I would say it is wrong to term it "PC RAM" without at least doing the same for the 360 and PS3's RAM (bar the XDR RAM).
RAM does not have to be custom to be fast, but yes, the Wii U RAM is slow.
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Wii U has 2GB of DDR3 RAM, [Up: RAM 43% slower than 360/PS3 RAM]
- Thread starter Horse Armour
- Start date
I would say it is wrong to term it "PC RAM" without at least doing the same for the 360 and PS3's RAM (bar the XDR RAM).
RAM does not have to be custom to be fast, but yes, the Wii U RAM is slow.
I guess we all just underestimated how much the ps3 and 360 were able to be refined and reduce their costs to get them so low in price. The fact that they have been on the assembly line for so long has allowed them to become much cheaper. The Wii U is just now releasing and there seem to be alot of costs in terms of creating new assembly line technology as with any new console.
GraveRobberX
Platinum Trophy: Learned to Shit While Upright Again.
Save 100million, yet lose hundreds of millions, maybe even billions to licensing fees from 3rd party support that wains
At least with the Wii, it was Profit Day 1
Not with the WiiU, no clue before break even/profit timeline
The Wii was way less powerful than PS3 and 360 and it lasted more than 3 years.
Always-honest
Banned
I think this is e most likely scenario, unfortunately.
Yeah but i doubt this console will have the succes that the Wii had. Not even close would be my guess right now.
But how much potential money lost from third party ports that run badly or don't happen because of it?
That probably should have been your assumption all along. They won't compare well if they get them at all most likely.
DonMigs85
Member
Someone has to do a scanning electron microscope procedure on the chip itself.
There is not a chance wiiU will have similar success. The novelty of the wiimote is just not there with the wiiU gamepad.
GraveRobberX
Platinum Trophy: Learned to Shit While Upright Again.
Yeah on the back of Nintendo, @ profit, with different refreshes from accessories to keep that longevity going
Not this time with the WiiU
I found the gamepad + nintendoland to be a lot more fun with my family than the wiimote was.
NinjaBoiX
Member
So it has four times the RAM, but it's half as fast? (that's my basic interpretation anyway, I know it's not quite as simple as that)
I keep getting all excited for this thing, then I hear another really disappointing stat. I was hoping this was going to be basically a PS360, but without the troublesome RAM bottleneck. Hmm, possibly not I guess.
I keep getting all excited for this thing, then I hear another really disappointing stat. I was hoping this was going to be basically a PS360, but without the troublesome RAM bottleneck. Hmm, possibly not I guess.
Officerrob
Banned
What? Batman has serious frame rate issues
perfectchaos007
Member
But how were the 3rd party offerings after the first couple of years? Devs realized they could make a quick buck on the Wii to pay for the development cost of their flagship games on the 360 and PS3. That may happen again once 360 and PS3 games are no longer being made.
I'm sure my post might come of as "DUH!!!" but I don't see it mentioned in the past few pages or much in WiiU threads.
Did Nintendo just want to spend as little as possible for it to be 1080p media player for the family that has games for the family? Nintendo games that they know and love.
I mean the Wii was a success even though the graphics weren't no where near its competition.
but it was a media device that tapped out at 480p....now with more people having HDTVs and broadband internet access. Did they want to just go about it as WiiHD?
their media app setup looks nice, as well as how you can interact with it.
I don't know, it just seems weird how some seem so surprised by why Nintendo went with certain decisions.
Did Nintendo just want to spend as little as possible for it to be 1080p media player for the family that has games for the family? Nintendo games that they know and love.
I mean the Wii was a success even though the graphics weren't no where near its competition.
but it was a media device that tapped out at 480p....now with more people having HDTVs and broadband internet access. Did they want to just go about it as WiiHD?
their media app setup looks nice, as well as how you can interact with it.
I don't know, it just seems weird how some seem so surprised by why Nintendo went with certain decisions.
TheFLYINGManga_Ka
Member
That's too bad. Never played it. Just saw some reviews.
Looks like Nintendo knew head on that they won't get strong third-party support. They better support the hell out of the system then. I'm talking three main Zeldas and four Mario Galaxies.
That is nice but general public perception is nowhere near enthusiastic as it was for wii. Most people I talked to about the WiiU still seem to think it is a controller add on for the old Wii.
GraveRobberX
Platinum Trophy: Learned to Shit While Upright Again.
I seriously think they built it for 1st party devs and the things they asked for
Showed 3rd parties how to make the WiiU purr, had sessions to show what can be done
Most publishers/devs just said fuck it, port it, why try to go the extra mile for shit already released
Just have it ready to ship on launch day, disaster commences
No one QA'ed Epic Mickey 2?... are you fucking kidding me, that shit made Skyrim for the PS3 look like it was running 120FPS
It just has to be for the bucks, over a console cycle, ending up with tonnes more profit. I'm not a tech either, but why aim so, so low. 1/2 the BW of the current competition?!?! They must have been able to match it for next to nothing right?!
The Zelda part actually makes this more frustrating to me, as one of the things I've been wanting out of Zelda was to be more seamless like WW's overworld or Dark Souls (yeah yeah using that as an example is overdone, but it's an area more directly relevant), and judging by the texture loading in Batman and perhaps the sudden slowdowns in Epic Mickey 2 (though that at least HAS to be largely bad porting) it's definitely not going to work for that, and in general it doesn't seem to hurt to have faster RAM. I think it'd be easier to go "well ok" if they were nuts and had 4 or 8 GB of RAM, as the sheer bulk would easily make up for how slow it was, but at only four times the total of the 360 and PS3 and EFFECTIVELY double for games... I really do wonder if they shot themselves in the foot for the most miserly of reasons, unless as EatChildren noted there's something being missed here.
Fix'd that for you.
Unless you expect a massive economic upswing next year
The Wii was woefully underpowered and printed money. The 3DS is woefully underpowered and stomped the Vita into a hole.
My worry is that if the Wii-U 'wins' next time around, Sony & MS will give up on the power race too. Why bother making killer hardware if nobody cares?
TAJ
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Lawl
The current crop of consoles should have been taken out back and shot years ago.
I've been really down on Nintendo for a long time now, but if they'd been first with truly next-gen hardware, then I would have camped out for it.
Karsticles
Member
Every system has its audience.
NinjaBoiX
Member
But not every audience can sustain a system.
It does have 2 gigs of RAM, but only 1 gig is used for gaming. The rest is (for Allah knows what reason) dedicated to the OS.
GraveRobberX
Platinum Trophy: Learned to Shit While Upright Again.
Somehow this gen before the WiiU did pretty well, it's still doing pretty well
Not rip roaring it like the old days in the NPD, at least it still simmers with a boil here and there
It saves a full half of that for the OS. Not that the 360 and PS3 didn't set some aside for the OS, but they kept the footprints VERY small. If Nintendo had a similarly small footprint I don't think this would matter as much, I imagine a lot of developers could make up for it just by loading MUCH more "just in case".
Though I wouldn't be surprised if future updates optimized the OS and shrank the footprint, allowing more of the ram to be used by games.
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
Is everybody going to stop gaming, or what? No I've got it: you think they'll go iOS.
perfectchaos007
Member
If that's the case then I Nintendo better let 3rd parties in on the optimization method.
3rd party support is already going to be much better than the Wii's by default. Even when Sony and M$ have new consoles, dev costs will still double, and the Wii U will be the most feasible option for developers. Plus the Wii U has traditional controls (for the most part) which is what held the Wii back before
Not true at all.
Also, the more dev costs the more it seems feasible to make multi-platform. When PS4 and X720 hits, and developer make multiplatform for that one, wiiU users will have to deal with inferior port or... zero port.
It would be kind of interesting if the Wii U gained enough of a foothold that combined with rising costs it couldn't be ignored as a platform... and as a consequence we see the same situation with current HD consoles and gaming PCs: any good port from consoles to PCs easily hits 1080p/60 FPS, and the same or similar (MUCH nicer effects) happens frequently with the next Xbox/PS.
Or they'll play on a (relatively) low powered Sony or MS console. I didn't say they'd drop out, I said they'd stop the traditional power chase. Why build bleeding edge hardware at a high cost when skimping on specs incurs no penalty?
TAJ
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
It's always been 32MB on 360. PS3's is down to what, 50MB? Shit's crazy.
lol1giglol
Yeah, they're cheap and have huge libraries of games. Most of those games have been bargain-binned, too.
GraveRobberX
Platinum Trophy: Learned to Shit While Upright Again.
Well the 360 is lead most of the time or sometimes the PS3 is
Devs have to go from 360 to archaic PS3 structure, do they want too? Maybe (if there's money to be had)
Now add WiiU into the mix, do you really think devs will go out of their to fully optimize a 360 version, then do a PS3 version, then a WiiU version to have full parity
Most just ship it broken or playable, patches/updates do the rest of the legwork
How does the WiiU handle updates/patches?
I mean BLOPS II for my PS3 gave me a secondary install of a Texture Pack which was roughly 1.8GB
The best explaination I can think of is that they're keeping EVERYTHING open while you play games, so you could theoretically brows the shop or web lag-free on the touch screen while using the regular controls to play the game. But even then I question if it's really worth it, game performance DOES come first.
On the flipside: people watch Netflix on the TV while you play a game on the pad, pausing to address movie/episode changes or pauses.
Not quite. No analog triggers. As for 3rd party support, well I'll wait for the announcments.
No, it is pretty obvious unfortuneately that Nintendo went cheap, pathologically cheap. No optical out, no ethernet, no hdd, cheapest RAM on the market, cheap screen, cheap battery, cheap flash,...everything about this console is cheap and dirty. And that isn't even looking at the half baked OS.
This is a really poor console for 2012. And yes, you can still have fun with it and play mario, but don't delude yourself into thinking 3rd party support is going to be any better than wii. In fact, it will most likely be worse because no way this sells like the wii.
With this additional piece of information I really wonder how fast/if the CPU can access eDRAM. It could also explain some of the lower (than expected) resolution / no AA decisions -- developers need to do manual caching in the eDRAM to work around the main memory bandwidth bottleneck, and so have less space left in the eDRAM for the FB.
Not really. Latency in cycles will be lower of course (at lower frequencies), absolute latency in time (which is the more relevant metric) should be similar.
After one or two experiences like that, I've come to understand that Nintendo build hardware by estimating the very least they think they need, for their own titles. And nothing more.