Interesting. That's pretty close to my expectations (1460/ 490).
Well known hardware hacker and former member of Team Twiizers, the guys responsible for the Wii Homebrew Channel.
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Rumor: Wii U final specs
- Thread starter EatChildren
- Start date
Plinko
Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
Translation?
famous hacker
lightchris
Member
1.25 GHz CPU clock with larger caches is about what I expected (though I'd hoped for ~1.5 GHz). Certainly not what you'd call powerful, but at least significantly more powerful than Broadway. 
Sadly, 550 MHz GPU clock doesn't tell much.
Sadly, 550 MHz GPU clock doesn't tell much.
https://twitter.com/marcan42/statuses/274129689705058305
marcan said:@digitalfoundry sorry, I'd rather not talk about how I got that yet. It doesn't involve leaks, it involves Wii U hacks
Wow. That was quick.
1.25 GHz CPU clock with larger caches is about what I expected (though I'd hoped for ~1.5 GHz). Certainly not what you'd call powerful, but at least significantly more powerful than Broadway.
Sadly, 550 MHz GPU clock doesn't tell much.
so it was 3Xbroadway.
lwilliams3
Member
Thanks for the link. If that is true, Matt and Lherre wasn't kidding when they said not to think too much about multipliers.
Very heavily modified. 750CL is inherently unsuited for SMP.
hehe
Also Espresso on B3D with "the clock is much closer to Broadway than to PS360). I didn't believe it to be THIS close though
The CPU should suck around 1W (a guess!), I really don't know why they saved that much on it.
DeuceGamer
Member
Finally getting some details. Interested to read what this means from those that frequently speculate in here. I normally lurk since it can be a dangerous thread as a junior
Also I find it interesting that it's from a Wii U hack according to the marcan. Maybe he's speaking about Wii mode, but he said Wii U.
Also I find it interesting that it's from a Wii U hack according to the marcan. Maybe he's speaking about Wii mode, but he said Wii U.
3 cores. so 3x3 Wii if you're going off that.. And you have a separate DSP to handle audio, which a lot of times a core on the 360 is busy with handling.
lightchris
Member
We don't know how much has been chagend or added exactly (obviously besides multicore capatibility), but I wouldn't expect wonders. They wouldn't have reworked the pipeline completely.
The clock is 70% higher. Together with the larger caches and maybe a few other enhancements I'd say roughly 6x Broadway.
Also, is there something I am missing or does the CPU sound terribly underpowered? Didn't the 360 use a tri-core 3.2Ghz CPU? I'm aware that GHz are far from everything, but just a third of 360's clockspeed doesn't sound good at all.
Is the GHz number this meaningless or is the Wii U CPU just a terribly underpowered piece of hardware?
Is the GHz number this meaningless or is the Wii U CPU just a terribly underpowered piece of hardware?
But how does it work on PC games which usually have various settings for detail, textures, resolution and so on?
Honest question, I'd really like to know (I thought we were talking about similar issues but again, I'm not a professional game programmer).
Wii had a DSP as well.
lightchris
Member
GHz are not entirely meaningless, but there can still be huge differences between CPUs which run at the same clock speed. For a example, a modern Sandy/Ivy Bridge core from Intel is about 3 times as fast as a Pentium 4 core in games (when running at same clock speeds).
Xenon (360's CPU) uses in-order execution and is quite slow per GHz. Slower then Broadway for sure, but the difference isn't as big as between P4 and Ivy Bridge. It's not easy to come with practical benchmarks here of course, and it depends on the specific application.
DeuceGamer
Member
Normally, when I hear rumors that are consistently the same I have to believe that they have some type of basis in reality. We've heard things about the CPU for a while.
I'm sure some will say this is confirmation that Wii U isn't as powerful as PS360. I still find that hard to believe with all things considered and the first round of ports are close to PS360 and in some cases equal.
deathkiller
Member
Depends on the CPU but is extremely unlikely that that it will have better Floatpoint power per clock that the 360 CPU (Wii cores had half power per clock) so anything that requires, for example, 3D computations will be slow (part of the AI, Animations and Physics) for other things it will be more or less the same.
Thrillhouse
Member
Everything Arkham said has been spot on so far. Funny how no one wanted to belive him back in the days.
Always-honest
Banned
Not funny at all. It was only logical not to believe this.
GhostTrick
Banned
Wow... 3 PowerPC750 cores ? Isn't it like Gekko core ?
JordanN
Banned
I'm comparing a whole range of games. I wouldn't use Nano Assault for this though (when it comes to shadows).
Now here's my idea of a game that does shadows better.
The only thing it loses against LOU is they're not soft shadows. But every object has a shadow. Zoom in and there are even self shadows (the windows). All while pushing extensive motion blur and having subtle depth of field near the edge of each level.
I agree, it shouldn't be ignored. But remember what you were replying to.phosphor112 said:
I haven't played Nano Assault on Wii U but if the 3DS version is a precedent, I doubt they made the levels uber compact like Naughty Dog did. Nintendo land is almost the same deal. The main plaza is quite spacious. Some of the minigames too I guess (Mario Chase and Animal Crossing Sweet Day).
grimshawish
Banned
This is my view. Based on final output these specs are proven to not be the full story at all. Otherwise were talking mid-way between a Wii/360 (in some cases lesser).
Yet end of generation ports had mixed results; yes most had issues but didn't ME3 match the PS3 version?
Something is going on behind the scenes here. I'd ask in the other thread but that has become more a 'see number: comment' without actually trying to figure out what this thing can produce.
So: Why would you move to have 2GB's of RAM in a system thats running on all the other specs we know about? Working backwards can this tell us anything?
lightchris
Member
Mainly because DDR3 is very cheap nowadays, and having more RAM makes work a lot easier for developers. It's not like 360 and PS3 couldn't make use of more RAM, it was simply a matter of cost saving back then.
Still, I agree that the first round of ports prove that Wii U isn't necessarily slower than PS360. In some cases there will be advantages in the future due to the stronger GPU, but I doubt that most poeple will find that really noticeable.
What? The wii homebrew scene is the only redeeming factor of the console (besides games of course)
Backfoggen
Banned
That's what shadow mapping does. And I think TW101 doesn't even use shadow mapping a lot of it seems pre-baked, which only makes sense with the fixed perspective and 60 fps.
^ see the shadows overlapping
The Wii U is essentially as powerful as what MS put out in 2005. It's up to you whether or not you consider that underpowered.
Risk Breaker
Member
Are you even sure that the environment shadows are real-time?
BTW do you even know about the soft indirect shadowing in The Last of Us? That's not simply "soft shadowing" and obviously a lot more advanced than self shadowing. I think you are trying too hard.
Backfoggen
Banned
I'm talking about the effects you mentioned, we've already seen them in games around 2006. Dead Rising had impressive object-based motion blur in 2006 + DoF.
phosphor112
Banned
Did they say what features? I'm assuming graphical. I can't imagine anything behind the "smoke and mirrors" that the 360/PS3 can't do.
JordanN
Banned
I remember seeing a video where alot of the environment is destructible. I have to see it again.
I'm not saying those effects are new.
dsmoke1986
Member
Guys, why are you debating the menutia so much?? Does it really matter if WiiU is slightly overpowered or underpowered compared to the current gen systems?
Games on PC now can run the spectrum from low settings on low res, to ultra settings on 1920 x 1200p; the variation there is huge, if there is a market for the WiiU, developers will figure out a way to port over their new franches, like Star Wars 1212 to make if playable on the WiiU.
I know most of this is tech talk, but the underlying point shouldn't be lost that the WiiU will be able to host some good 3rd party games...Whether they choose to support the system or not remains to be seen.
However, I think even if next gen systems hit in the next 2 years, there will still be a lot of people sticking with PS3 and 360, as the installed base of users is extremely high. The Next gen systems will be playing the Ultra 1920x1080p versions of the software, while the PS3/WiiU/360 will play the low to mid setting/720p versions...
Games on PC now can run the spectrum from low settings on low res, to ultra settings on 1920 x 1200p; the variation there is huge, if there is a market for the WiiU, developers will figure out a way to port over their new franches, like Star Wars 1212 to make if playable on the WiiU.
I know most of this is tech talk, but the underlying point shouldn't be lost that the WiiU will be able to host some good 3rd party games...Whether they choose to support the system or not remains to be seen.
However, I think even if next gen systems hit in the next 2 years, there will still be a lot of people sticking with PS3 and 360, as the installed base of users is extremely high. The Next gen systems will be playing the Ultra 1920x1080p versions of the software, while the PS3/WiiU/360 will play the low to mid setting/720p versions...
Based on comments from guys like Reggie, people thought they would be getting decent down ports from Orbis and Durango, and now that its less of a reality so they're a bit disappointed which is understandable.
If you look at my post history though, you'll see I always expected the system to be relatively underpowered so I've already come to terms with the fact that once again it will be primarily a system to play Nintendo games.
If you look at my post history though, you'll see I always expected the system to be relatively underpowered so I've already come to terms with the fact that once again it will be primarily a system to play Nintendo games.
Sure it wasn't the voxel based game coming out. I forgot the name but that term alone and google search by history should make it easy to find.
I never said that. Neither did i imply or meant to say that. But the argument that WiiU is only as powerful as PS360 because launch ports of games that were made after 6 years of development expertise on that specific hardware, don't look any better (generally on par with PS3 ports since 360 is usually lead platform) or slightly worse, is asinine. I'm not even arguing that the WiiU is all that much more powerful. But these techniques alone don't account for the massive jump from Perfect Dark Zero, to Halo 4.
Mass Effect 3 wasn't that far off of the 360 version and already better than the PS3 version. The same team is supposedly working on two other WiiU games. One being an exclusive. Let's see if we can notice improvements due to experience of working on ME3.
To put it more clearly, so that Log4Girlz can actually wrap his head around it: how well would ME3, AC3, Batman etc... have looked or ran on PS3, had those developers not have 6 years experience on that hardware, nor have been able to borrow info other than what was known about the platform 6 years ago and working under the same conditions as the studio's porting WiiU games. I wonder if Mass Effect 3 would reach 10 FPS.
Apophis2036
Banned
So how many GFLOPs can a 2011, 550Mhz GPU push realistically ?.
Good news about the CPU using such a low amount of electricity, all the more for the GPU to use.
Still waiting on the eDRAM speed though, shouldn't the guy that hacked it be able to get that info too ?.
Good news about the CPU using such a low amount of electricity, all the more for the GPU to use.
Still waiting on the eDRAM speed though, shouldn't the guy that hacked it be able to get that info too ?.
lightchris
Member
It scales linearly with the number of streaming processors (which we still don't know). Realistically, if you look at the die size and take the eDRAM into account, it should be between 300 and 500 GFLOPs imo.
Btw., 2011 is not confirmed as far as I know. May still be a R700 type GPU (that's 2008). The feature set described in the OP would hint to that.
~400 on the low end, ~580 on the higher end.
Some people (Thraktor) much smarter than I about this stuff expect about 440 shaders, so that would be 484Gflops, BG assumed 480 shaders, so it would be 528.
lightchris Whether it's R700 or even R900(northern islands/HD 6000) the efficiency per watt wouldn't change, both are around 12GFLOPs/Watt @ 40nm, but given that includes GDDR5, and desktop GPUs being designed with other things beyond power saving in mind, you'd see that number increase. If BG or the other highly intelligent NeoGAF poster (Thraktor) is right (given the actual size of the GPU 120mm^2+ for gpu silicon, it's likely they are) Then Wii U's GPU reaches ~16GFLOPs/Watt or in BG's case, ~17.5GFLOPs/Watt. Both of these numbers are less efficient than R700 mobile parts, so they are very realistic considering the maturity of 40nm and Wii U's customizations.