Mike12Nite

I know there is a very slim chance of something as drastic as this happening, but there is still a posibility that something similar will happen down the road for the system (at least for the RAM). Either way lets imagine Nintendo finds a way to shrink the OS when a game opens (something similar to the Vita OS) and allows a significant boost in available RAM for games and overclocks the GPU (I mention this just because the system runs so cool), I'm just curious about what you guys think the games will look like after an upgrade like this.

 

With 1.9GB of RAM and 32MB of eDRAM for games and the GPU going from 550MHZ to 620MHZ, how big of an upgrade do you think we'd see in games going by how games like Bayonetta 2 look now.

 

 

Again I know there's a slim chance of something this drastic happening but just for the sake of discussion. Fantasize with me why don't yah! . So looking at the current games on Wii U, what parts of the games would see a significant upgrade? Would PS4/X1 games be able to run easier on the system? Would the upgrade be negligable?

 

I personally think a decent upgrade in the amount of RAM would do wonders for the visuals of open world games like Xenoblade Chronicles X and Zelda U. With an upgrade in RAM we'd see even higher resolution textures in these already large open worlds. Xenoblade's textures become very blurry when you get up close to them, the floor/grass textures also aren't very good. I'd imagine a boost in RAM this big would fix this problem and some.

 

 

 

And although Zelda has a stylized design, it still uses realistic textures for most surfaces, so we'd probably get hgiher resolution textures and bigger draw distances. I'm not sure what an overclock to the GPU would allow, but maybe more particle affects (the game is already using impressive particle effects) and better shaders. Or higher resolutions.

 

 

 

Interested to hear your opinions on this and what possiblities would open up. Do you think with this upgrade the Wii U would be able to run closer versions of othe HD twin's games? Obviously it won't be on the'r level.

 

Just for comparison's sake here are some of the HD twims/PC game screenshots

 

Witcher 3

 

 

Assasin's Creed Unity

 

I know the Wii U wouldn't be running these games at this level of fidelity, but would it be able to run a respectable port with this upgrade? Or do you think it wouldn't make much of a difference.

 

Sorry for the super hypotheical thread, it's just something I've thought about for a while and would liek to see what other people think.

 

The edram is pretty much elbow to elbow the the GPU logic. Since there hasnt been a configuration like this before, I'm curious what having such a low latency connection to alreafy fast, high bandwidth memory will allow developers to do. The edram speed must be blindingly fast, and the CPU also has a very low latency connection to it. What will be the advantage of this in games?

Shin'en has given us some vital information on what the Wii U is truely and effortlessly capable of. If you think about it, what developer really focused on pushing the hardware this year? Of course we have 3d world, pikmin 3 and zelda, but those are highly stylized and most likely not focused on really taking advantage of every bit of the consoles power. 3rd parties are not putting any effort to take advantage of any of the Wii U's newer capabilities in ports, there's been confirmations on neogaf that devs arent using the dsp, they're only using about 10mb of the edram and of course the ps360s cpu' are very different from the Wii Us. fourthstorm on neogaf reported hearing that compute shaders weren't fully usable. With all of this going on for the year and gaming websites like eurogamer nailing the notion that the console is underpowered into every Wii U article, it can really mess with everyone's perception about the system, when in reality we dont know jack about the console.

Shin'en however, for some reason are constantly raving about the console. They seem to be having a breeze making a true next gen game on the system.

Here's what shin'en has confirmed about their upcoming Wii U game Fast Racing Neo:

4-8k textures
Deferred render
Vsync enabled
Cascade filtered soft shadows
Hdr
Tessellation
60fps

Now they haven't come out and told us the resolution, but I dont think shin'en would bother using 4k-8k textures if the resolution was going to be 720p as it wouldn't be as noticable. They didnt bother making nano assault neo 1080p because it didnt make much of a visual difference. Im going to go ahead and guess this game is also going to be 1080p because they bothered to go with not just 4k but 8k textures too, and they'd likely want it to be as visable as possible, otherwise 2k textures would be enough.

Now the fact that the Wii U is achiving this in it's second year by a 5 man team speaks volumes about it's power. It would take a pretty decent gaming rig to run something like this game.

Some other interesting things we've heard from devs

Project cars using particle shadows and multi threaded shadow rendering

Two tribes finding a "new" hardware feature in the Wii U that shaves off 100mb of texture memory.

Its so easy to get caught up in the first year of a console, and let the uninformed gaming sites and comment sections drill that overly negative "underpowered" montra into our heads, but if the Wii U can have game that is a defrred render, using 4k-8k textures, with vsync enabled, tessellation and at 60fps, it sounds damned future proof to me, and sounds like shin'en werent talking hot air.

Btw sorry for the sucky writing , im on a phone.

Hello guys Im new here. Been reading around the forums and its nice to see a Nintendo community having people that are well knowledged and unbiased. I've been learning a lot from here.

Anyways this might be a noob question but Ive been reading that the Wii U outperforms the jaguar cpu in things like general purpose, but Espresso comes short in flops and number of cores. With that in mind, since things like general purpose is somewhere that the Wii u Cpu shines, shouldnt the dynamic city of Watchdogs carry over well on the Wii U? Like just as well as the other consoles? Also what is the advantave of having all of that simd on the ps4/x1? Like what is simd's role in cpus and how important is tht going to be moving forward? Does the Wii U have its own way of dealing with this?

Thanks