While I disagree with almost every single point you mentioned, this one in particular is worth commenting on. Because we don't know shit at this point. We know very little about Wii U and nothing about the other systems. That whole thing is just an assumption with very little to back anything up. In fact, given Microsoft's recent focus on Kinect and the casual audience in general, it's not exactly outlandish to assume their next system would be a cheap, low power system as well. And Sony can't really afford to burn another few billion dollars on a cutting edge console - not to mention the law of thermodynamics and basic economy will most likely crush many fanboy dreams, anyway. And assuming there's any truth to the recent Origin/ Steam rumors, and taking older statements by Gabe Newell into account, we might get a rather competent and comprehensive online system on Nintendo's next console. Or maybe not. We'll see.TheMagician said:
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Wii U Speculation Thread of Brains Beware: Wii U Re-Unveiling At E3 2012
- Thread starter bgassassin
- Start date
- Status
lherre said:
So basically, we can safe guess this much at current:
CPU
IBM Power7 TriCore Processor with "large" eDRAM pool. Comments from old sources linked to GAF (wsippel can help with this) stated these dev kits were working with a 3.6GHz Xenos part or something similar. Unknowns include clockspeeds, exact eDRAM amounts, and solid confirmation on whether or not the cores will increase (previous configurations of this chip have core arrangements in multiples of 2, potential increases for the chip to have 4 cores at final specs) or the eDRAM will be substituted for something with equal function from another source.
RAM
1GB - 1.5GB. Unknowns: Type (GDDR3/5... XDR/2 lol), Clocks, Setup (discrete memory pools versus unified memory pool), and chances of Nintendo pulling a Nintendo and throwing some RAM on that bitch to make it a rounded 2GB. (Logically, potential for this increases due to Nextbox coming around the same timeframe if rumor holds and Nintendo aiming more for parity with upcoming systems. This is Nintendo however...)
GPU
AMD RV700 (specifically RV770) Baseline; Mentioned numerous times intially to be a Radeon HD4830 (640SPU part) potentially used to emulate the baseline featureset of the final silicon. Was the cause for initial overheating and crashing/freezing of alpha/beta/"I don't have an actual fuck what number model this one was" dev kits and the source for many "headlines" stating Wii U was facing issues in development.
Unknowns: Tweaks to the baseline that make it more suitable for console space (this also includes tweaks that may come from later series cards, a smaller fabrication process - 28nm or 40nm versus the 55nm that the OG 4830 was created upon), clocks, memory amount and type (should discrete memory pools be used)
General Pondering
- Chances are higher for a single unified memory pool that discrete pools due to both benefits on overall system performance and ease of development with. Chances also strengthened due to earlier reports of the dev kits being Xbox360 like to facilitate fast and optimal development with an easy architecture to use and understand from the get go.
- GDDR3 vs. GDDR5 boils down to issues with memory latency versus efficiency. Nintendo likes their parts to work for a given performance and depending on their priorities with regards to keeping the system efficient as a whole or allowing it to work with more, they can swing one way or another. Other issues that can be pondered regard heat generated by the two types of memory versus dissipation methods & bus sizes (128bit GDDR5 clocked at the same speed as 256bit GDDR3 yields the same result assuming similar clock speeds between the two).
- More Than Rumor: There was a smaller memory providing company being backed entirely by Nintendo's contract for their specific type of memory. Note that this might not be applicable to main type as the detective work shows the memory could be the 1T-SRAM Nintendo has been fond of from the Dolphin days but said RAM is STUPIDLY expensive for the purpose of main RAM in a system. (What function would it serve?)
Question(s):
- I take your word for it that at current Wii U doesn't have 2GB of memory in kits lherre, but just for the sake of keeping the mind active, have the kits been receiving increasing amounts of memory or modifications to the memory type in between revisions?
- There was a strong hint earlier in all the speculation at the system being a CPU/GPU on a chip/die (the exact specifics here elude me) in a vein similar to 360 Slim's revision of the 360's CPU/GPU and RAM. Is there anything now still hinting at a customized silicon foundation like this being the core of what makes Wii U tick?
I got bored and tried to make a easy to digest catch all detailing as much as I could understand on Wii U as I could for newbie's sake, mostly because of a lot of the stuff getting thrown around in the Xbox 3 threads. Some of the more knowledgeable members can take it and roll with it or point out where I'm wrong, but as I'm interested in seeing Wii U for what it is, I hope I'm not too far off with my post and thought processes.
Nintendo wants the AAA third-party games which are selling like hotcakes on the HD consoles. Sadly, they don't want the games which sell only a fraction of that amount (regardless of how good they might be).TheMagician said:
USB HDDs can do all those things. Don't worry.TheMagician said:
No doubt! That's a fact of life. Cheap SD development is finished. Most people own HDTVs now and the Wii looks awful on them.TheMagician said:
That may happen but it beats the current situation where most AAA third-party games are only released on the PS360. Nintendo wants at least a piece of that action.TheMagician said:
"Wii U" can work but I do hope Nintendo thinks of an even better name before release.TheMagician said:
I'll settle for black. All our HT gear is black. I don't want an HD console that sticks out like a sack of flour in our family room.TheMagician said:
D
Deleted member 74300
Unconfirmed Member
So any ideas on how much the games will cost yet? Guessing it's too early for that kind of info.
AzureJericho said:So basically, we can safe guess this much at current:
CPU
IBM Power7 TriCore Processor with "large" eDRAM pool. Comments from old sources linked to GAF (wsippel can help with this) stated these dev kits were working with a 3.6GHz Xenos part or something similar. Unknowns include clockspeeds, exact eDRAM amounts, and solid confirmation on whether or not the cores will increase (previous configurations of this chip have core arrangements in multiples of 2, potential increases for the chip to have 4 cores at final specs) or the eDRAM will be substituted for something with equal function from another source.
RAM
1GB - 1.5GB. Unknowns: Type (GDDR3/5... XDR/2 lol), Clocks, Setup (discrete memory pools versus unified memory pool), and chances of Nintendo pulling a Nintendo and throwing some RAM on that bitch to make it a rounded 2GB. (Logically, potential for this increases due to Nextbox coming around the same timeframe if rumor holds and Nintendo aiming more for parity with upcoming systems. This is Nintendo however...)
GPU
AMD RV700 (specifically RV770) Baseline; Mentioned numerous times intially to be a Radeon HD4830 (640SPU part) potentially used to emulate the baseline featureset of the final silicon. Was the cause for initial overheating and crashing/freezing of alpha/beta/"I don't have an actual fuck what number model this one was" dev kits and the source for many "headlines" stating Wii U was facing issues in development.
Unknowns: Tweaks to the baseline that make it more suitable for console space (this also includes tweaks that may come from later series cards, a smaller fabrication process - 28nm or 40nm versus the 55nm that the OG 4830 was created upon), clocks, memory amount and type (should discrete memory pools be used)
General Pondering
- Chances are higher for a single unified memory pool that discrete pools due to both benefits on overall system performance and ease of development with. Chances also strengthened due to earlier reports of the dev kits being Xbox360 like to facilitate fast and optimal development with an easy architecture to use and understand from the get go.
- GDDR3 vs. GDDR5 boils down to issues with memory latency versus efficiency. Nintendo likes their parts to work for a given performance and depending on their priorities with regards to keeping the system efficient as a whole or allowing it to work with more, they can swing one way or another. Other issues that can be pondered regard heat generated by the two types of memory versus dissipation methods & bus sizes (128bit GDDR5 clocked at the same speed as 256bit GDDR3 yields the same result assuming similar clock speeds between the two).
- More Than Rumor: There was a smaller memory providing company being backed entirely by Nintendo's contract for their specific type of memory. Note that this might not be applicable to main type as the detective work shows the memory could be the 1T-SRAM Nintendo has been fond of from the Dolphin days but said RAM is STUPIDLY expensive for the purpose of main RAM in a system. (What function would it serve?)
Question(s):
- I take your word for it that at current Wii U doesn't have 2GB of memory in kits lherre, but just for the sake of keeping the mind active, have the kits been receiving increasing amounts of memory or modifications to the memory type in between revisions?
- There was a strong hint earlier in all the speculation at the system being a CPU/GPU on a chip/die (the exact specifics here elude me) in a vein similar to 360 Slim's revision of the 360's CPU/GPU and RAM. Is there anything now still hinting at a customized silicon foundation like this being the core of what makes Wii U tick?
I got bored and tried to make a easy to digest catch all detailing as much as I could understand on Wii U as I could for newbie's sake, mostly because of a lot of the stuff getting thrown around in the Xbox 3 threads. Some of the more knowledgeable members can take it and roll with it or point out where I'm wrong, but as I'm interested in seeing Wii U for what it is, I hope I'm not too far off with my post and thought processes.
I can't speak about all the questions/details here but devkits have double memory amount than future retail hardware (is "usual" with the devkits because they need extra memory for debug purposes), the thing with this is that like memory amount is in an open range now (not closed) they have the "better" choice right now (I mean in the range the higher amount in the devkits). For example, if Wii U memory range is 4-5 gb, the kits have 10 gb instead 8 gb. So as I said before that memory can't be less than 1 gb, the kits have at least 2 gb
(is higher of course because this is the lower value of the range).As far as I now, the amount of edram is specifically described in the video-graphics chapter not in the cpu one (there only speaks about L2 cache amounts for each core, is not the same for each one to be precise).
No specifics about any other types of memory (except for storage purposes).
But I have to check the latest info, not easy right now to get it (
), so take this as guiidance values (some of them won't change as edram, L2 cache or very unlikely to change, but others can change like the system ram that has to be set).ReyVGM said:
Sony makes their projects considering being market leader model, they take big hits during initial phases and then they recoup by dominating the market, the problem is they haven't system that are market leaders anymore, PS3 is not market leader, and PSP is not leader either. Vita now will take hits for every unit sold, if PS4 seek the same patern, and considering that the market leader model is not working for them anymore, I see a bleak future for the SCE division.
"At least" 2GB in the dev kits? That's a good sign if true.
I don't want Sony going anywhere. The more competition in the videogame field, the better. Hell I wish Sega would come back into the fray. Too many studios have shuttered this gen, so it is rather important for everyone to "live within their means".
TunaLover said:
I don't want Sony going anywhere. The more competition in the videogame field, the better. Hell I wish Sega would come back into the fray. Too many studios have shuttered this gen, so it is rather important for everyone to "live within their means".
Unless the L2 cache actually is eDRAM, it's probably save to assume that current devkits simply don't have final CPUs yet.lherre said:But I have to check the latest info, not easy right now to get it (
And regarding your previous post, I'm really not sure what to expect from Sony and especially Microsoft. But even if there's any truth to the Xbox rumors, they don't exactly tell us all that much. With the rumored specs, it could be extremely close to Wii U, or vastly more powerful. The number of cores for example tells us absolutely nothing if we don't know what cores both companies use. The amount of RAM also tells us very little without knowing stuff like OS overhead, or whether or not there's caching or swapping, or if or how compression or procedural generation might come into play.
Also, I wouldn't put it past Nintendo to do some odd stuff on the GPU side as well, like having the TMUs replaced with next generation TEV units or something. There are a few graphics hardware gurus at Nintendo Technology Development, mostly former SGI/ ArtX staff, and Nintendo hired a few more in recent years.
EDIT: We also shouldn't forget the extremely weird 3DS devkit and SDK situation. Some developers had hardware with an autostereoscopic screen, but they didn't notice until Nintendo pushed out a firmware update that enabled the feature. Developers had no access to the second core until now, the SDK wasn't even optimized for 3D grahics processing until very recently, and the online part wasn't even remotely done until months after launch, and it probably still isn't. With Nintendo, you really never know.
ShockingAlberto
Member
For all the people saying the Wii U can't succeed because of Xenoblade and the Last Story not coming out, that means it should do totally fine in Japan and Europe, right?
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Technically, we know there will be edram inside, as IBM were so kind to tell us about it. Whether it will be for the gpu, for the cpu, or for both - we don't know. It does make sense that if it's a single edram pool, it will be gpu-local. We know it will be 'a lot' for the context of a console, thanks again to IBM and their excellent edram tech.AzureJericho said:
Don't omit DDR3, as it's still a good price/performance option (if the gpu has its own edram pool, anyway).
BTW, fun fact and food for thought (via BC conjectures): Wii cannot execute code from its GDDR3 pool - too high a latency (yes, that including the I-cache).
There'll probably be a considerable eDRAM pool as MEM1 replacement, yes. Also, regarding BC, do you consider an approach like the one I've described, a modern GPU with blown up TEVs instead of TMUs, possible - or likely? As far as I understand the whole thing, TEVs are basically TMUs on acid, so that might actually be a good idea not only for BC purposes I guess?blu said:
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Tri-core IBM PowerPC. Sure is sounding like a souped up Xbox 360.
Can it run Halo? Probably only in SD.
Nintendo is d00med.
Can it run Halo? Probably only in SD.
Nintendo is d00med.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
BC in terms of TEV featureset is trivially doable via shaders*. What is not so trivial, is TEVs performance characteristics. Basically, TEV's shtick was doing EMBM like nobody's business (translation: dependent texture reads), thanks to its enormous texture cache (the 1MB of 1t-stam of texbuffer). It may come as a surprise, but hw generations later, gpus still would not be quite as good at dependent texture reads as TEV was. Just because 1MB of ultra-fast texcache was still *a lot* many moons down the path of technology. So if anything will be tricky for BC on the WiiU, it will be the rate at which TEV could produce dependent texture reads (which is: 1 dependent fetch per two clocks or thereabout, iirc).wsippel said:
* Feature-wise, TEV is like a proto-shader circa PS1.1 - 1.4. It has quite a few of the characteristics of those early pixel shader architectures, but is not quite as flexible in data jiggling. At the same time, it could run more shader ops (as in: longer shaders) than some of those early pixel shader implementations. Actually, TEVs flexibility was much more constrained by the lack of vertex shaders in Flipper, than by TEV's own shortcomings.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, but it isn't really answering my question.blu said:
I know that the ArtX design is hard to emulate. It was pretty damn clever at its time, which comes at no surprise if you look at the people behind it (roughly half of which became big shots at AMD, while the other half is now at Nintendo Technology Development). I wonder if it would make sense to keep the tech around and combine it with standard modern shader units. Does that sound worthwhile?
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
BurntPork said:
It's hard to say how much RAM will be there, but it won't make a huge difference. Taking lherre and Chopper's comments into account, along with the bits and pieces devs have slipped and yes, it is far more probable than not (if not set in stone) that the Wii U will be notably underpowered compared to the next Xbox and PlayStation.
How underpowered? How close to a Wii situation? Impossible to say. But noticeably underpowered by comparison, enough for people to comment on the matter.
I figure anybody at this point who believes the gap wont be all that large is either misinformed or optimistic almost to the point of delusion.
Yeah. It really hurts, but I guess it's time to accept the fact that Nintendo will always be a generation behind from this point on.EatChildren said:
For their sake, they better fix their marketing issues ASAP if they're committing to the "casual" audience, especially if they plan to sell this for $300.
I think that I'm going to hold off on Wii U for a year or two unless something about the launch really impresses me, or it launches at $250 or less. I'm not paying $250 for another current-gen system unless I'm really impressed.
Part of me wishes that Iwata never became CEO...
bgassassin
Member
EatChildren said:
Only if it's in-order.
Unless, of course, the next Xbox isn't all that powerful either. Hard to tell, but not exactly unthinkable. I believe a lot of people, including developers, were looking at high end PCs and were expecting at least that from Microsoft and Sony. They most likely won't get it.EatChildren said:
Huh? I really don't see how you come to that conclusion based on what's out there. I've seen nothing that suggests that the next Xbox will be more than more than double as powerful as the WiiU. That not even close to what Wii situation is.EatChildren said:
It seems that the rumors about the next Xbox came in so much lower than what was expected that people are now retroactively downgrading everything we heard about WiiU to match their own expectations.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Sorry, I should've been less verbose and more to-the-point. The gist of the technology is some ultra low-latency dependent texture reads. If WiiU's gpu could somehow achieve this rate of this kind of op (and Wii's TEV could do 8 of those in a single pass; for reference, there are PS2.0b parts unable to do more than that), regardless how (via fat caches, or via duplicating the same ol 1MB 1t-sram pool), TEV is trivially emulatable.wsippel said:Thanks for the detailed explanation, but it isn't really answering my question.
I know that the ArtX design is hard to emulate. It was pretty damn clever at its time, which comes at no surprise if you look at the people behind it (roughly half of which became big shots at AMD, while the other half is now at Nintendo Technology Development). I wonder if it would make sense to keep the tech around and combine it with standard modern shader units. Does that sound worthwhile?
In essence, TEV is emulatable view the right amount of very fast memory in the right place of a contemporary GPU ; )
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Gaborn said:
Assumption, among other things.
And there's been no 'downgrading' of my own expectations, given I've long held the belief the Wii U would be of notably less power than the next Xbox and PlayStation. I chose to read between the lines, ignoring the hyperbole and projected opinions of the people sprouting these rumours. It's easy for a developer/publisher/source to say "The Wii U sucks its terrible its underpowered". I don't care if that's how they feel. That isn't the interesting point. The interesting point is that they imply it is underpowered, by comparison. By how much, I do not know, but it's still there.
Point me to the reliable sources, rumours and leaks implying the Wii U isn't underpowered and I'll change my song. Until then there is a very real case to lean towards an underpowered system versus a comparatively powered system. Not necessarily Wii level, but still underpowered. It's not a matter of having irrefutable evidence, or even an abundance of leaks or sources. It's simply, from where I'm standing, the most logical position with the given information.
When we learn more that may change. Until then I don't see any reason to.
Couldn't Nintendo most easily achieve BC by taking Hollywood, Flipper and the 1T-SRAM, slap it all together onto a single 45 nm chip and call it a day? It would mean 100% BC and no compatibility restricions ftor the rest of the design. They could even use it to run networking stuff or Upad programs and communication.
Delusion. Everything suggests that it'll be 5-6x more powerful than Wii U. MS is going for a full next gen leap of 10-12x the current gen, and Nintendo's sticking to 1.5-2x, just like they did with Wii and 3DS. The Nintendo that made the SNES, the N64, and the GCN is dead and never coming back. The Microsoft that made the XBox and the XBox 360 isn't going anywhere. The fact that they're using 2 GPUs in the target specs means that the GPU will be more powerful than the GTX 580, which crushes Wii U's RV730.JJConrad said:
The more I think about it, the more I'm thinking of not buying it, since I'm no longer the target audience. If E3 doesn't impress me, it's over.
bgassassin
Member
DCKing said:
Unnecessary cost.
EatChildren said:
I guess this is my problem: Under powered compared to WHAT? Before the few days we really had no particular rumors about the PS4 or nextbox's power.
I assumed the Wii U might be under powered - because I expected a year or more gap between the Wii U and it's next competing console, same as most people. If we take the latest rumors about 2012 for the NextBox as more or less true or at least close to me that changes the equation.
I see the consoles as all being launched at a competitive price point, no more than $350. I also think MS and Sony are going to listen to the concerns that were ALL OVER the industry about the development costs not being able to go up as high as they did this generation again, as it was it drove a lot of developers out of business or to the brink and it COMPLETELY destroyed a lot of companies profits.
Even if there IS a gap assuming it will be anywhere NEAR substantial seems like a leap to me. I think a lot of people are going to be bitterly disappointing if they expect the same sort of difference we saw between say, the 360 and the Wii.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
A really simple example of what I'm getting at is what Chopper and lherre have said. I know Chopper well enough to know he is telling the truth. I know that if that is what his source told him, then that is what his source believes. If this is what the source believes, that the Wii U is underpowered in comparison to the other next generation systems, then either they made an error (for unexplainable reasons), or they're accurate. I have no reason to believe in anything other than the latter. This person's personal frustration with the specs? Their business. But the statement itself? It's either underpowered or it isn't. There's no inbetween.
lherre has been implying just as much with his (her?) posts, and I have no reason to doubt their information either. Again, no hyperbolic "THE WII U FUCKEN SUX" nonsense. No projected opinions clouding the raw data. Just the implied relativity of the specs compared to other systems, which also hints towards an underpowered (compartively) system.
Throw in a few snippets of comments people such as Pitchford "Wii U is a 'stop-gap' between this gen and the next", the Battlefield 3 developer's blog comments (yes, I'm aware there were inaccuracies in some of what he said), and the graphical quality of the garden and Zelda tech demoes at E3 2011 (yes, they were pretty, but that isn't the point), and I have no reason what so ever to believe the Wii U is a huge generation gap over the current generation Microsoft/Sony systems.
It's easy to pick apart small aspects of individual statements, or overly focus on projected opinions of the people stating them, but that's missing the point of what is being said, and that is the sources implying that the Wii U is underpowered compared to the next Xbox and PlayStation platforms. No, the specs of these are not known. Yes, rumours are pointing every which way. But we don't need concrete information on the latter to side with the 'Wii U underpowered' argument based on the current information.
And yeah Gaborn, it does come down that. Underpowered compared to WHAT exactly? No idea man, no idea. None of us (except the special, lucky few) do. Hopefully we know sooner rather than later so we can have a basis for comparison. But until then all I we can go off is the known knowns, as few and vague as they might be.
Ultimately the policy I adopt is this; though we know not the specs of any of the three next generation systems, if the Wii U is not underpowered compared to Sony and Microsoft's offerings, why are reliable people implying that it is?
lherre has been implying just as much with his (her?) posts, and I have no reason to doubt their information either. Again, no hyperbolic "THE WII U FUCKEN SUX" nonsense. No projected opinions clouding the raw data. Just the implied relativity of the specs compared to other systems, which also hints towards an underpowered (compartively) system.
Throw in a few snippets of comments people such as Pitchford "Wii U is a 'stop-gap' between this gen and the next", the Battlefield 3 developer's blog comments (yes, I'm aware there were inaccuracies in some of what he said), and the graphical quality of the garden and Zelda tech demoes at E3 2011 (yes, they were pretty, but that isn't the point), and I have no reason what so ever to believe the Wii U is a huge generation gap over the current generation Microsoft/Sony systems.
It's easy to pick apart small aspects of individual statements, or overly focus on projected opinions of the people stating them, but that's missing the point of what is being said, and that is the sources implying that the Wii U is underpowered compared to the next Xbox and PlayStation platforms. No, the specs of these are not known. Yes, rumours are pointing every which way. But we don't need concrete information on the latter to side with the 'Wii U underpowered' argument based on the current information.
And yeah Gaborn, it does come down that. Underpowered compared to WHAT exactly? No idea man, no idea. None of us (except the special, lucky few
) do. Hopefully we know sooner rather than later so we can have a basis for comparison. But until then all I we can go off is the known knowns, as few and vague as they might be.Ultimately the policy I adopt is this; though we know not the specs of any of the three next generation systems, if the Wii U is not underpowered compared to Sony and Microsoft's offerings, why are reliable people implying that it is?
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Notable by whom? Unprepared observers have serious trouble telling apart meshes of difference in complexities as large as 2x to 3x, and well below the saturation threshold of a few pixels per polygon (No, I did not just make that up). You do realize that all it takes for a 60fps game which does twice as much pixel shading work as WiiU's hard limits is to run at 30fps and voila - the WiiU can do it! And this is before using 'dirty tricks' as render targets downscaling and shit. And before the fabled effect of diminishing returns. Unless WiiU is entirely devoid of any tessellation capabilities (I don't see that happening, but let's assume for the sake of argument), I can guarantee you that there will be WiiU games screenshots that an observer will have no way in hell of telling which of the three HD platforms produced that, without receiving extra tips. More often then not, the times when things will be noticeable will be in side-by-side comparisons, and often not without the 'pixel counting' ordinary gamers are far from practicing.EatChildren said:
Here's an honest question to you: given the huge chasm in power between todays upper-end gaming PC and the current passing gen of consoles, how often do you see a game screenshot of not-immediately-telling resolution, and not look for the caption to see what platform that comes from?
Actually, in terms of the Wii situation, it's quite possible to say, an it's 'nowhere near the Wii situation; not even in the same ballpark'.
Come on now. I've seen you more level-headed before.
I'm hoping for 1.25GB of RAM. For a current-gen system, that would be fantastic.
EDIT: I'm hoping for/expecting
2.0GHz custom PowerPC tri-core CPU closely related to POWER7 @45nm
600MHz Redwood LE w/ 10MB eDRAM @40nm
1.25GB GDDR3 (but clocked higher than the 360) @28nm
Up to 4xMSAA support
That should be good enough for great looking Nintendo games. The CPU and GPU migh be slightly optimistic, though...
EDIT: I'm hoping for/expecting
2.0GHz custom PowerPC tri-core CPU closely related to POWER7 @45nm
600MHz Redwood LE w/ 10MB eDRAM @40nm
1.25GB GDDR3 (but clocked higher than the 360) @28nm
Up to 4xMSAA support
That should be good enough for great looking Nintendo games. The CPU and GPU migh be slightly optimistic, though...
Zoramon089
Banned
BurntPork said:
Current gen consoles don't have replaceable RAM
Forsaken82
Member
EatChildren said:
I think the general consensus is that it won't be as large as the Wii to 360 gap was, not that it won't be all that large, which I whole heartedly agree with.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
wsippel said:
Why would they specifically state the Wii U as 'underpowered' comparatively unless they had something to compare it to? They'd have to be literally making things up, or making brash assumptions. I have no reason to believe they're doing this.
Remember that the Wii U's specs won't be the only ones out there. Just because there hasn't been an official announcement doesn't mean developers and publishers don't have early information on the next Sony/Microsoft systems. Even if they don't have devkits, the target (or preliminary) specs will be out there. At this point at least the major publishers will have a fairly good idea on the hardware direction of all three systems.
blu said:
Frequently. But this is an unknown I'm not applying to next generation because I don't know the concrete specs of any of the three systems. I might have an opinion on how things are heading, but I'm not going to make wild assumptions on an unknown future.
blu said:
And I feel this way too, personally, but I don't have the info to make a truly objective statement one way or the other.
I regret nothing.
One thing people tend to forget, and something I have to bring up again and again like a broken record, is that PC hardware manufacturers cheated. When the last generation started, I had an insanely powerful and expensive workstation: Dual Opteron, 2GB registered low latency DDR with ECC, U160 SCSI subsystem with three harddisks, SCSI DVD-ROM, SCSI DVD recorder, Analog Devices Sharc DSP card, Quadro 3000G. Now that was bleeding edge at the time. Thing is: To build something comparable these days, you're looking at two to three times the power consumption. And while the case was a big tower back then and would still be a big tower today, that old ultra high end system ran perfectly cool and stable using three 8cm case fans.
I believe it, though, and I have little reason not to. I believe developers think it's underpowered compared to some baseless expectations. At least until someone who's in the know states otherwise.EatChildren said:
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
EatChildren said:
They are likely making assumptions, but not 'brash' ones. I mean, let's play hypotheticals for a second. You just get a devkit from Nintendo for their new console. It's a tri-core processor like the 360, although each core is a bit beefier. It has twice the total memory, but a 2x increase is not even close to what you normally get for a new generation. The GPU is more powerful, but as with the other components not really amazingly so.
That's basically the picture painted by a lot of the early WiiU rumors (not sure if there were updated rumors since then, there may be). If this was roughly true, based on the assumption that MS and Sony weren't going to pull a Wii and release a console only 50% more powerful than their current one, calling it underpowered is probably extremely justified. Even without this assumption, they may call it that simply to express their disappointment in next generation consoles.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
In order for that to be true we'd have to assume these statements were made while the sources were unaware of the specs of the next Microsoft/Sony systems. Given Chopper's were only from the last few weeks, I find that very hard to believe. Pubs/devs will know, at the very least, early specs for the PS4/XboxWhatever.
I think the Wii U is similar to the Wii in the sense that it is at its heart, just a beefed up last generation system. The difference now being that the Wii-U should have modern GPU features and a decent amount of RAM. So this is like an Xbox 360 on steroids as opposed to a "OMG NEW GEN YAY" system. I am ok with this.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Ah, ok, gotcha now ; )wsippel said:That's still not answering my question.
BC is one aspect. My question is whether to throw the whole TEV architecture out of the window, or improve and combine it with current GPU technology instead?
Well, I consider myself a guy with a taste for retro and obscure architectures (heck, i've written graphics code for things 99% of gaf has not even heard of ; ), but putting on my 'pragmatic hat', even I don't see much of a point in keeping the TEV, if it's properly emulatable. Why keep it around if the same effects can be carried not slower in shaders? There's the notion of maximizing the use of your transistors, and in by this metrics, TEV would be a waste of die space today. I mean, TEV was arguably the swan song of an entire gpu era, but that is gone now ; )
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