Oppo
Member
You are doing the same.
Honestly this is a foolish path you are on; PC and console hardware just can't be compared that way. It's apples and pomegranates.
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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
You are doing the same.
Honestly this is a foolish path you are on; PC and console hardware just can't be compared that way. It's apples and pomegranates.
THE:MILKMAN
Member
I have wondered if Nintendo are holding back from third parties the technical documentation of the eDRAM.
Do we know of any third party games that are using the eDRAM? Or is that stupid question?
That is in fact a pretty stupid question
lherre, you know you are teasing us, right? (right?)
So, what can we do/expect with the EDRAM?
If you don't voice yourself, I'll type in minuscule the rest of my posts in this thread, really!
Opus Angelorum
Member
So if it does indeed have 32MB of eDRAM then the GPU is quite powerful, depending on the bandwidth available.
I think the 10MB of eDRAM in the Xbox 360 has a 2GHz(?) link between the dies.
I think the 10MB of eDRAM in the Xbox 360 has a 2GHz(?) link between the dies.
They are using it of course, it's a part of the console hardware. See the shin'en (third-party) interview where it's obvious they are referring to caches and the edram when they praise the overall memory layout of the system.
Have a GAF meltdown? Not sure what your looking for here.
If it isn't then I'll be wrong about it, I suppose.
EDIT: I'll still (probably) get one and have a lot of fun too.
quoting myself from the last page. the topic is immensely interesting but i couldn't find any source on the web that describes how images are processed from the disk all the way to the screen. please educate me.
THE:MILKMAN
Member
Thanks. So if the games are using this ultra fast eDRAM what, in simple terms, are third party devs struggling with?
aeolist said:
Yes I am aware. But even IdeaMan has hinted that Nintendo could possibly be hindering/not helping enough "port teams".
quoting myself from the last page. the topic is immensely interesting but i couldn't find any source on the web that describes how images are processed from the disk all the way to the screen. please educate me.
euh... lol
if someone were to explain how exactly that happened, you could start making games yourself.
ChaosInTheRain
Member
I think people will be pleasantly surprised in relation to the edram.
This reminds of the Wii launch. When it came out they were people on Gaf speculating that thought it had extra wholly untapped potential and features that would eventually lead to PS3/360 quality visuals at 480p. Some of them claiming to have good industry links or sources.
Let's not fool ourselves and think things will get better because of unknown quantities like the eDram, the Arm processor and DSP chip etc etc. Virtually every developer has come out and said that the hardware overall is not so great. They're not idiots and there's no hidden magic optimizations that's gonna dramatically unlock extra performance.
As for 1st party Nintendo games I'm sure they'll be in the ball park of what we expect from xbox360/PS3 games. Nintendo weren't even on the cutting edge of the Wii's visuals. Factor 5 did more impressive things a decade ago. And we've haven't seen anything to show that Nintendo are prepared to spend the kinds of multi million dollar budgets on games that Sony and Microsoft are.
Let's not fool ourselves and think things will get better because of unknown quantities like the eDram, the Arm processor and DSP chip etc etc. Virtually every developer has come out and said that the hardware overall is not so great. They're not idiots and there's no hidden magic optimizations that's gonna dramatically unlock extra performance.
As for 1st party Nintendo games I'm sure they'll be in the ball park of what we expect from xbox360/PS3 games. Nintendo weren't even on the cutting edge of the Wii's visuals. Factor 5 did more impressive things a decade ago. And we've haven't seen anything to show that Nintendo are prepared to spend the kinds of multi million dollar budgets on games that Sony and Microsoft are.
I haven't said that they could purposely hinder port teams though
Just that maybe, they haven't done enough efforts to plan/think in advance what small "port teams" with low resources could do/or not with their dev kits and tools to develop for. And it's a matter of licensing/third-party relations policy also, i can't believe they haven't managed to secure the "technical superior version" of AC3 and other multi titles for example. We can only be circumspect in front of all these ports, coming from different studios, from different part of the world, using different engines, all delivering at best on-part Wii U versions (with sometimes a tiny bonus there that is countered by other issues here).It's actually very possible if MS opts for a large pool of DDR3.
Really?
Main franchise games from Nintendo will have a lot of graphical effects the 360/PS3 are not capable of. The difference should be quite noticeable.
I just want to know how the countless capacities and rates we hear left and right influence the quality of the output (framerate, polygons, visual effects). All that I know is that data from the disc is read and ends up being displayed on the screen. I have no idea how the components work with one another to make that happen and how crucial their attributes are. That's what I want to learn (if you could help me).
wakajawaka
Member
so, this EDRAM thing... can it make up for the RAM being slower than expected? Or are there are some aspects where the U will always suffer from having slow RAM?
Barack Lesnar
Banned
In hiding after getting exposed? Margalis summed it up best:
Convenient he 'left' the forum right before launch, too.
Yes tell me Nintendo is prepared to blow $20 plus million on a game. It's not their style.
ChaosInTheRain
Member
Don't get me wrong, this isn't going to be leaps and bounds better than the PS3 or 360, but this thread overly fatalistic over the ram situation when the edram is very important and it hasn't been publicly confirmed what it is. Nothing wrong with people being optimistic, as long as they stay somewhat in touch with reality.
As I've said, the edram will play a big part of what the system is capable of, so no need to write it off just yet.
THE:MILKMAN
Member
I haven't said that they could purposely hinder port teams though
Fair enough. Hindering was probably the wrong word to use.
Still, it is not good that third party relations are still being questioned.
You missed the point. Nintendo were not using lots of graphical effects that the Wii was capable off. We know this because of how devs like Factor 5 could push the Gamecube.
POWERSPHERE
Banned
God, grow up
Barack Lesnar
Banned
That's exactly what he's doing.
Are you saying that is not true that every single news on wiiu wasn't a bad news recently? If so you are blind or something
Also you should let people do whatever they want with their money
That's why you have 32MB eDRAM. In PC you have a bottleneck of 8Gb/s that doesn't exist here. Even so, low end GPU's with shared memory (And no eDRAM!) are more that enough to run 720P @60fps
Guys, you are trying to be smarter than Nintendo engineers here.
I don't even want to tell you what is wrong with this post and graph.
Well, let's not overreact
But for multi-titles visuals & technique, it's disappointing (minus some smart gamepad implementations, promising for the will of third-party to creatively take advantage of this central feature), there are no other ways to say it.
if its 32MB of edram, the bandwidth would be significantly higher than 360 or PS3 main memory and allow the GPU to really do some decent work. But it will require optimisation.
Nintendo first parties will do that, the big question is how easy is it to do for third parties
Sho_Nuff82
Member
Randy Pitchford was the public face of Duke Nukem Forever.
Edit: dr apoc, every modern pc graphics card has at least 1 GB of GDDR5 dedicated to graphics, in addition to what the user has as system RAM. Your PC benchmarks are meaningless.
Souldriver
Member
Oh brother.
I somehow knew this would be the Wii situation all over again.
Wii is next gen --> Wii is a big step up from this gen --> Look at those leaked Red Steel screenshots, they are pretty impressive --> wait those were total bullshots --> Wii is basically an Xbox --> Why do these games look worse than on Xbox wtf?
I know the Wii made Nintendo lots of money, and that they are not in the "specs race", and try (or at least tried up until 3DS) the blue ocean strategy instead. But there's no doubt about it that the second half of the Wii's life was completely mangled due to lack of third (and even first) party support. Nintendo even had to report quarterly losses.
They are in such a good position to dominate the gaming world right now. Sony's castle is in shambles, and MS hasn't completely taken over yet. If they'd just invested some more in raw power and things gamers see as "given" (online infrastructure, achievements, ...), they could have had a new PS2 type of deal on their hands. If third party developers are on board because the console's specs are in line with their own investment cycle, and people get to see Nintendo IP's in HD glory, and given that Nintendo still has some pull with the more casual gamers, you end up with a console where every demographic flocks to (like the PS2).
But I guess the initial financial risk isn't worth it for Nintendo...
I somehow knew this would be the Wii situation all over again.
Wii is next gen --> Wii is a big step up from this gen --> Look at those leaked Red Steel screenshots, they are pretty impressive --> wait those were total bullshots --> Wii is basically an Xbox --> Why do these games look worse than on Xbox wtf?
I know the Wii made Nintendo lots of money, and that they are not in the "specs race", and try (or at least tried up until 3DS) the blue ocean strategy instead. But there's no doubt about it that the second half of the Wii's life was completely mangled due to lack of third (and even first) party support. Nintendo even had to report quarterly losses.
They are in such a good position to dominate the gaming world right now. Sony's castle is in shambles, and MS hasn't completely taken over yet. If they'd just invested some more in raw power and things gamers see as "given" (online infrastructure, achievements, ...), they could have had a new PS2 type of deal on their hands. If third party developers are on board because the console's specs are in line with their own investment cycle, and people get to see Nintendo IP's in HD glory, and given that Nintendo still has some pull with the more casual gamers, you end up with a console where every demographic flocks to (like the PS2).
But I guess the initial financial risk isn't worth it for Nintendo...
Well, let's not overreact
Oh yeah i forgot the news of nintendo getting rid of friend codes... well aside that all bad news:
From third party games that runs like ass to slow and sluggish OS, from super awkward backward compatibility to stupid restriction on how to store digital games... then the slower cpu and ram than 7 years old consoles, the Miiverse debug fiasco, the day one 1gb patch and so on...
you sure have a lot of reasons to not buy the console now.
All of you go on with your "well balanced hardware" and "promising future" or "GPGPU and eDRAM our saviour!" stuff if you want but do not blame others if they bail out from this trainwreck of launch
kurtrussell
Banned
Just curious....
If you guys all know so much about awesome RAM, why is it that Nintendo didn't hire you? After all, it appears they could have really used your help developing the Wii U in light of all the threads on here about how it locks up every 5 seconds and kills babies and stuff.
Satoru Iwata really missed out here. Lol Nintendo, you failed again! It keeps getting worse!
He'll be laughing on the other side of his face when you all get snapped up by Sony to work on the Vita 2.
If you guys all know so much about awesome RAM, why is it that Nintendo didn't hire you? After all, it appears they could have really used your help developing the Wii U in light of all the threads on here about how it locks up every 5 seconds and kills babies and stuff.
Satoru Iwata really missed out here. Lol Nintendo, you failed again! It keeps getting worse!
He'll be laughing on the other side of his face when you all get snapped up by Sony to work on the Vita 2.
cyberheater
PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 Xbone PS4 PS4
Fab post.
Well actually I was quite excited about the WiiU hardware, it seemed like the current-gen consoles but with a modern GPU and all the bottlenecks such as RAM solved. With game costs rocketing it couldve been a system that we couldve got a lot of middle-tier games on especially from Japan but clearly not.
But yeah, its the community, Nintendo fans never change I guess (or their avatars).
Barack Lesnar
Banned
Or maybe it really is dreadfully underpowered. The way you keep trying to paint a rosy future about its power when "properly developed for" sounds like bologna.
Edit- i guess that would be smells like bologna not sound
Yep, i always thought (at this point uselessly hoped) of the WiiU as the perfect current gen console, where it can put clean non aliased 1080p Uncharted3/Killzone3 standard graphics from the getgo and nothing more... i guess i hoped and asked way too much for the new Nintendo.
I haven't blamed anyone, players have every rights to complain (with courtesy
) about a system, you're mixing people up For the quotes, i'm only assuming the ownership of the "balanced system" and "promising future", and it's the case, dev "just" have to properly use it. (But then, i'm criticizing Nintendo in two threads about how they shouldn't have overlooked how third-party port teams with moderate to low resources would well exploit or not their dev kit + development tools). For the eDram also (because we've heard comments from developers praising the memory layout of the system, and no complaints from studios about this department). About the GPGPU, i think i never said one thing about it, i don't have info on it.
And concerning your long steak of issues, yes there aren't normal. But you also forgot clever gamepad (core feature of the system) implementations in a lot of games, solid launch line up with fun, great and unique experiences on NintendoLand or ZombiU for example, a quick browser, and other neat points.
Let's hope most of those problems will be quickly fixed.
tinfoilhatman
all of my posts are my avatar
THIS.....I really didn't think that was too much to ask for a 400$ game console 6 years newer than the competition :-(
Do you think WiiU would have suffered had they tried to port CODII or PDZ to it? Both were launch games for 360. Do you think ACIII would have been able on the 360 with a framerate in the double digits 7 years ago?
This is new hardware. Even Nintendo is still figuring it out. Developers need time, and these launch ports didn't get time, didn't get large studio's and WiiU certainly wasn't the lead platform. The Darksiders II team that started porting the game to WiiU was 5 people! Sure, devs have learned universal techniques over the past 7 years that will also apply to WiiU development, but they don't know the console like they do after having developed for it for 7 years.
You have to realize that WiiU is a new platform with a very small userbase and publishers and developers know the money to be made during launch is limited. There are 60 million XB360's out there, and 3 days ago, there were zero WiiU's out there. What version of the game do you think will get the most attention?
So unless you think the WiiU version got the same budget, team size, development time and hardware architecture doesn't matter... there is no reason to believe it has hit its ceiling during launch or anywhere near.
The Abominable Snowman
Member
IMO no. With EDRAM, it'll be used to make what was already drawn prettier by adding effects post-processing for the most part. I'm sure there will be different uses in this case with main RAM being so slow, like for example a dev might elect to use it to make an object or two on screen have nice detailed hi-res textures or to run a awesome lighting map. 32MB is too small to have too much going on though. It can be used for simpler tasks like "free" AA but it seems like in the first round devs elected to either make use of it elsewhere or not use it at all. Based on the amount of normal mapping in the 3rd party games, I think devs used the eDRAM to get a bit more definition and normal mapping (Or maybe to keep it the same as the HD twins) and a bit of aniso. Lighting might also be crunched into eDRAM, but im not sure, because 32MB is a tiny bit of space for that, but lightmaps do need fast bandwidth access
The Wii U will excel in Nintendo's use, because looking at Nintendo games, they all seem to be simpler, smaller scenes. Sprawling battlefields, dozens of detailed characters/objects or insanely detailed corridors might not work as well on the Wii U, but for something like Zelda or Metroid, it'll probably look arguably better than things found on the 360 and PS3. Games like that will take advantage of the modernized GPU, dont need a musclebound CPU, don't have millions of things onscreen, doesn't make overly dramatic use of lighting and selfshadowing, etc, etc and will basically "fit" in the slower bandwidth speed and eDRAM.
just compare the PC's HD 4650 cards with a fat memory pipe (Full height cards) to the ones released halfheight with a much slower pipe to RAM onboard, and look at the games that didnt fare so well. Everything took a huge universal hit, but games like FEAR and Crysis took an even bigger hit, much worse than the degradation in framerate in other games.
I haven't blamed anyone, players have every rights to complain (with courtesy
For the quotes, i'm only assuming the ownership of the "balanced system" and "promising future", and it's the case, dev "just" have to properly use it. (But then, i'm criticizing Nintendo in two threads about how they shouldn't have overlooked how third-party port teams with moderate to low resources would well exploit or not their dev kit + development tools). For the eDram also (because we've heard comments from developers praising the memory layout of the system, and no complaints from studios about this department). About the GPGPU, i think i never said one thing about it, i don't have info on it.
Let's hope most of those problems will be quickly fixed.
It was not directed to you but in general to the people who attack other people that rightfully talk about the problems of the console and have second thoughts on it.
I admit that the "balanced hardware" is a quote that originally came from you but it seriously wasn't directed to you.
I sincerely haven't seen any clever implementation of the gamepad that isn't something that we've already seen on ds and other devices or ones that are good at all but maybe i'm not searching enough so i may be wrong but what i can say is that in the whole wii lifetime we only have seen one (arguably two) good implementation of the wiimote and it was from nintendo... history tell us that third party won't spend too much time on searching neat way of using the controller aside from the banal map screen or search something with the touchscreen
Hey i like bologna
Well, not a rosy "akin to PS4/Xbox720" level of power, clearly.
But rosy as a "more distinguishable step over current gen, visually, than what we're witnessing now", yes.
There are released launch day games on Wii U, exclusives, that could be compared to the good-looking xbox360 titles, with in addition 720p resolution, steady 30fps, and intricate use of the gamepad on certain sequence (so another 480p to render). And the teams behind managed to greatly increase what they could do just from a v4 dev kit context to a v5 one, a few months ago. Moreover, they clearly indicated that the learning curve (like any other platform you could say) and potential is here, so what they achieved for their first projects will be noticeably surpassed by their second.
Now, for the ports, it's another matter, undoubtedly disappointing, i expected more.
No problem
Yeah... fortunately that goes both ways ofcourse. This post was just as much about you as it was about BGassassin. Whichever side of the fence you're on.
gundamkyoukai
Member
I don't think anybody is saying this is the ceiling for Wii U but it does not have the brute force to make ports look better without much work .
Do you think that PS4\720 is going to have trouble with last gen ports , chances are that is not going to happen .
Wii U games should look better in time but the question is how much and if it going to matter along with other things .
Oh come on now. bg is busy, and as I have already said he contacted me to say his views on Wii U have not changed even in light of the RAM info.
Nobody ever, not even the most optimistic dreamers, have ever thought the WiiU to be in the league of PS4/720. Since the beginning of the speculation threads, it has always been somewhere between 1.5x and 3.5x jump expectations compared to PS360.
Did the jump from the PS2 or even the GCN to the original xbox matter? Maybe not too much, but the original xbox did manage to get some ports of PC/next gen games that the other two didn't get. So maybe it'll matter enough to ensure a couple of downports, since it will feature at the very least a more modern GPU (like the xbox at the time).