lwilliams3
Member
Ok..for all the posters continually stating how much of a problem it is, why we have not heard any devs working on Wii U games complaining about it? We definitely heard about the CPU, for example.
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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 recall lots of anon devs saying it was worse than 360/ps3.
Sho_Nuff82
Member
Strict NDAs? We didn't even know how much RAM was in the box before 6 weeks ago or so. And you don't want to slag a console right before you drop a few flawed launch games on new customers at $60.
Aren't you contradicting yourself here by talking about the great design of the GC when this thread is about a single part of the Wii U, and we have no definitive understanding of what steps they've taken to balance out their system design aside from leaks and rumours?
It could well be a badly balanced design, but those sorts of definitive proclamations should be left for when the full specs are uncovered.
the gamecube was essentially the swan song for the raw material to performance wizardry that was custom home console hardware design. the ps3 was its funeral.
it's all off the shelf parts and APIs from here on out.
Ooccoo
Member
Enjoy your ban?
Tongue-in-cheek jokes are bannable now?
In all honestly what we have learned this gen is that 10MB proved insufficient for the Xbox 360. Because you'd have to resort to tiling to fit things into memory and that severely impacted performance especially any deferred rendering. And for modern fully deferred rendering engines 32MB eDram makes a lot more sense.
Anyway the way the Wii U will work is that the 2GB pool will be used as main system memory. And assets will get swapped into the eDram for rendering on screen. The eDram is inadequate to store all your assets.
lwilliams3
Member
Only a few of them, and the ones that complained about the system often pointed at the CPU. None of them IIRC said anything negative about the RAM. In fact, we have heard praises about it instead. As Wsippel said, however, the ones that praised it was talking about the whole memory system instead of just the main RAM. Greater than the sum of its parts.
MadeInBeats
Banned
I smell b-b-b-b-bullshit.
Alright Bill, didn't see you there. How's the wife.. I SAY... HOW'S THE WIFE??
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
Lol, no.
I just can't believe some of you really think 3rd parties games would be more difficult to port to a modern architecture, with some times the ram pool. This is just crazy.
You also don't understand that a better architecture it's more efficient, so it can do better use of bandwidth. Also, you don't even know the real bus size of the thing. Counting chips number it's just a guess. Could be 128 bits as it could be 256 bits.
Guys, you lack a lot of essential information here.
AppleSmack
Banned
Why are you so aggressive?
I may be wrong about this but I'm not sure if RAM speed actually makes that much of a big deal for gaming. On PC, all the advice I seemed to get is that it doesn't really matter what speed your ram is.
Totally. Those serial numbers on the chips are just rough guidelines after all, you can connect as many bits as you want to them!
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
modern architecture plus more ram means nothing if its slower. Look at PC GPUs with DDR3 memory (in budget laptops) compared to GDDR5 versions of the same chip to see the impact that slow memory can bring.
The edram is the unknown quantity here, but then you're back to potentially needing to optimise specially for the WiiU, and thats not something that all developers can or will do. The idea of a 'modern architecture' (at least in part) was to allow developers to bring ports across easily.
I'm sure Nintendo first parties will make the WiiU sing, leveraging its quirks well. But many won't.
The issue would be about the RAM available to the GPU more than anything, since it's a unified pool.
If the RAM is shared by GPU, slow ram does indeed matter. CPU's can rely on cache to make calculations. GPU's need faster ram because you are rendering much more complex calculations with floating points. There's definitely a bottleneck in there some where.
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
Most intensive bandwidth stuff will run on eDRAM.
You DON'T need crazy numbers at system ram, as PC's proves:
To those chip counters, go count low end GPU's with crazy low density chip numbers and 128 bits of BUS. Counting chips it's only a guess. And you don't have any clue of latencies either.
It doesn't need to store all the assets. Performance critical stuff like render targets, display lists and the like go in MEM1, big assets like textures or audio are stored in MEM2.
Most intensive bandwidth stuff will run on eDRAM.
You DON'T need crazy numbers at system ram, as PC's proves:
To those chip counters, go count low end GPU's with crazy low density chip numbers and 128 bits of BUS. Counting chips it's only a guess. And you don't have any clue of latencies either.
unless those are software rendering benchmarks, thats kind of irrelevant because PCs would use GPU ram as the critical element, system memory would have less of an impact there.
There are like 50 unknown quantities here.
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
Fixed.
Can someone explain some of these terms in lay mans language, I've looked up some of this stuff on google but I still don't get it. I'm really interested in this stuff, but words like bandwidth in regards to ram and DDR3 and DDR5 are like foreign language to me.
Anyone want to give us tech noobs a bit of an overview?
Anyone want to give us tech noobs a bit of an overview?
Maybe they don't want to say the equivalent of, "Our Wii U versions will be inferior!"
Most intensive bandwidth stuff will run on eDRAM.
You DON'T need crazy numbers at system ram, as PC's proves:
To those chip counters, go count low end GPU's with crazy low density chip numbers and 128 bits of BUS. Counting chips it's only a guess. And you don't have any clue of latencies either.
That's a 2004 game already maxed out with "shitty" RAM. Of course recent one won't make a huge difference.
.
Seriously considering just not getting this system and canceling my Monster Hunter preorder. There's been no good news since it released.
amstradcpc
Member
Most intensive bandwidth stuff will run on eDRAM.
You DON'T need crazy numbers at system ram, as PC's proves:
To those chip counters, go count low end GPU's with crazy low density chip numbers and 128 bits of BUS. Counting chips it's only a guess. And you don't have any clue of latencies either.
What´s next? Quake 1 benchs?.
Gemüsepizza
Member
Most intensive bandwidth stuff will run on eDRAM.
You DON'T need crazy numbers at system ram, as PC's proves:
To those chip counters, go count low end GPU's with crazy low density chip numbers and 128 bits of BUS. Counting chips it's only a guess. And you don't have any clue of latencies either.
What? You know that the Wii U also uses this slow RAM for the GPU... why don't you post a benchmark of different RAM types on GPUs?
Most intensive bandwidth stuff will run on eDRAM.
You DON'T need crazy numbers at system ram, as PC's proves:
To those chip counters, go count low end GPU's with crazy low density chip numbers and 128 bits of BUS. Counting chips it's only a guess. And you don't have any clue of latencies either.
Dude. I have a feeling that you will eat massive crow.
just stop now and watch for awhile.
Most intensive bandwidth stuff will run on eDRAM.
You DON'T need crazy numbers at system ram, as PC's proves:
To those chip counters, go count low end GPU's with crazy low density chip numbers and 128 bits of BUS. Counting chips it's only a guess. And you don't have any clue of latencies either.
Video cards have a lot of VRAM on PC.
They don't use system RAM for the GPU.
Do we have a detailed breakdown over the memory architecture in the system and how it's used?
GC had bottlenecks. The poly performance was behind the PS2 and xbox for example.
NDA could be a reason. Both MS and Sony have heavy NDAs covering parts of their existing systems (the CPU and GPU respectively)
This doesn't prove anything. You can't compare a PC memory set up to what we're seeing in the Wii-U. What type of memory did the GPU use for those benchmarks?
GC had bottlenecks. The poly performance was behind the PS2 and xbox for example.
NDA could be a reason. Both MS and Sony have heavy NDAs covering parts of their existing systems (the CPU and GPU respectively)
Most intensive bandwidth stuff will run on eDRAM.
You DON'T need crazy numbers at system ram, as PC's proves:
To those chip counters, go count low end GPU's with crazy low density chip numbers and 128 bits of BUS. Counting chips it's only a guess. And you don't have any clue of latencies either.
This doesn't prove anything. You can't compare a PC memory set up to what we're seeing in the Wii-U. What type of memory did the GPU use for those benchmarks?
Barack Lesnar
Banned
You're in complete denial. You're using dev quotes with no specifics when we have info on the ram speed from Anandtech and a teardown of the console. We don't need a hand-written note from Iwata himself to put 2 & 2 together.
DonMigs85
Member
I wonder just how much bandwidth the eDRAM has... At the very least it has to be over 20GB/sec to match the Wii's 3MB + 24MB 1T-SRAM aggregate bandwidth, but that's still slow for a modern HD system.
I wish a dev would just leak the specs somewhere they're unlikely to be traced.
I wish a dev would just leak the specs somewhere they're unlikely to be traced.
McHuj
Member
Probably, but I'm not sure 32MB is enough. It maybe enough for 360/PS3 ports and WiiU only games designed specifically for it, but going into next gen I don't think it will be enough.
Best case for WiiU, is that both 720/PS4 will only be 4X faster in terms of main memory bandwidth (and that's really conservative) and 3.5-4X size for the main memory. That's a huge discrepancy and will make porting difficult.
DonMigs85
Member
Oh I'm sure, Half-Life 2 ran fairly well on my old system with only 3.2GB/sec of system RAM bandwidth and a Radeon X600 Pro.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
If they do it GCN style then yes, at least the front buffer is stored in DDR3 after being resolved and you keep in eDRAM only backbuffer, depth-buffer, and perhaps even other FBO's.
AranhaHunter
Banned
Someone put it in layman's term to me. What the hell does this mean? Because right now I'm reading it as 1GB of PS360 RAM is ~ 2GB of WiiU RAM in terms of performance. So the current 512MB the PS360 has is really only half the RAM performance of the WiiU instead of 1/4.
DonMigs85
Member
What? No no, the Wii U RAM just has limited bandwidth, barely more than half the speed of the 360's 512MB RAM pool or the PS3's 256MB XDR pool.