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DopeyFish · Nov 21, 2012

TAJ said:
Yes, they have IE.
And they're locked into 32MB for compatibility reasons.

People are confusing the OS and the dashboard.

Dashboard and any apps can take free reign on memory

The memory used by the OS (guide, communications, networking, audio, visual, etc) is capped at 32 MB while a game is running, an app is running, whatever.

It's always possible to decrease the footprint of the OS but its 100% impossible to increase it

PS3 OS used a ridiculous 96 MB of ram in game operation at one time and they finally got it down to 52 MB or something... Still too hard on a system with split ram pools.

I am not sure what wii-u is doing with that memory if its allocation is true- I seriously doubt it is. 1GB is so overkill, you can run windows 7 with that size of allocation.

And on another note... Imagine what MS could be pulling off with 8x their memory footprint

Guiberu · Nov 21, 2012

lightchris said:
What are you trying to say with that? I think you misunderstood wsippel.

No. The Raderon 4870 had 115.2GB/s.

I was simply pointing out that despite the amount of ram on the card, the framerate was unaffected - thus agreeing with wsippel's point about limited amount of data being accessed (as opposed to large volume of data being bogged down by throughput limitations).

The figures I could find during a brief search suggested the memory modules on the 4870 has a bandwidth of around 3.7gb/s - although this may be based on individual memory chips and need to be multipled together to find an overall throughput for the card.

Metalmurphy · Nov 21, 2012

kurtrussell said:
You've obviously never cross-compiled then.

Do enlighten me. Cross-compiling will magically make a game run exactly the same on weaker hardware?

What about that 4A Games dev? Obviously he never cross-compiled either.

"We had an early look at it, we thought we could probably do it, but in terms of the impact we would make on the overall quality of the game potentially to its detriment we just figured it wasnt worth pursuing at this time. Its something we might return to. I really couldnt make any promises, though."

Perkel · Nov 21, 2012

Guiberu said:
Indeed.

For example:

Also worth mentioning that, I believe the 4870 had much lower memory bandwidth than the WiiU seemingly has (?)

4870 had GDDR5. which is above 100Gb/s Wii U has 17Gb/s.

Also this chart is stupid for comparition. Because Crysis 1 assets at most took 750mb vram so icreaasing resolution didn't have that much difference here when you had memory above 1GB (i mean Ram bottleneck). And as i said earlier 17Gb/s is not 100Gb/s+ so you point is invalid

Curufinwe · Nov 21, 2012

Durante said:
I agree with your first sentence. We simply don't have enough information to claim that everything is uniformly weak and outdated, and even if we did have full information I don't think 32MB eDRAM are outdated by any definition.

But the second part, "it's not a weak system", seems to be a rather subjective judgement. I say releasing a piece of consumer electronics in a similar form factor that has trouble matching 6 year old hardware in some aspects is "weak". It may be "efficient", but the two -- to me -- are not mutually exclusive.

If the form factor was more similar it would be able to use more power and be more powerful. The Japan-friendly small size of the Wii U is a real shame.

kurtrussell · Nov 21, 2012

Metalmurphy said:
"We had an early look at it, we thought we could probably do it, but in terms of the impact we would make on the overall quality of the game potentially to its detriment we just figured it wasnt worth pursuing at this time. Its something we might return to. I really couldnt make any promises, though."

Zoukka pretty much nailed it earlier. It appears that they decided that the cost/time ratio wasn't worth it. This != the CPU is weak, more (in my opinion) that they decided the effort wasn't worth it.

Basileus777 · Nov 21, 2012

kurtrussell said:
Zoukka pretty much nailed it earlier. It appears that they decided that the cost/time ratio wasn't worth it. This != the CPU is weak, more (in my opinion) that they decided the effort wasn't worth it.

The chief technical officer outright states in blunt, plain English that the CPU is horrible and slow, there's no real room for this type of reinterpretation.

QaaQer · Nov 21, 2012

Basileus777 said:
The chief technical officer outright states in blunt, plain English that the CPU is horrible and slow, there's no real room for this type of reinterpretation.

There are some pretty good efforts at spinning this quote into "we are shit lazy devs who are ignorant about how to use superior modern hardware to run our gray brown dudebro clone that only PC gamers wanting a tech demo buy anyway. Oh, and we will be out of work soon because THQ is dying, so this is our way of getting some free press."

In retrospect, given the actual games that Nintendo has shown over the last few months, it is pretty obvious that the wii u's upper ceiling is definitely current gen. But that's Ok because looking at where and how they are advertising the system, it is being targeted towards the Under 13 crowd.

Nintendo's pricing strategy, most likely, is going to be like the 3ds. Sell it high to the Nintendo fanatics at first. Then use price reductions to position it at the bottom of the market to make it super attractive to parents. That's why they have penny pinched so much on it, they want to eventually cut the price to the bone.

Of course, with it being on par with the PS360, this strategy might not work so well if sony and microsoft keep those consoles on the market beyond next Dec.

The wii u will look cheap compared to the ps720, but never in comparison to the ps360.

Durante · Nov 21, 2012

Untalkative_Bunny said:
The wii u will look cheap compared to the ps720, but never in comparison to the ps360.

They could probably get the cost of the system itself below PS360 level actually, simply by virtue of it using newer (and thus more efficient) tech. But taking the pad into account they'll probably not be able to undercut them significantly before their EOL.

QaaQer · Nov 21, 2012

Durante said:
They could probably get the cost of the system itself below PS360 level actually, simply by virtue of it using newer (and thus more efficient) tech. But taking the pad into account they'll probably not be able to undercut them significantly before their EOL.

You're probably right. And the PS3 has to have a hard drive, which hurts Sony's ability for price reductions. And MS pays for the DVD licensing fees as well as dolby etc. Still, I don't see the wii u being less than $199 for at least a few years.

That rumour of an xbox set-top box might also throw a wrench in Nity's plans. I wonder if that will be able to run 360 type of games. 2013 is shaping up to be pretty interesting.

User Tron · Nov 21, 2012

Untalkative_Bunny said:
In retrospect, given the actual games that Nintendo has shown over the last few months, it is pretty obvious that the wii u's upper ceiling is definitely current gen.

Short and simple: No. We don't know that. We know some limitations but not the upper ceiling. Only time will tell. GPGPU may make a difference.

mrklaw · Nov 21, 2012

wsippel said:
Textures are pretty much a non issue. With 1GB RAM total, you only use a couple dozen MB textures per frame. Most bandwidth is used to access a limited amount of data many times per frame.

If you're standing still in a game, depending on your field of view, you can probably see a quarter of the environment around you at once. So you'd need enough memory transferred in that frame for a quarter of the immediate world around you. A couple of dozen would mean around 100MB for the entire surroundings textures. That seems low to me.

If main memory is 12GB/s, a game running at 60fps would be able to transfer a max of 200MB per frame. That actually sounds not too bad, assuming textures etc can be transferred once into edram and then out to the frame buffer without needing to be written back into main ram. If you can avoid that, then it could be 200MB of unique data (texture, models etc).

QaaQer · Nov 21, 2012

User Tron said:
Short and simple: No. We don't know that. We know some limitations but not the upper ceiling. Only time will tell. GPGPU may make a difference.

I'm not saying there wont be improvements, just that improvements post launch are usually incremental, not generational.

I guess it is possible that Nintendo has some strategy that requires the console's potential to remain untapped at launch, or maybe they're just incompetent?

I'm just assuming that Nintendoland is their showcase game, and that they put a lot of talent and resources into it. I'm happy to be proven wrong though.

AzaK · Nov 21, 2012

Sorry, instead of posting in the Wii U specs thread I probably should have posted it here but I chatted with BG briefly the other day and he had this to say regarding the RAM bandwidth. FWIW.

Going back as far as the first WUST, we talked about Nintendo possibly choosing DDR3 over GDDR5 due to latency. The memory clock isn't really surprising since it's not dramatically less than what Thraktor and I talked about in this exchange. http://67.227.255.239/forum/showthread.php?p=42579861#post42579861 I will say though that if Nintendo did stick with clock multiples (DSP originally listed at 120Mhz), the memory could very well be 720Mhz for all we know if they underclocked it. It wouldn't make sense to overclock a part when faster speeds are available to underclock. But what I found interesting is that ifixit.com (Step 12) has a teardown and theirs had Micron memory. Looking at the specs of the available choices I believe Nintendo chose latency (1.25ns @ CL = 11) over BW and at the same time were limited to a 64-bit bus because 32-bit wide DDR3 was not ready or available for production. Wii U's timing is unfortunate since Micron is taking the same memory module and sampiling a "TwinDie" doubling the density and BW so Wii U could have possibly had 4GB with twice the BW. All that said, I think some are giving too much weight/concern to the memory bandwidth. Nintendo has always been picky about balance and BW is not the only factor in memory speed. I decided to put forth the effort to look for/at the latency speeds. So based on the formula I found (and if I did it correctly) this is what we're looking at.

Wii U DDR3 - 13.75ns (based on 800Mhz)
Xbox 360 GDDR3 - 14.29ns (low end), 21.43ns (high end)
PS3 XDR - 35ns (taken from a PS3 wiki)
PS3 GDDR3 - 15.38ns or 16.92ns

I think there was a dev that talked about the latency for Wii U compared to the others so this should give some actual numbers to that. The reason there are multiple numbers for the GDDR3 is because the Samsung's data sheets gave multiple CAS latency options for the possible clock speed, so I calculated all of them since I didn't know which CL MS and Sony chose for their respective GDDR3 memories. There were three other possible outcomes for the 360, so I stuck with the high and low. Going back to Nintendo's choice, they seem to have gone with the lowest latency using Micron's info.

800Mhz - 13.75ns
900Mhz - 14.44ns
933Mhz - 13.93ns
1000Mhz - 14ns

So I didn't do this to justify Nintendo's decision since as you know I've said in the past that Wii U comes short of what I think a next-gen console (from a power perspective) should look like. As with other speculation this was to look at Nintendo's thinking.

Trevelyan9999 · Nov 22, 2012

So his point was that the bandwidth was not going to be a big deal afterall since latency was the goal for Nintendo? I'd love to hear more on this....

Ryoku · Nov 22, 2012

Trevelyan9999 said:
So his point was that the bandwidth was not going to be a big deal afterall since latency was the goal for Nintendo? I'd love to hear more on this....

We will see. Obviously, the EDRAM will play a part in this, but until we have concrete numbers and specs, the RAM amount and bandwidth are only just pieces of the puzzle.

AzaK · Nov 22, 2012

Trevelyan9999 said:
So his point was that the bandwidth was not going to be a big deal afterall since latency was the goal for Nintendo? I'd love to hear more on this....

You're out of luck as BG has essentially left NeoGAF. If I look at that latency list he gave for the consoles, there doesn't look like a huge difference between Wii U and 360 best case. Not sure if that small number is huge in the scheme of things and I'm not sure if best case happens often or not on 360.

Oblivion · Nov 22, 2012

A thousand apologies, but I haven't been on the intranets all day. Has there been any other news regarding the specs released today?

NBtoaster · Nov 22, 2012

AzaK said:
You're out of luck as BG has essentially left NeoGAF. If I look at that latency list he gave for the consoles, there doesn't look like a huge difference between Wii U and 360 best case. Not sure if that small number is huge in the scheme of things and I'm not sure if best case happens often or not on 360.

He has time to write up the email and look up all those RAM and manufacturer stats, don't see why he wouldn't just post here seeing as you just passed it on anyway.

lostinblue · Nov 22, 2012

They explained he is busy and trying to not loose as much time as before on boards (if any at all).

He probably just doesn't want to be involved with having to answer people's replies to him. It's a very hard thing to do when you're writing and collaborating on a discussion.

This is just a console, no one would take refuge in the mountains 'cause of it. Except perhaps the dude's that went with this RAM/40W max consumption design back at Nintendo.

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