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WiiU technical discussion (serious discussions welcome)
- Thread starter blu
- Start date
Thank you for this - I'd been lurking & enjoying the focus in this thread until the comparison & publisher preference discussion crept in here...
<back to lurking...>
I'm a bit miffed why Nintendo went with compression there - on the supported ranges, latest Wireless HDMI devices now support full 1080P with 3D and Surround uncompressed, with the 480P Stereo target, compression feels like overkill.brain_stew said:
Well, if you want to play paper-specs, 360 CPU is roughly 6x more powerful than WiiUs (PS3 would be closer to 18x).Apophis2036 said:
I understand but this thread has remained completely focussed on tech specs and not comparing platforms as has been going on the last couple of days. Be nice to keep it that way. There's two more threads for the other stuff.
I'd probably follow "circle" up with another word, but I get your point.
With no latency?
400 to 1800 = 350% increase
I must be missing something. Alright, I'm leaving the thread...
Osiris
I permanently banned my 6 year old daughter from using the PS4 for mistakenly sending grief reports as it's too hard to watch or talk to her
The only thing you're missing is that Apophis2036 is as bad at math as he is contributing to tech threads.
Apophis2036
Banned
The only thing you're missing is that Apophis2036 is as bad at math as he is contributing to tech threads.
HAHAHAHAHA
Thunder Monkey
Banned
Riiiiiight...
Glorified G
Member
'WiiU technical discussion (serious discussions welcome)'
lol. so much for that.
lol. so much for that.
shinra-bansho
Member
Meltdowns, meltdowns. Get your meltdowns.
-----
Anyway, can someone elaborate on how exactly "GPGPU" is going to be the Wii U's panacea, as has been made out as on the chalkboard.
From reading B3D, the impression I'm getting is that it likely isn't going to be that much use.
There was also some interesting speculation, that seemed to imply that eDRAM may not be any sort of magic bullet either... that it's bandwidth could be as poor as the system RAM.
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Anyway, can someone elaborate on how exactly "GPGPU" is going to be the Wii U's panacea, as has been made out as on the chalkboard.
From reading B3D, the impression I'm getting is that it likely isn't going to be that much use.
There was also some interesting speculation, that seemed to imply that eDRAM may not be any sort of magic bullet either... that it's bandwidth could be as poor as the system RAM.
HAHAHAHAHA
GO FUCK YOUR MOTHER.
Yes, perma ban me
Ok you may never enter my apartment.
Osiris
I permanently banned my 6 year old daughter from using the PS4 for mistakenly sending grief reports as it's too hard to watch or talk to her
Personally I hope we see some advancement in GPGPU use in all platforms, PC included next gen, only of course where the use of such resources makes sense and doesn't greatly affect graphics performance.
Planetside 2 can use it a little to improve particles on a CPU limited set-up but on my set-up when enabled it does drop the framerate by a few fps.
I've honestly not seen it used anywhere in games for anything other than particle rendering yet. (At least outside gaming it's found a home with SHA256 hashing & Bitcoin).
I honestly can't see it seeing much general use though, the workloads stream processors are suitable for is still very narrow, and there's no escaping the fact that any resources taken by a GPU on non-graphic related function is going to take away resources from that which a GPU is good at, graphics and rendering.
Isn't all the PhysX stuff on PC GPGPU based? That's been used for things like cloth physics, fluid simulation, particles, and others.
eg:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWFkDrKvBRU
Thunder Monkey
Banned
Maybe in comparison to what it could have been, but it's not likely to literally be anywhere close to the main mem bandwidth.
It'd defeat the purpose of it's existence.
The Abominable Snowman
Member
Apophis is comedy gold. They're giving him a pass. As they should.
Wii U CPU has a very very weak and slow vector unit, compared clock-for-clock, whatever, its really bad. The GPU could sacrifice some processing time to bring the Wii U just under par in that area. That goes for physics/gravity, sound (offloaded to a DSP in WiiU case), time transforms, and a ton of other gameplay modifiers.
Osiris
I permanently banned my 6 year old daughter from using the PS4 for mistakenly sending grief reports as it's too hard to watch or talk to her
Yes, but then things like cloth physics, fluid simulation and particles are pretty much the narrow workload I was talking about, we're not talking about major parts of what would traditionally be the CPU workload anyway, which would be the game logic, AI etc.
There will be interesting uses, some of which will slightly broaden that narrow workload more as developers find tricks people haven't thought of yet.
But that is a million miles away from seeing any of the majority of what is usually the domain of the CPU being done on the GPU, those expecting that kind of offloading are going to be disappointed.
You also have to think about GPGPU being used as more than just enhancements, but integral to the actual game. It will happen with next get, maybe more so on Wii U if that is all the console can really do.
If you have a serious post to make about WiiU specs, then just make it.
The Abominable Snowman
Member
Welp. Now's your time.
DeuceGamer
Member
Please post. It may help get the discussion going on the actual specs again, which would be great.
charlequin
Banned
Please, post away.
Osiris
I permanently banned my 6 year old daughter from using the PS4 for mistakenly sending grief reports as it's too hard to watch or talk to her
The thing is that in order for it to make sense to move a calculation to the GPU from the CPU it has to be a a fairly small task on a largely parallel-ized dataset, with little to no branching, think of shaders acting on vertices in a scene, or pixels on a framebuffer, these are the workloads a GPU is designed to do, and to do very quickly.
Not all tasks fall into this category, in fact the tasks that can be moved already are being moved, but there is still a lot of tasks the CPU is responsible for that don't make sense to move to the GPU, the GPU would perform very badly if it could do them at all on these tasks.
It's not that technology hasn't moved forward, but rather that GPU tech has massively moved forward for GPU's to undertake these types of parallel task to the point that they do not, and never will do the other types of task well.
And a whole load of those "other types of tasks" are what make up the game logic and AI that run on the CPU in a game.
I think I may have interrupted the first decent thread on wiiu tech. Apologies.
Are we allowed to talk about costs? If so what is the reason behind the wii u controller's high cost?
The eurogamer wii u review posted on Gaf implied it would be cheap, but I've been led to believe that it is near half of the console cost. If this has been discussed already, what is it, that is contributing to high cost?
edit: If there is a better thread to direct this question, please direct me, I'll be happy to post it there.
Are we allowed to talk about costs? If so what is the reason behind the wii u controller's high cost?
The eurogamer wii u review posted on Gaf implied it would be cheap, but I've been led to believe that it is near half of the console cost. If this has been discussed already, what is it, that is contributing to high cost?
edit: If there is a better thread to direct this question, please direct me, I'll be happy to post it there.
I was talking more about the things that physx already does, just more integral to design.
Grampa Simpson
Banned
I think you could talk component costs. What would be frowned upon would be arguing that less or more should have been spent on the it, or that if they had spend less on the controller, they could have spent more on the base unit.
I personally don't know how much that panel cost, or the silicon backing it, and I think a proper tear-down would be really interesting.
Fair enough.
For reference, the eurogamer article implied this:
That makes sense to me. This doesn't [yet]:
techrader said:
Source.
The Abominable Snowman
Member
GPGPU could be very useful for complex AI and pathfinding. Not to mention complex physics and world deformations that alter gameplay.
Just look at how the Cell processor is used, since its much closer to a GPU in many respects to how it processes than most other processors.
Complex AI like what we started to see with Spore and what we could see in Sims/Simcity/Elder Scrolls/GTA/ETC in the future. With emergent worlds and the "Butterfly Effect" being reflected in game. That would definitely benefit from the way GPUs and Cell process data with multiple passes
Clockwork
Member
Why go over this? The Wii U doesnt utilize DirectX/Direct3D
Not only that but it's readily available info.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Direct3D
lwilliams3
Member
Thanks Popstar. I'm personally interesting in this. I believe that the extra GPU features will eventually be a major factor of Wii U games moving ahead of current-gen expectations.
Controllers are never sold below cost (or even at cost), so you can't really tell much from the retail price of a standalone gamepad except that it costs them less than ¥13,400 to manufacture.
Both PS3 and 360 can do alpha to coverage and 360 supports 8K textures.
Of course while other consoles may be able to do some of these things it's probably faster/less of a hack on Wii U.
lwilliams3
Member
While this may have already been clarified before, Aegies specifically said it will be look better "in a technical perspective" In other words, they will be pushing more polygons, effects, etc. It doesn't necessarily mean that it will look more appealing, which is more of a subjective manner.
That makes sense. As an example, I think the Wii-mote's manufacturing cost was less than $10.
Question is if the display really makes for the majority of the total cost for the controller. They made a big deal out of the technology that allows for the close-to-zero latency. The parts could be cheap to produce, or they could be more expensive than expected, we don't know (or does someone?).
And there are probably also some patents/licensed technologies involved which would also be projected to the cost.
He does say technically. I'll give you that one.
Yeah. I guess this makes sense too.
JordanN
Banned
Where does this idea come from? The whole point of EDRAM is to move data at faster than usual speeds (compared to say its 2GB of ram) and IBM seems to agree with that as well.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/34683.wssIBM Press said:
The current discussion on B3D is just a few people who have absolutely no idea how the Gamecube and Wii memory architecture worked making wild and completely baseless assumption.
GPGPU on Wii U may well be seen as a testbed of a system that AMD tries to eventually implement with Fusion/heterogeneous computing in x86/x64 space, having unified address space for both CPU and GPU and all that things. Support for this is mostly a question of software maturity which again depends on how widespread its use is. So I expect it to be used well if similar concepts are used in Xbox720/PS4 and AMD finally sells APUs of that kind and the technology (HSA/Heterogeneous System Architecture) is being widely embraced. If that doesn't happen I don't expect it to be in much use by Wii U games alone either.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
I largely share your meta-view on the matter - I think WiiU might be a harbinger of future AMD (and not only theirs) APU technologies. Not unlike how Xenos was a harbinger of future AMD (and not only theirs) GPU tech.
BTW, marcan has a few things to add on the CPU front:
Some more well known usages in games.
Battlefield 3, tiled deferred rendering. (all direct lighting is done by compute shading.))
Just Cause 2, post processing and ocean rendering.
Civilization V, texture decompression.
Rage, texture conversion to dxt.
Crysis 2, post process, possibly lighting.
There should be many more, especially post processing seems to be one of the more obvious and 'easy' things to use GPGPU for.
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