You are so witty.
"Before the release of its next-gen rivals, the Wii U is the console with the most memory, so much that developers like Ubisoft’s Michel Ancel
praised this volume."
This states that the above people praised the
amount of RAM, not the speed, which is the issue.
"... It’s the same flattering portray for latency, the main recipient of Shin’en’s Manfred Linzner compliments on the system in
our exclusive interview."
Let's look at exactly what they said:
"When testing our first code on Wii U we were amazed how much we could throw at it without any slowdowns, at that time we even had zero optimizations. The performance problem of hardware nowadays is not clock speed but ram latency. Fortunately Nintendo took great efforts to ensure developers can really work around that typical bottleneck on Wii U. They put a lot of thought on how CPU, GPU, caches and memory controllers work together to amplify your code speed. For instance, with only some tiny changes we were able to optimize certain heavy load parts of the rendering pipeline to 6x of the original speed, and that was even without using any of the extra cores."
"We didn’t have such problems. The CPU and GPU are a good match. As said before, today’s hardware has bottlenecks with memory throughput when you don’t care about your coding style and data layout. This is true for any hardware and can’t be only cured by throwing more megahertz and cores on it. Fortunately Nintendo made very wise choices for cache layout, ram latency and ram size to work against these pitfalls. Also Nintendo took care that other components like the Wii U GamePad screen streaming, or the built-in camera don’t put a burden on the CPU or GPU."
"Q: On the lauded general organization of the system memory, surely you’re referring in part to the important role of the edram in the Wii U? And about the ram, are other parameters than latency such as bandwidth favorable compare to current platforms?
A: I’m not able to be precise on that but for us as a developer we see everything works perfectly together. Many systems in the past forced the programmers to shift around their data and code quite a lot to fight against latency."
This is pretty much saying that the GPGPU design is the saving grace for the system.
"In general all those DRAM numbers are not of much importance. Much more for example are the size and speed of caches for each core in the CPU. Because DRAM is always slow compared to caches speed."
Way to go sherlock. Probably not even a developer.
Then the writer goes on about edram, which isn't new and 32MB is the best!
Then reaching at straws with it's new! a memory controller is better when it's new!
Then the writer cuts the 360's bandwidth in half by having their old lame controller be controlling the flow of data like an old old old.
But the Wii U's got chips all over the place connected by seperate buses and memory controllers so it's really super-fast! and new!
Followed by baseless peculation about using the ram as a scratchpad.
And baseless speculation about DDR3 > GDDR3 when that's just plain silly. Again using the it's new! excuse.
AMD and Nintendo secretly made a secret texture secret that AMD didn't think of as the guys who have been making gpu's for decades and it's only on Nintendo!
I'll ignore the anonymous developer conversation, because of the one they quoted earlier obviously being an idiot.
"we had no issues at all with memory bandwidth on Trine 2: Director’s Cut."
The writer tacks on the implication that what frozenbyte meant was wii u is not bandwidth starved, but we can't say that because of nda's :'( nintendo want you to think it's weak.
What a silly thing to tack on to someones simple statement saying they haven't had problems developing for the system, within its limitations. Like every other console ever, except the ps3's cell.
Followed by more stuff of little value.
I agree with shin'en though, I have faith that Nintendo didn't just grab the cheapest chips they could find and glue them to a cardboard circuit board, the truth on how the ram is managed will be revealed some day.
Bandwidth is a completely separate thing from how well the memory is organised though.