far flung future.

Regardless I think it's pretty uninteresting whether or not they'd shove a "next gen" game onto the Wii U. It's just not that system. I'd rather play a "next gen", heavyweight, grunty muscly game onto my PS4, and leave the Wii U to oddities and smaller things. Plenty of room for both."

"Nintendo counts on developers to know how compute shaders and parallelism work to alleviate the CPU issues (which are real). The GPU is, relatively speaking, a powerhouse and if you use it without care you are completely missing out on the intended design.

The thing that has bothered me the most with Wii U dev isn't "power" but simply that it's a weird idiosyncratic system that makes it hard to do things in traditional ways."


"As a developer, now having some (admittedly recent) insight into how the system is architected, anyone who complains its underpowered have very specific expectations of what a games system should be doing. I think it's, in one way, fair to expect every system under the sun to be designed to do the same things, I mean, they are in direct competition, but in this case there are going to be things that system A is built to do that system B will have a tougher time at and vice versa. The horrible Silent Hill 2 HD update Konami did for the PS3 struggles with rendering fog like the PS2 did, for instance, because of both the higher resolution render target and the basic fact that the PS3 is basically worse than the PS2 at rendering alpha blended surfaces. Think about that.

I can't get into more detail, but I for one, being an indie with a pretty small team and some specific ideas, have more than enough legroom to spare on the system, and I'm just plain excited to be working with a touchscreen with so little latency (wtf are you talking about, last gen touchscreen, TRY doing art on a capacitive screen) and such a potent legacy."

So these are the quotes. The username is Sunjammer on eurogamer, if you want to search him. As i said, he sounds reasonable and i would like to read your thoughts about this statements^^

 

The ps2 did have a bonkers memory bound fillrate, its read modify write/alpha blending was ridiculous. Something like 156x overdraw at 60fhz? Neither ps3 nor ps4 can match it... Under the conditions modern games are run, 720-1080 resolution and hundreds of operations per pixel. The 'problem' comes from the ps3 having 7x the pixels to fill as the ps2... and only 3-3.5? times the bandwidth to do it. But... They dont really need to rely on fillrate the way ps2 did, modern rendering techniques arent really fillrate bottle necked, being they have bajillions of little alu factories hammering out pixel shading and other operations, so even having infinite fill rate wont improve the frame rate all that much.

 

If you wanted to revert to gourad shading, 480i im pretty sure the ps3 and 4 would smoke themselves some ps2 fillrate turkey. But, even so, demo artists still have a blast going banannas on ps2's fillrate.

[grahamf]

Nintendo is Love

Nintendo is Life

Nintendo is Perfect

Nintendo is Eternal

 

End of discussion, nothing else matters.

[ShyGuysOnStilts]

PS4 is Schwarzenegger

 

Xbox One is Stallone

 

PC is Norris(!)

 

Wii U is Van Damme

 

That is how I see things but don't ask me for my reasoning:p

[Raiden]

PS4 is Carrot Top. Somehow popular but nothing good to show for it.

XBO is Danny Devito. Comes up short in everything.

PC is the hot chick who sleeps with everyone but also very prone to disease.

Wii U is Freddie Mercury. While amazing somehow will become more popular when it's time is done.

[3Dude]

PS4 is Schwarzenegger
 
Xbox One is Stallone
 
PC is Norris(!)
 
Wii U is Van Damme
 
That is how I see things but don't ask me for my reasoning:p

Youre Van Damme right.

[Chronos21]

So WiiU is a mix of Van Damme and Hulk Hogan

[Raiden]

So WiiU is a mix of Van Damme and Hulk Hogan

Trying to establish a new world and order.

[Son Edo]

PS4 is Carrot Top. Somehow popular but nothing good to show for it.

XBO is Danny Devito. Comes up short in everything.

PC is the hot chick who sleeps with everyone but also very prone to disease.

Wii U is Freddie Mercury. While amazing somehow will become more popular when it's time is done.

 

I'm listening to queen songs right now.
 

[megafenix]

it amazes me that some stafff of the eurogamer reporters still call wii u directx10 tech when pretty much directx11 equivalent features like multithreaded rendering(project cars), compute shaders(report from eurogamer secret developers, or the wii u sdk documentation) and other stuff

http://www.eurogamer...ategy-behind-it

"

In Theory: Nintendo's next-gen hardware - and the strategy behind it

Digital Foundry on the tech that best matches the Big N's revamped approach to console R&D.

 

By Richard Leadbetter Published 10/01/2015

 

 

The hardware make-up of Nintendo's last console is based on two key components -ancient PowerPC cores from IBM (the presence of which appears to have been dictated mostly by Wii back-compatability), along with DirectX 10-era graphics technology from AMD. While the Wii U was a power-efficient design, its PowerPC CPU architecture would be immensely difficult to scale down to mobile, while AMD left the kind of graphics tech utilised by the Wii U behind many, many years ago.

 

"

 

Not to mention that there are wii u games there taht clearly use diretx11 equivalent features and even if the gpu started as a customized rv770 we must remeber that the the hd5000 and hd6000 gpus from amd are basically using the same architecture as the hd4000(rv770) gpus with tiny little changes to improve performance and give directx11 support, since the wii u gpu is custmized is no wonder that nintendo made the necessary changes for next generation graphics support, and this wouldnt be the first time since nintendo also has made modifications on cpu and gpu devices back on the gamecube era, and the gamecube cpu was different than the standard powerpc 750 series of those times

[grahamf]

I wonder if Nintendo will ever try to pull their chip designs further in-house? If they can fork the components instead of always dealing with AMD and IBM, they could better integrate the components together and have a safety net in case there's issues with AMD or IBM.

[Chronos21]

Why? Nintendo has a long relationship with AMD/ATI/ArtX since the N64 days and the will work in the future together.