I never said its easy to predict them, all I said was that's it's very easy to interpret their marketing strategy and from that you can form various hypothesis about what they would do in implementing that strategy (that's the hard part).
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Wii U Speculation Thread 2: Can't take anymore of this!!!
- Thread starter ClovingWestbrook
- Start date
- Status
I never said its easy to predict them, all I said was that's it's very easy to interpret their marketing strategy and from that you can form various hypothesis about what they would do in implementing that strategy (that's the hard part).
http://uk.ign.com/articles/2012/01/24/xbox-720-will-be-six-times-as-powerful-as-current-gen
"Following initial reports from tech blogs Fudzilla and SemiAccurate, our sources have confirmed that mass production of the system's GPU will indeed begin by the end of 2012 but will not, however, be based on AMD's 7000 series Southern Islands GPU. Instead, the processor will be derived from the 6000 series, which was introduced last year. More specifically, it will be akin to the Radeon HD 6670"
"In real terms, the Xbox 720's raw graphics processing power is expected to be six times that of the Xbox 360 and will yield 20-percent greater performance than Nintendo's forthcoming console, the Wii U."
Some very important things pop out here:
1. IGN confirmed the story independently from the original rumor, which makes it much more likely.
2. The GPU isn't 6 times the processing power of the 360 if it's a HD6670, it would have to be a very customized part, because 6x the 360 is 1.4Tflops, not the 768 Gflops from the HD6670, so I am guessing 6 times is an overall performance increase. (faster cpu/ram/gpu)
3. If it is a custom part based on HD6670 and is 20% faster than Wii U, that puts the performance of the Wii U close to a HD6570...
If you stop thinking about Gflops and start thinking about fill rates and other aspects, it would be much easier to hit that 6times statement.
I think no matter where Wii U actually ends up, the entire industry is going to be surprised where x720 ends up, and that to me, is all that really matters, Wii U and x720 being closely comparable (inside x2) it won't matter where the PS4 sits, even if it goes insane with 1200% faster than PS3, it won't mean anything to 3rd parties, they will just up port their games to the system, the largest console(s) base directs development.
BTW I am not saying Wii U will use a turks GPU, it will just perform around the level of an HD6570 which I believe is what trinity is targeted around (so my earliest estimates are possibly right)
Arkam if you are reading all this mayhem maybe you should try to get a better idea of what Wii U actually has inside of it, if you aren't a software developer it's easy to mistake the sort of power you have there, I am starting to believe that you simply heard some basic specs and thought that the next gen would crush it, then maybe heard something like Xenos has more memory bandwidth (256bit vs 128bit) and targeted that to make your statement true.
I think Nintendo has a lot to reclaim this next generation when it comes to tech, Gamecube was a marvel, so much so that its tech stayed with Nintendo for 11 years.
It was risky, and I doubt it could ever happen again, but Wii U won't be a Wii.
"Following initial reports from tech blogs Fudzilla and SemiAccurate, our sources have confirmed that mass production of the system's GPU will indeed begin by the end of 2012 but will not, however, be based on AMD's 7000 series Southern Islands GPU. Instead, the processor will be derived from the 6000 series, which was introduced last year. More specifically, it will be akin to the Radeon HD 6670"
"In real terms, the Xbox 720's raw graphics processing power is expected to be six times that of the Xbox 360 and will yield 20-percent greater performance than Nintendo's forthcoming console, the Wii U."
Some very important things pop out here:
1. IGN confirmed the story independently from the original rumor, which makes it much more likely.
2. The GPU isn't 6 times the processing power of the 360 if it's a HD6670, it would have to be a very customized part, because 6x the 360 is 1.4Tflops, not the 768 Gflops from the HD6670, so I am guessing 6 times is an overall performance increase. (faster cpu/ram/gpu)
3. If it is a custom part based on HD6670 and is 20% faster than Wii U, that puts the performance of the Wii U close to a HD6570...
If you stop thinking about Gflops and start thinking about fill rates and other aspects, it would be much easier to hit that 6times statement.
I think no matter where Wii U actually ends up, the entire industry is going to be surprised where x720 ends up, and that to me, is all that really matters, Wii U and x720 being closely comparable (inside x2) it won't matter where the PS4 sits, even if it goes insane with 1200% faster than PS3, it won't mean anything to 3rd parties, they will just up port their games to the system, the largest console(s) base directs development.
BTW I am not saying Wii U will use a turks GPU, it will just perform around the level of an HD6570 which I believe is what trinity is targeted around (so my earliest estimates are possibly right)
Arkam if you are reading all this mayhem maybe you should try to get a better idea of what Wii U actually has inside of it, if you aren't a software developer it's easy to mistake the sort of power you have there, I am starting to believe that you simply heard some basic specs and thought that the next gen would crush it, then maybe heard something like Xenos has more memory bandwidth (256bit vs 128bit) and targeted that to make your statement true.
I think Nintendo has a lot to reclaim this next generation when it comes to tech, Gamecube was a marvel, so much so that its tech stayed with Nintendo for 11 years.
It was risky, and I doubt it could ever happen again, but Wii U won't be a Wii.
This post revealed my biases to myself. I instantly believed you more than Arkam.
I guess the fact that the rest of GAF ignored you shows they really don't have a double standard.
I'm a horrible human being.
IGN better be right.
All x720 rumors and Wii U rumors (minus Arkam's) point to IGN's assessment... Wii U needs to be between "2.5x"-"5x" more powerful, considering the bird demo on early dev kits, the way the bird interacted with the snow, and the extra Ram, not to mention the modern shading units (lighting) There is nothing that even really hints at a weak box.
At least there is a good chance we will get new info in 23hours.
StreetsAhead
Member
The snow falls off the feathers! It falls off!!
pieatorium
Member
Hmm.
Hopefully we get something to settle this, E3 feels so long away.
Fjolle
Member
This is nintendo. You will never get any specs.
pieatorium
Member
Right but if we see actual games running on actual machines we should get at least some closure.
Fjolle
Member
People will probably then blame the poor graphics on the fact that Nintendo never has coded for HD before
That was IGN, Fudzilla made the rumor about the 720 being 6times as powerful (GPU wise, it won't be if the rumor is to be believed, the GPU is about 3x faster than Xenos processing wise)
x720 is going to be a lot weaker than the majority of the gaming industry thought last e3, all the reliable sources say it isn't going to be the jump 360 was, and 6x the 360 is about half what people expected.
Wii U won't have a large difference in quality at most we are looking at graphics quality "set to high vs ultra" for the other consoles.
I haven't seen any notable rumor that puts it below 360, with the ram alone, you can expect a noticeable improvement over current gen. After seeing the bird demo, I feel like it is impossible that arkam's rumor could have merit, and is likely just a misunderstanding he has with the box or the 2nd hand information he acquired.
pieatorium
Member
Who? which rumours are reliable and which are not?
Most of the current crop of console games are set to "low" so I have trouble picturing this.
He didn't say it was outright weaker than the 360 and confirmed more ram, once again looks like you are choosing which rumours are reliable. I wish people would stop using that bird demo as some kind of proof of anything other than that tech demo exists.
Gianni Merryman
Member
For the sake of precision I recall in the original quote he actually said something much different, along the liines of "WiiU at launch won't be as cheap as Wii is now".
OrangeGrayBlue
Member
It was running on a Wii U. It has more value than any of the nonsense in this thread.
Lord Ghirahim
Member
Wii U and Durango? ;//
The best lesson a Nintendo fan can learn is to be a gamer first buy other hardware or invest in decent PCs so you wont miss out on great 3rd Party games. Because Nintendo rides the "special" bus when it comes to hardware
Well, if I could have my Zelda, Metroid etc. with up-to-date graphics on PC I wouldn't care less about Nintendos consoles. That's the problem here, Zelda and Metroid, aren't casual games like Wii Sports, they need the graphics.
I certainly don't want to play another outdated looking Zelda game ever again.
not quite. the ps3 does have xdr ram connected at full processor speed
pieatorium
Member
It was running on something almost 12 months old by now, how similar that is to a final WiiU we will probably never know.
Duallusion
Member
Since WiiU is so NDA'd to hell and back, do MS and Sony know what are its specs? And if so, how do they go about getting this information? Do they employ some super spy-ninjas or is it just a mundane matter of Mattrick picking up the phone and calling Rein or whoever?
When a rumor from one source is collaborated by another (6x 360 rumor) and given to us from 2 independent sources, that should count as a reliable source, while xbox magazine rumors should probably be looked at with a bit more skepticism.
I was using High and Ultra as a comparative between those two systems, since consoles have no such things as "low" settings, I find your knowledge on the subject dubious.
A tech demo running on the show floor, inside a Wii U prototype unit, on early dev kits, is a pretty good judge of what is possible on a final unit, especially if the final units got a "nice bump" in power.
ShockingAlberto
Member
Probably.
You'd be surprised how often it's the latter just disguised as "We want to make sure your game can run on anything, how comparable is our hardware to the competition?"
Duallusion
Member
mugurumakensei
Member
actually, in one of his earlier posts, he says its weaker in everything but ram amount. He also said the ram is slower than 360/PS3, and his company struggles to match 360 without sacrifices.
I love this post and shrod's specs:
CPU: tri-core at 2.916 GHz
GPU: 480 SPUs at 486 MHz (final kit would have a bump in at least the clock, but SPU numbers might increase as well)
RAM: 1 GB+
This points to a lot of people (including my early estimates of a Trinity GPU)
IGN's rumor actually fits perfectly with everything else we've heard, just look at the GPU that x720 is targeting, it's a HD6670, 768Gflops, 480 SPU...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4278/amds-radeon-hd-6670-radeon-hd-6570
Wii U's GPU would be comparable to a HD6570, it's ~20% slower than the HD6670, if it was underclocked below 500mhz in the early dev kits, it would of been probably around ~500Gflops (624Gflops at stock speeds)... If Wii U based their GPU around Trinity as many people assumed, it would make a ton of sense that we get these numbers, and we see IGN's confirmation of Fudzilla's rumor become true.
Basically 6x is all bs, we all know that 6x means nothing, it's arbitrary and has no real way to measure directly lol.
AceBandage
Banned
Only one rumor is saying that (and it was started in this thread).
And it would cost like $150.
THe first Nintendo HD console with the interesting Utablet at 150 could be mine at lauch if they release also Pikmin3 alongside it AH AH AH
Did he though? He said it had more RAM, but then he said his dev kit has 1GB, which wouldn't point to more ram as dev kits usually have twice as much RAM as the standard console (360 dev kits have 1GB). For instance lherre said his dev kit had 2GB of ram and that Nintendo were aiming for 3GB (which points to 1GB currently for the standard console with the aim of 1.5GB).
This is yet another inconsistency in Arkams claims. Saying more RAM but giving a number which suggests the same RAM as 360..
AceBandage
Banned
So, again.
He's either:
A. Trolling
or
B. Being fed a sack of lies/half truths and then spreading them here.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
I don't believe he said the devkits specifically had 1GB of RAM. He said the system had 1GB, along with a tri-core out of order CPU.
But according to iherre it has more than 1GB...
I couldn't agree with you more. I think the 3DS is the perfect indication of Nintendo's current strategy. The only things Nintendo had to rectify with the 3DS were it's price and the game library. So long as they launch Wii U with the right price and launch lineup, the plan you've outlined above should work out incredibly well for them.
His information was pieced together. I think it's safe to assume that we can't really use his gauge, and if the Fudzilla rumor confirmed by IGN's sources are true, then it won't matter either way, because that rumor said that the x720 is going to have a GPU based on the HD6670, which is a far cry from 6x Xenos in pure processing power. That is why I love those multiplier numbers, they don't mean anything yet become the most important piece of information given.
IGN's rumor actually aligns perfectly with those x2 rumors, which reminds me of 100 pages back or so when we were all saying 2x=5x... a 480spu is about twice as many as you can compare from the Xenos, yet it ends up 5x as powerful if you consider the entire package (fill rates, cpu being OoOe, much more ram, and a larger edram on the GPU.
A 6670 and a 6570 fit the x720 and Wii U console IGN & earlier rumors perfectly.
Also who really cares how much more powerful these two consoles will be as long as they are close to each other in performance, that is all that will ever matter for next gen. Devs aren't going to double their dev teams/time to push GRAFFIX this next gen just for the lawls.
IGN's rumor actually aligns perfectly with those x2 rumors, which reminds me of 100 pages back or so when we were all saying 2x=5x... a 480spu is about twice as many as you can compare from the Xenos, yet it ends up 5x as powerful if you consider the entire package (fill rates, cpu being OoOe, much more ram, and a larger edram on the GPU.
A 6670 and a 6570 fit the x720 and Wii U console IGN & earlier rumors perfectly.
Also who really cares how much more powerful these two consoles will be as long as they are close to each other in performance, that is all that will ever matter for next gen. Devs aren't going to double their dev teams/time to push GRAFFIX this next gen just for the lawls.
It doesn't add up.
Wii was more powerful (yet less featured) than the xbox. Gamecube was not far behind. Both had controller ports, memory slots, large discdrives. Now we have the WiiU, that does not have controller ports, has a smaller discdrive, and has nearly as much practical case volume as a GCN and double that of the Wii, yet Nintendo somehow forgot along the way how to put powerful hardware in a small case? This generation, they need more case volume for less power than the actual previous generation?
I can't imagine WiiU being weaker compared to PS360 than Wii was compared to the xbox, just by looking at its size. I know this is not a good analogy, and maybe my brain just can't cope, but in a time where laptops cost 500 bucks, have an i5 inside, large screen, battery, HDD and are no (or not much) larger than a WiiU, running games the 360 can't handle as well while running on a bloated OS, and all the while making a profit on the actual hardware... i just can't see how it's possible for the WiiU to be less or merely as powerful as a 360.
Wii was more powerful (yet less featured) than the xbox. Gamecube was not far behind. Both had controller ports, memory slots, large discdrives. Now we have the WiiU, that does not have controller ports, has a smaller discdrive, and has nearly as much practical case volume as a GCN and double that of the Wii, yet Nintendo somehow forgot along the way how to put powerful hardware in a small case? This generation, they need more case volume for less power than the actual previous generation?
I can't imagine WiiU being weaker compared to PS360 than Wii was compared to the xbox, just by looking at its size. I know this is not a good analogy, and maybe my brain just can't cope, but in a time where laptops cost 500 bucks, have an i5 inside, large screen, battery, HDD and are no (or not much) larger than a WiiU, running games the 360 can't handle as well while running on a bloated OS, and all the while making a profit on the actual hardware... i just can't see how it's possible for the WiiU to be less or merely as powerful as a 360.
DragonKnight
Member
Welp. I knew it was all too good to be true. Every nintendo console post snes has had a caveat and apparently this one is no different. If arkams' information is indeed true then consider me very disappointed. I very cautiously await E3.
It wasn't until 2009 that Microsoft released devkits with 1GB of RAM. It wouldn't be unheard of for prototype devkits to have the same amount of RAM as the final system.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
He said the devkits had more than 1GB. I don't recall him saying the final system has more.
Indeed. I suspect he is mistaken then, or it is a devkit issue.
That's fine apart from the fact that we already know the WiiU dev kit had 2GB of ram quite some time ago (with Nintendo aiming for more in future) through Lherre's posts.
EDIT: Actually looking back at his posts he seems to be saying that the dev kits have more than 2GB. He mentions 2GB as the lower range of what Nintendo said they would put in the dev kits but says the kit he has uses the higher amount of that range, so more than 2GB (3GB probably?). I may be misunderstanding him, but that seems to be what he's saying:
Lherre said: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
Eh, if games on Wii U look like the best games on current gen HD twins, but with better fps, AI, more enemies onscreen, etc. - I'd be fine with that.
I play a lot of retro games too, and grew up playing games. I distinctly remember having fun with them without them having incredibly real detailed graphics.
For me anyway, today's (best level of) graphics are good enough. Just make everything buttery smooth, make the games fun, and I'm in.
I think a part of me would be disappointed in it not being OMG NEXT GEN, but then I'd play the new metroid and zelda. All would be well again. =)
I play a lot of retro games too, and grew up playing games. I distinctly remember having fun with them without them having incredibly real detailed graphics.
For me anyway, today's (best level of) graphics are good enough. Just make everything buttery smooth, make the games fun, and I'm in.
I think a part of me would be disappointed in it not being OMG NEXT GEN, but then I'd play the new metroid and zelda. All would be well again. =)
tkscz
Member
Ok I don't get it. ONE guys makes ONE post and all of GAF believes him? You guys must be joking. I mean, how do we believe him? He could be just some troll who has been watching the thread until he got accepted to GAF. Then made this post in order to see how many would believe him. I mean, he said it had modern hardware in it that was weaker than what was in the 360. Any GPU from AMD 4000 series and up, can not be weaker than an early 2000 series. And even if it's tri-core, out-of-order pretty much puts it above the 360 right there. It makes little sense to me how (s)he's more believable than IGN.
IceDoesntHelp
Banned
So.. are we back to this?
Thanks Arkam, THANK YOU!
(Can't believe that Nintendo will release a console which is less powerful than the 360)
I still can't believe how people aren't fully reading into it.
1. Either he has been fed false information
2. He's working with an older dev kit (which Arkam has stated himself)
How about you wait for confirmation on how powerful it will be, before jumping to conclusions.
tkscz
Member
he was joking, that was kind of obvious.
frankie_baby
Member
I still think he's just the tea boy
IceDoesntHelp
Banned
Was it? I honestly couldn't tell. Sorry for not being able to tell what's sarcasm over the internet
I thought writing "Duuuuuurango" and the obvious fake screens would make it obvious.
For the record, I don't believe Arkam.
- Status