StoppedInTracks
Member
It is in Nintendo's best interest now that PS4 and 720 launch as late as possible. Spring 2014 would be ideal giving Wii U 1.5 years of unique games and PS360 downports.
Thanks, I must have missed those.People talked about it a couple pages before.
Sorry, but I'm just not tech-savy. But can anyone give a little example how this slower RAM can effect games?
Seeing how Batman Arkham City and Darksiders 2 plays well, so from my understanding, current-gen games that are out right now will work well on the Wii U. But going forward, future PS4/720 games will be in trouble if they were down-ported, is that about right?
So we'll see a lot of Wii HD remakes and a bunch of current-gen GOTY/Ultimate editions?
Could the Wii U run Skyrim? One that plays as good as the 360?
I can try to make a RAM metaphor about buckets of water. NeoGAF loves metaphors.
RAM is like an environmentally-friendly rain barrel. Rain water fills those up, and there's a valve on the bottom, so you can use rain water for various jobs around the house without wasting your supply of clean drinking water.
Well the rain barrel at WiiU's house is four times as big as PS360's! Yay! But the OS has claimed half of it. Let's just say that the wife put a plastic barrier down the inside of the barrel, because she wants to reserve some water for her flowers. Okay, I guess. Damn that's a lot of flower watering. But it's still a huge barrel, so who cares. But also, the opening for water catching at the top of WiiU's barrel is half as large as PS360's openings are, so for all it's capacity, it only collects water half as fast. And the valve at the bottom similarly undersized. It's like, instead of a cool fire hose attachment, or at least a garden hose like the other guys have, WiiU's impressive monolith of a rain barrel laughably pees water out of a drinking-straw-sized hole.
So now, if you're going to wash your car, instead of the usual way of just washing your car and then hosing it down to get the soap off, you have to set the WiiU's puny hose on top of your car, and let it dribble the soap away while you wash. By the time you're done, you won't need to rinse your car. And if you get good at washing your car this way, you might find that the WiiU's massive rain barrel lets you wash several cars in a row without running out of water like the other guys do, especially if you can find a way to have a steady source of water slowly refilling the barrel.
So basically, if you are Nintendo or you adopt the Nintendo way of doing things, then maybe it's good for you, but if you're not, then it's strange and bad.
As good as 360? Probably not likely.
Can you give a breakdown of why you think this? I'm curious to know why Skyrim would be handicapped on the Wii U based on memory bandwidth alone.As good as 360? Probably not likely.
Could the Wii U run Skyrim? One that plays as good as the 360?
Could the Wii U run Skyrim? One that plays as good as the 360?
What if it is a dual channel interface like in the PC world? Wouldn't this double the bandwidth?
A lot the best games from this generation run at resolutions below 720p, 640p, 540p etc....
If the PS3 version was a slideshow, I have no clue what Bethesda would do with a WiiU port
Clip Art?
This is overstated, most games this gen run at 720p.
This is overstated, most games this gen run at 720p.
Sorry this is a bit off topic, but how does the Wii U's CPU compare to the 360s? Is it dramatically slower, or just a bit?Graphically the WiiU has everything needed to match or exceed the 360 version in terms of GPU and RAM, trouble is the WiiU has a weak CPU, weaker than the 360's, and the engine Bethesda uses is very CPU dependant.
This is overstated, most games this gen run at 720p.
Actually they do. Just google 'B3D native rendering resolutions'.In terms of rendering? Not really.
This thread is getting depressing. Let's playdevil'sangel's advocate.
Assuming everything else (framebuffers, shader constants, lookup tables, etc...) being allocated in the eDRAM, 12.8 GB/s is probably more than enough bandwidth for streaming textures and geometry to the GPU.
Because of the way mip-mapping works your worst case scenario is going to be around a unique texel per pixel in a modern engine that does some sort of Z pre-pass. So for 1080p that gives you 1920*1080 texels * 4 bytes (RGBA) each. For ~8.3 MB/frame. Let's triple that to take into account extra stuff like normal maps, specular maps and so on. Thats ~25 MB/frame for textures. 25 MB * 60 fps = 1.5 GB/s for texture transfer. Some people may object that I'm not taking into account that each texel requires multiple samples, but I'm not taking into account texture compression either and it should roughly balance out.
We can do a similar calculation for geometry. You don't actually want to dice your geo down to the 1 triangle per pixel range in a modern engine because your shaders typically work in quads and you'll waste ~75% of your shader power doing that. Let's aim for a unique vertex every 10th pixel. 1920 * 1080 / 10 = 207360 vertices. Each vertex takes around 32 bytes (I can break this down if need be) so that gives us ~6.64 MB/frame. We haven't taken into account things like overdraw or that fact we don't have perfect frustum culling however. Let's say that increases our geometry by an order of magnitude giving us ~66.4MB / frame. 66.4 MB * 60 fps = 4 GB/s for geometry transfer. (This number is probably a huge overestimate)
So 1.5 + 4 = 5.5 GB/s needed. We're not even using half of the 12.8 MB/s we have!I have the flu and doing this amused more than it should have.
Sorry this is a bit off topic, but how does the Wii U's CPU compare to the 360s? Is it dramatically slower, or just a bit?
It's true most games are 720p, despite the constant railing against that. Lots aren't, that doesn't mean most aren't though.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241
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.
No.I don't really understand all this "WiiU only has 2x RAM of 360 and PS3." It has 4x but people point out that the OS takes up half... yet they ignore the OS of 360 and PS3. "They have a small footprint especially now that they've been optimized over the years."
...Is it not possible for Nintendo to reduce how much RAM the WiiU OS uses? I thought they often "unlock the full power of the system" long after they launch a console.
In the same vein, is it possible for Nintendo to OC the WiiU to enhance power?
I don't really understand all this "WiiU only has 2x RAM of 360 and PS3." It has 4x but people point out that the OS takes up half... yet they ignore the OS of 360 and PS3. "They have a small footprint especially now that they've been optimized over the years."
...Is it not possible for Nintendo to reduce how much RAM the WiiU OS uses? I thought they often "unlock the full power of the system" long after they launch a console.
In the same vein, is it possible for Nintendo to OC the WiiU to enhance power?
Sorry this is a bit off topic, but how does the Wii U's CPU compare to the 360s? Is it dramatically slower, or just a bit?
Could the Wii U run Skyrim? One that plays as good as the 360?
Most AAA games run at like 600p
Embrace the 600p ethernity
Because 600p offers better visuals
Quality is subjective, but okay, let's do Gamerankings' 15 highest rated 360 games.Right, I've seen that list many times. As previously stated by myself and others, a lot of the best games this generation are at a lower resolution than 720p. I never made the claim of most. Only a lot
So...higher RAM must have a benefit right? So whats the benefit of that 2GB of RAM if the speed is so fucking constrained?
Won't it basically be out of the box PS3 memory issues :/
Well the speed obviously can't be the only problem because then 512mb of a slightly faster speed would always be better than 16gb of a slightly slower speed and that doesn't make any sense.@SmokeMaxX
It's the speed of the memory that's the issue, not how much is available.
Yeah, but will that really require 1Gb in the future? I think the code is just heavily unoptomized.Sure they can reduce OS footprint, but for now you have browser access directly from games and that feature will always require more free ram than all the other features combined.
Yeah, optimizing and shrinking the OS to the point games get most of the 2 GB definitely seems possible and HAS happened with the PS3 (I think it was 100+ MB originally?), but OCing the system? Closest you'll ever get to that is what the PSP did, UNDERclocking the system until Sony gave the word to use it at full speed. And that's more likely to be something on the 3DS no one knows about than on a console, where battery life optimization is a complete non-issue.No.
You'll have better luck convincing them to order you a bride.
I think it's like having a DEEP fridge but small doors versus a very wide fridge that doesn't go as far back. You can get way more stuff in the former, but it'll take longer and be more of a pain to get stuff in the back out. If you arrange smartly however you can make really good use of that fridge.So...higher RAM must have a benefit right? So whats the benefit of that 2GB of RAM if the speed is so fucking constrained?
Most AAA games run at like 600p
Embrace the 600p ethernity
Because 600p offers better visuals
Yeah, optimizing and shrinking the OS to the point games get most of the 2 GB definitely seems possible and HAS happened with the PS3 (I think it was 100+ MB originally?), but OCing the system? Closest you'll ever get to that is what the PSP did, UNDERclocking the system until Sony gave the word to use it at full speed. And that's more likely to be something on the 3DS no one knows about than on a console, where battery life optimization is a complete non-issue.
°_°the rain barrel at WiiU's house is four times as big as PS360's! Yay! But the OS has claimed half of it.
I think it's like having a DEEP fridge but small doors versus a very wide fridge that doesn't go as far back. You can get way more stuff in the former, but it'll take longer and be more of a pain to get stuff in the back out. If you arrange smartly however you can make really good use of that fridge.
The apps aren't actually kept in RAM though, as evident by the current load times. Only daemons are kept in RAM.What you missed in your statement is multitasking. Wii U is multitasking console which require a lot of Ram to do those things.
It doesn't mean OS is taking 1GB. It may be even small like 200mb but system need those unused ram because there must be empty space for all your apps you will switch on.
In same manner Vita is also devided. IT has 512mb ram memory for aps and os and 128vram for games. But it doesn't mean vita is is 512mb.
So your idea about shrinking OS is rather pointeless. 1GB is probably strickt system devide by firmware. So 1GB for system and apps and 1GB for games. In case when they will shrink OS they may increase MB for games but don't think it will be more than 50-100MB.
Well the speed obviously can't be the only problem because then 512mb of a slightly faster speed would always be better than 16gb of a slightly slower speed and that doesn't make any sense.
Also- shot in the dark here, but is it possible that the flash memory could play a part in the speed of the system? I don't know exactly how it works, but on PCs, you have the option of letting flash drives "readyboost" your computer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost
No one can be sure until/if someone leaks the full and final specs, but it's seems certain that it isn't matching the 3.2Ghz clock rate and doesn't have 2 threads per core, and as we now know, slower RAM bandwidth.
The WiiU's CPU is basically a refined,higher clocked, 3 cores, design of what they've been using since the Gamecube.
All these issues about the Wii U power has me a bit worried about PS4 and NextBox capabilities if they release in under 12 months, even considering the advantages (larger form factor, $399, no expensive tablet controller).