• 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.

WiiU technical discussion (serious discussions welcome)

G

guek

Banned
Refreshment.01 said:
Ok man, im not happy if this is the case. Is just that what about the reasonable people? You know the ones that tried to get some disscussion going leaving fanatism and bias aside. Who cries for them? XD
Click to expand...

Plenty of reasonable people were involved in both sides of the debate but the problem was that asshat behavior was more tolerated when coming from nintendo fans than it was from people being both pessimistic and dicks.

Being "right" doesn't automatically make the opposing side unreasonable. This is why people in nintendo threads tend to find you and a few others intolerable.
 
prag16

prag16

Banned
Thunder Monkey said:
Depending on what is attempted that 40% can be a huge gulf.

You had to hijack the CPU and hamstring the system to pull off one thing the Xbox could do easily. Dot3 precision bump-maps.

If simple EMBM or emboss are what was needed the GCN would probably achieve it quicker, with a negligible hit to the system. But any time you wanted the bump-mapping that set apart Xbox titles you were just about SoL.
Click to expand...

Not arguing that the xbox could do more. But did it exceed it by the margin you'd expect with the advantage of over 150% more FLOPS than FLIPper? Most multiplats were barely distinguishable from eachother, and some of the GC exclusives easily were on the same playing field as xbox exclusives.
 
L

LCGeek

formerly sane
Thunder Monkey said:
Depending on what is attempted that 40% can be a huge gulf.

You had to hijack the CPU and hamstring the system to pull off one thing the Xbox could do easily. Dot3 precision bump-maps.

If simple EMBM or emboss are what was needed the GCN would probably achieve it quicker, with a negligible hit to the system. But any time you wanted the bump-mapping that set apart Xbox titles you were just about SoL.
Click to expand...

Factor 5 talked about his. You didn't need that type of bumpmapping which was imposssible more due to ram requirements than anything. Had people listened to that company and done methods they left on doing their own customized bump mapping more people could've seen what the system or architecture was capable in a variety of games.
 
A

Apophis2036

Banned
Alistair Roo said:
Over five official speculation threads, + 100,000 replies
hundreds of bans, hype, meltdowns, tears, joy and frustration will resume in a single thread

It WAS worth it :p
Click to expand...

5 million plus views aswell, there will NEVER be anything like the WUST's again imo because of the ban on 'super threads', an amazing adventure :).
 
T

Thunder Monkey

Banned
LCGeek said:
Factor 5 talked about his. You didn't need that type of bumpmapping which was imposssible more due to ram requirements than anything. Had people listened to that company and done methods they left on doing their own customized bump mapping more people could've seen what the system or architecture was capable in a variety of games.
Click to expand...
If I remember right they used the CPU to take per pixel reads pretty much achieving Dot3 precision.

They were using similar means to achieve. They were just significantly helped by the very structure of their games. Little in the way of independent AI routines, very rudimentary collision detection. The CPU wasn't a limiter.
 
D

Durante

Member
One thing we can say for certain is that the eDRAM is taking up a larger portion of the die than most expected. Not a huge difference, but it's there.
 
T

The Abominable Snowman

Member
prag16 said:
Not arguing that the xbox could do more. But did it exceed it by the margin you'd expect with the advantage of over 150% more FLOPS than FLIPper? Most multiplats were barely distinguishable from eachother, and some of the GC exclusives easily were on the same playing field as xbox exclusives.
Click to expand...

Late Xbox titles were touted as being almost on par with early 360 titles. Many multiplats were featured on 360 with 720p or even 1080p for a few. I don't think its fair to the GC, which has nostalgia and 'art' going for it, but in real world, the Xbox really did outpace others in its generation comfortably...
 
L

LCGeek

formerly sane
Thunder Monkey said:
If I remember right they used the CPU to take per pixel reads pretty much achieving Dot3 precision.

They were using similar means to achieve. They were just significantly helped by the very structure of their games. Little in the way of independent AI routines, very rudimentary collision detection. The CPU wasn't a limiter.
Click to expand...

Yep

Basically an easier way to lay it out . No xbox or ps2 tittle has what some of the factor 5 games did like light scattering or the amount of customized bump mapping. You can claim all day the majority of xbox titles had their moments when the one gc title had its moment nothing on it's own platform or others came close. There are no comparisons for it and everything factor 5 said about running the game as is hints the xbox would've need its own customizations to match or exceed what the GC titles did.

We can knock nintendo all day for the hardware, but if you choose to work on it and not exploit or learn from things it's all on you at this point.

That wasn't aimed at you persay but certain sentiments I see in the thread.
 
H

Hoo-doo

Banned
Apophis2036 said:
I have to ask, is there really a need for a new thread ?.

If the news if good it will die within 5 pages and if news is bad all it is going to lead to is 20+ pages of people arguing with more than likely a few of the regulars from this thread being banned...

Everyone who is interested in the WiiU hardware is already posting in here imo.
Click to expand...

Information wants to be free, whether it's positive or not.
 
T

Thunder Monkey

Banned
The Abominable Snowman said:
Late Xbox titles were touted as being almost on par with early 360 titles. Many multiplats were featured on 360 with 720p or even 1080p for a few. I don't think its fair to the GC, which has nostalgia and 'art' going for it, but in real world, the Xbox really did outpace others in its generation comfortably...
Click to expand...
There were a few things the GCN did easier than the Xbox.

I'm not sure if it was just because of the insane speeds of the main memory, or the even faster framebuffer, but the use of concentric shells to achieve the look of fur came much earlier to GCN hardware.
 
C

CTLance

Member
Wow, that's awfully nice of chipworks. Thanks!

Shadow of the BEAST, brown areas are highly complex (so to speak, it's where the magic happens), shiny areas are likely highly uniform areas like cache or registers.
 
L

LCGeek

formerly sane
Thunder Monkey said:
There were a few things the GCN did easier than the Xbox.

I'm not sure if it was just because of the insane speeds of the main memory, or the even faster framebuffer, but the use of concentric shells to achieve the look of fur came much earlier to GCN hardware.
Click to expand...

Star Fox adventures to be precise, fur was done that way.
 
C

chaosblade

Unconfirmed Member
Shadow of the BEAST said:
so im guessing.

things that looks like apartment blocks good?

empty brown areas bad?

if so.

lots of brown here.
Click to expand...

I don't really have any experience looking at die shots, but I think you sort of have that backwards. I think the apartment block looking things would be eDRAM. The brown contains the actual compute stuff.

But my word here is meaningless.
 
T

The Abominable Snowman

Member
Thunder Monkey said:
There were a few things the GCN did easier than the Xbox.

I'm not sure if it was just because of the insane speeds of the main memory, or the even faster framebuffer, but the use of concentric shells to achieve the look of fur came much earlier to GCN hardware.
Click to expand...

These are little small things here and there, which are great effects, but we're talking overall. Overall, the Xbox comfortably outpaced its generation in the GPU department.
 
prag16

prag16

Banned
The Abominable Snowman said:
These are little small things here and there, which are great effects, but we're talking overall. Overall, the Xbox comfortably outpaced its generation in the GPU department.
Click to expand...

This is getting way off topic now. But I still think you're making a blanket assertion that overstates the real-world gap.

But enough about that.

On topic. I'm pumped to know more, regardless of the final conclusion. xD
 
L

lwilliams3

Member
AzaK said:
He might still be right in real world term as who the hell knows how to measure the FF stuff? :)
Click to expand...

I think that was Wsippel's and maybe Bgassassin's idea. Bgassassin's rational is why would Nintendo label it as a GPGPU if it has a lower shader counts. Looks like Nintendo may have done some other "unique" things instead to get that label.
 
T

Thunder Monkey

Banned
And I still say this level of hardware should be more than enough power to represent all but the most... excessive... of visions.

Unless you really want to render an entire city with hundreds or thousands of independent AI routines and unique models.

TheGreatMightyPoo said:
Don't mention that visual abomination ever again.
Click to expand...
It was wildly inconsistent.

But it also had some of the most "rendered" lighting of the generation.
 
N

nikatapi

Member
lwilliams3 said:
I think that was Wsippel's and maybe Bgassassin's idea. Bgassassin's rational is why would Nintendo label it as a GPGPU if it has a lower shader counts. Looks like Nintendo may have done some other "unique" things instead to get that label.
Click to expand...

What if they thought they could use the extra horsepower for GPGPU while achieving comparable graphics to the PS3-Xbox360?
 
Refreshment.01

Refreshment.01

Member
guek said:
Plenty of reasonable people were involved in both sides of the debate but the problem was that asshat behavior was more tolerated when coming from nintendo fans than it was from people being both pessimistic and dicks.

Being "right" doesn't automatically make the opposing side unreasonable. This is why people in nintendo threads tend to find you and a few others intolerable.
Click to expand...
I have never said opposite or disagree with what you said in the above post.

In practice the most vocal and the ones that highjacked these technical disscussion threads were the unreasonable bunch. And if i did read right you do agree with this also.
 
T

The Abominable Snowman

Member
You guys agree with 'function' from B3D? (If you're reading I hate to crosspost, but I'm just using this for fuel )

So anyway, yeah, looks like the Wii U might be weaker than anyone (except me, hurray for me) imagined it could be.

Looking at the die shot, it seems that there are 8 blocks of (probably) 20 shaders for a total of 160. Directly above it there are what looks like 3 repeated blocks that I would guess are TMUs, so 12 of them. Then two blocks below the shaders, so probably 8 ROPs. The arrangement of TMUs to shader blocks seems odd, but that's going by the few other die shots I've looked at.

32MB of edram, with what looks like some other smaller blocks of embedded memory above it, maybe for BC purposes?

Anyway, what does everyone else think they see?

Edit: the distance between what I *think* are the ROPs and the edram probably indicates that Wii U ain't got no magic ROPs (like the 360) with free MSAA and transparency, as I think you'd want the ROPs right next to the edram rather than routing a swollen bus right across the chip.
Click to expand...

So 160/12/8 configuration
 
D

Durante

Member
Thunder Monkey said:
And I still say this level of hardware should be more than enough power to represent all but the most... excessive... of visions.
Click to expand...
And I still say that's not even remotely true -- and for that matter also isn't true for the high-end consoles.

We recently had a thread about clipping artifacts and how they ruin immersion. Would you consider the idea of having customization options for a character's clothing, but still not suffering from clipping artifacts, excessive?
 
S

Shin Johnpv

Member
Thunder Monkey said:
There were a few things the GCN did easier than the Xbox.

I'm not sure if it was just because of the insane speeds of the main memory, or the even faster framebuffer, but the use of concentric shells to achieve the look of fur came much earlier to GCN hardware.
Click to expand...

GCN could also do the highest number of textures per pass that generation. If I remember it was 8, and I think the PS2 was either 1 or 2, and the Xbox I believe was 4.

They both had their strengths and weakness' and another reason why straight flop comparisons didn't paint the full picture.
 
J

joesiv

Member
tipoo said:
4870 with blocks annotated for refference

die-shot-colored.jpg
Click to expand...
Thanks tipoo, I count 190 SIMD cores, anyone else agree?

Btw, this is kind of interesting. So essentially, if you're game could live with fixed function graphics of the Wii (at a higher clock mind you), then you have all the programmable shaders for GPGPU things for games that need such processing power but not such graphics power. I wonder how the graphics pipeline works, if it's actually easy to use both programmable shaders and fixed function ones together. This stuff is way over my head.
 
D

Donnie

Member
AzaK said:
Well done FS and everyone. Shame you didn't get a chance to decipher first but we might end up getting a hive mind looking at it which could help....or not ;)

Roll on the new thread.


BTW: Less shaders? /sob I'd have to apoligise to USC-FAN :)
Click to expand...

Nah, he was adament it was just a R700, so he'd be just as wrong as you or I really if this does turn out to be some super custom unified shader/fixed function hybrid GPU.

Incidentally this idea sprung up a while ago on this forum (about shaders plus special fixed function logic working together). But after a while the idea seemed to disapear, well looks like that was spot on. Very interesting. On one side it could make porting from Orbis ect harder than expected. But on the other side it could mean the GPU can produce some very unexpected results in the right hands.
 
N

NotLiquid

Member
This thread ought to have the Who Wants To Be A Millionare background ambience humming over it.

I presume from first glance the info might not be very favorable even when compared to 360/PS3?
 
T

Thunder Monkey

Banned
Durante said:
And I still say that's not even remotely true -- and for that matter also isn't true for the high-end consoles.

We recently had a thread about clipping artifacts and how they ruin immersion. Would you consider the idea of having customization options for a character's clothing, but still not suffering from clipping artifacts, excessive?
Click to expand...
Generally yes.

It might be a noticeable issue, but as long as it doesn't hinder the game itself it's just a superficial problem. Irritating as they can be.

I'm not knocking the idea that more power will make a vision easier to realize. That much is common sense. But I will always be against the idea that power is mandatory to realize your vision in a pure play mechanics sense.

If your game isn't fun unless you can realize an entire living breathing city? You done failed as a game designer. The core idea should be fun under any visual limitations.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

AMD 4700S desktop kit is based on PlayStation 5 SoC
Hardware
10
2K
Kilau replied
  • Poll
[REVISED] Sony & Microsoft 10th-Gen Speculation: SONY EDITION
Opinion Analysis Hardware
40
5K
thicc_girls_are_teh_best replied
  • Poll
[REVISED] Sony & Microsoft 10th-Gen Speculation: MICROSOFT EDITION
Opinion Analysis Hardware
13
2K
thicc_girls_are_teh_best replied
AMD Ryzen 4000 And Radeon RX Navi 2X ‘RDNA 2’ Graphics Cards Expected To Launch In October 2020
News Rumor Hardware
20
2K
TaySan replied
Alleged AMD Next-Gen Flagship Navi GPU Specifications Leaked – 5120 Cores, 24 GB HBM2e Memory, 2 TB/s Bandwidth
Rumor 2
58
5K
Knch replied
Top Bottom