routerbad

Hello everyone.  Starting last December, I started creating and posting videos to YouTube on a new format that I haven't seen done before.  Many of you know that I love riding motorcycles and I love following the video game industry.  What I'm up to is a basic motovlogging channel where the primary topics revolve around gaming.  Check it out and let me know what you think (constructive criticism welcomed, but don't expect me to accept every suggestion).

Day Tripper: Underratings, That New IP Smell, and EA Can DOS It Up Their FPS and THQ

Night Rider: Nintendo working on 9th gen "Fusion Terminal/DS"?

Night Rider: Nintendoom is Alive and Well

Playstation Now Too Far Ahead of Its Time?

Sorry for the apparent new thread SPAM.  I was getting a php error that made it appear that the topic wasn't being created.

Nice post, and the details provided make good sense! Now.. back to those lazy devs...

Love it, one CPU core, unoptimized shader assenblies, rendering to two screens, at 60fps 1080p, looks and plays better than ports from enormous publishers.

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 if 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) youalready 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.

In general, development for Wii U CPU+GPU is simple. You don’t need complicated setups or workarounds for things like HDR(High Dynamic Range)or linear RGB (Color Modeling). What we also like is that there are plenty of possibilities for speeding up your rendering and code, but you don’t have to dig deep for them to get proper performance.

For instance, all of our shaders used in ‘Nano Assault Neo’ are not really optimized. We just used the first iteration of them because they were already fast enough. We looked later through the shaders dis-assembly and noticed we can make them 30-40% faster by better pipeline usage or better hints for the shader compiler.

As ‘Nano Assault Neo’ never had a problem running at 60fps (including a 2nd screen rendering at 60fps on the GamePad) we didn’t have to do that kind of optimizations back then. For CPU usage ‘Nano Assault Neo’ only used the main CPU core. The two other cores were almost idle, beside a few percent used for our audio thread.

So all in all ‘Nano Assault Neo’ only used a fraction of the currently available resources on Wii U and looks and plays quite nice. And for the future, don’t forget that in many consoles, early in their life cycle, not all resources were already useable or accessible via the SDK. So we are sure the best is yet to come for Wii U.’

 

Hence why I said I could wait. 

 

Although, I already own a Wii U, so the statement was more rhetorical than anything.

There's no point in waiting for a price cut when there isn't one coming.  Wii U first makes more sense, because the PS4 games landscape is going to be sparse for a while after launch.  Meanwhile many of Nintendo's biggest titles are coming out before, during, and after both of the other consoles launch

I'll rephrase. It makes more sense to spend your money as you see fit, buying games when you want them. I could wait to buy the next Batman game, sure, but do I feel like waiting a year or more just to get a better deal while everybody around me spoils the story? Uh...no.

 

For sure.

Nintendo announced that Earthbound will be available on the Wii U eShop today for $10.

http://nintendoenthu...nintendo-eshop/

Discuss!

One of the problems regarding dev teams is that they're just throwing HUNDREDS at development, thinking it's an easy way to get things out faster. It's like trying to make a cake and thinking you can cut down on the baking time by just doubling the temperature. Doesn't work like that. For SOME games, large dev teams are inevitable (like Grand Theft Auto, The Elder Scrolls, and ANY MMO), but I don't see why we need 600+ man dev teams for everything. Pubs have become one-trick ponies by just doing blockbuster after blockbuster instead of doing blockbusters, but also SMALLER projects throughout the years.

Very true, an unsustainable business model.  You have to create a breadth of properties that appeal to different demographics to stay consistently profitable.  Many publishers rely on ONE demographic and throw all of their money at making games for them, when to be honest many of them don't spend a whole lot of money on games to begin with.

I think it's still not too late, let's hope this will happen after the price cut which will inevitably follow after the release of PS4 and XBOX One.

Don't hold your breath.

Developers could be confusing GPU performance with improper use of the edram.  GPU performance cannot be maximized without proper use of the edram, without using it properly the GPU will not be able to run at its maximum potential.  Its up to the developer to make sure they are getting the most bang for their buck with the edram.  From what I can gather, this means that the frame buffers/Z buffer would stay in the edram saving tons of bandwidth.  However, this only leaves about 12-16MB for textures.  So the majority of textures would still need to come from the main memory pool. 

Right, and even though honestly disc streaming along with the main ram bandwidth is enough for most applications (textures aren't as bandwidth hungry as some would think) prioritizing commonly used textures to be housed in EDRAM would be effective, but it depends on the game being developed.

if nobody is using the eDRAM whats the point in having it.

They aren't using the EDRAM 'yet'.  Many of them simply hadn't figured out what they were doing with the system, and Nintendo's tools weren't very good (you could argue even Nintendo didn't really know what they were doing with the system yet) when the current crop of games was released.  Obviously there are a couple that use it lightly, like Shin'en's game and Trine 2.  Just goes to show you that the indie guys were able to get more acquainted with the system in a shorter period of time than big house publishers.  A testament to their engineering prowess.

Since we are the ones buying games, we kind of are an authority. Not alone, but if people group up, they can make a difference (cf. tripping removed in SSBWIIU). Many devs do care about people's opinion. Then intervene AAA publishers that force them to keep silence, and that's why we assume stuff like that.

I understand where you are coming from and I agree.  The problem is that when they've said pubilcly before that all of the next gen versions of games look "the same" but that isn't enough for a minority of people that feel that it needs to be "proved" they aren't going to give a damn.  

This is absolutely true.  A lot of people have wanted to just add up the bandwidth numbers and declare the Wii U as having phenomenal bandwidth, as if its just as good as the memory bandwidth on the PS4, and anyone with some common sense knows that 32MB of super high bandwidth can only do so much for the slow bandwidth of the main memory.  The question is where is the tipping point for hardware.  How powerful does a GPU need to be before its trully being limited by the memory.  With the Wii U, memory management is very important.  What can be done in the edram, and what absolutely needs to be stored there.  You would never want data in the edram that eats up valuable space when it really be stored in the main memory with no issue.  All this is true for the cache on the cpu as well.  So the even if the edram's bandwidth is 256GB/s, the actual memory performance when used corrected may only perform as well as a traditional memory setup that has 35-50 GB/s bandwidth. 

 

Like Shin'en said, everything matches up very well.  The GPU isnt memory bandwidth starved, but at the same time there isnt tons of extra memory bandwidth that does to waste because the GPU isnt powerful enough to process as much data as the memory can supply.  There is a reason that Sony didnt choose this memory setup for the PS4, and that was for ease of programming.  Its obvious that many developers are either not capable, or simply dont have the resources to take advantage of Wii U's unique architecture.  It is funny that even Sony aknowledges that from an outright performance standpoint, the edram with slower main memory can work very well, but its not as easy to program for, and thats why they chose to go with high bandwidth main memory.   

Keep in mind that when they develop their games they should know what assets are coming when, and prepare to manage the EDRAM accordingly.  That's why Shin 'en said that devs need to work to maximize performance, because the potential is there for a very high theoretical bandwidth, but it has to be managed, and devs can't be caught sleeping at the wheel.

We also know that developers aren't being limited to the bandwidth of the main memory pool, either.  Somehow they are getting good bandwidth but haven't really said how much or how they are getting it.

I'm willing for any developer to prove me wrong. Splinter cell blacklist is up 1st... Let's see. Haven't heard Ubi say anything about it yet with just about a month and some days to go.

You aren't an authority in game development, the developers don't have to "prove" anything.  They just make the games for the platforms that the brass tells them to make the games for.  Don't expect any developer of publisher to come out and qualify the ridiculous presumption that for some reason they aren't going to take advantage of better hardware by making a statement about it.  They've talked about the next gen engine they are using, for each individual platform.  The Wii U version of the engine will be more capable than the 360 version of the engine, in all cases. 

A console with NO 3rd party games is probably the stupidest idea I have ever heard of. And this is probably the biggest overreaction I have ever seen to EA not putting games on the Wii U.

Technically the indie games WOULD be third party.  He's referring to not closing them out completely, but making them compete on the exact same footing as indie game developers.  I don't quite see how it would work, but a very interesting idea indeed for what its worth.

Keep in mind that console exclusives will continue to sell over the system's lifecycle if it is a good product.  Even if they don't hit 700k instantly, they will eventually meet and surpass that.