If it's anything like the eDRAM on the Power 7 architecture, probably >100GB/sec.
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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
If it's anything like the eDRAM on the Power 7 architecture, probably >100GB/sec.
Windom Earle
Member
We are down to 43% now? WTF.
DonMigs85
Member
I hope that's true!
Anyway Nintendo still has something in their bag of tricks, I'm sure. Can't wait to see how Mario Kart U and the next 3D Mario look.
AranhaHunter
Banned
So what does this means in terms of real life performance?
Only on spec sheets but in the real world poly performance was a lot closer. There are bottlenecks which stopped the PS2 and Xbox from reaching anywhere near their published peak rates. Whereas the GC had more predictable performance, easily matching published specs and exceeding the PS2 in real games poly performance. Which is why the GC generally had better performance on multi platform games and exclusive titles like Rebel Strike & Star Fox Adventures far exceeded PS2 games at the time.
You can store more in memory but do less with it at a time basically.
I thought Durante put it well with this quote on what it means compared to the lower amount, but faster, memory in the PS360:
Edit:
It had better performance because it had more memory and faster chips. That doesn't mean the poly count wasn't a bottleneck.
Also, just like this gen, comparing exclusives is pointless.
wouldn't edram be in the high tens of GB/s if not higher?
plus if exploited well, its not only faster, but removes reads/writes to main memory too, which puts less burden on the main memory (so you can 'get away' with slower ram)
eg fetch texture from main memory, fuck about with it in the GPU, then write it back to main memory (frame buffer), and eventually write to the screen
with edram you can grab the texture (one hit on main memory), fuck about with it, write it to edram frame buffer (or working space too hopefully), then write to the screen. assuming you do that a ton of times per frame, it can be a big advantage.
MultiCore
Member
If you want to take the port performance at launch as a face value performance measurement, then it's worse than both.
FalsettoVibe
Member
Wait. I'm just starting to read up on Wii U specs. Why is the ram slower than Xbox360? I mean......its 2012 
I know, it's a DizastahWait. I'm just starting to read up on Wii U specs. Why is the ram slower than Xbox360? I mean......its 2012
metalslimer
Member
But why in the world would you ever do that?
DonMigs85
Member
GameCube's RAM was very low-latency, but had only about half the bandwidth of the Xbox's 200MHZ DDR RAM. It was much better than PS2's RDRAM though - almost the same peak bandwidth and much lower latency.
Xbox was really a beast last gen. At one point in development Microsoft even contemplated going with 128MB and leaving the HDD out.
Technically the GC had a slower GPU chip (triangle throughput wise) but it wasn't a bottleneck because it had enough performance to run DX7 level games of the time and it was well balanced with the rest of the chips. Therefore you could easily achieve near peak performance without being slowed down by anything else in the system. A bottleneck is when you have something inherent to the design that acts like a constriction preventing you from using all the chips to their full potential. For example if the GC GPU was too fast, the CPU would not be able to keep up causing bottlenecks.
For example The PS2 GPU had a massive fillrate but you couldn't make effective use of it because you were hampered by a lack of vertex processing power. On the Xbox you were severely bandwidth limited and CPU limited, so you could never achieve anything near the peak throughput in actual games. The GPU was too powerful and therefore under utilized. Those bottlenecks are what kept the Gamecube both competitive and cheaper to produce.
Honestly, there's no logical answer. It's just Nintendo being Nintendo. It's just their hd solution. They don't give a shit about being first in hardware. Japan pays their bills. This is the company who is about 10 years behind in networking experience.Wait. I'm just starting to read up on Wii U specs. Why is the ram slower than Xbox360? I mean......its 2012
Yes. Probably the worst news about the WiiU is this estimated 12.8 GB/s memory. The funny bit is that people buying the WiiU for Christmas probably expect it to be decent step up from current gen.
Iwata has talked about diminishing returns. The WiiU GPU supposedly has a modern feature set. So hopefully they placed some good bets and difference between multiplat PS4/X720 games and the WiiU will be more like the difference between playing Witcher 2 maxed out on a PC and running it on Xbox 360. They are both beautiful.
Vague multipliers have no meaning. It can be up to 4x more powerful in some respects but half as slow in others. The demands of each individual game, plus how well it's optimized for the specific hardware, will determine how it performs compared to the PS360.
I know what a bottleneck is, but I wasn't referring to the architectures of each system, I was talking in comparison to the PS2 and xbox.
Also you're off on some of this. For example, I wouldn't say the xbox was bottlenecked by the CPU at all and a dev here even said the GPU was around 3x faster than what's in the GC. So IF the CPU was a bottleneck in that system, it sure didn't seem like it. Also the PS2's fillrate was essential to the multi-pass rendering the system used.
Actually, I think larger world games wouldn't be badly affected by this. The larger overall ram could help with buffering.
With a game like tekken, in theory you could have nearly 1GB just for two characters and a small environment, and you'd suffer trying to get that much memory read in the space of a frame.
With a streaming engines open world game, more of the ram would be for buffering, so less of the ram would due needed t draw your immediate surroundings, putting less stress on the ram.
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
Residen Evil 4 isn't a exclusive and tells a whole different story.
PS2 peak poly numbers are just wet paper.
It was designed as an exclusive, there's no getting around this fact. That game played to the strength of the GC while PS2 exclusives play to the strengths of the PS2 and would likely not look as good if ported to the GC.
Edit:
I'm sorry but do you have a quote? I forgot what was said.
Basically he said that the memory was slower than 360/ps3 and nobody believed him.
Not sure where was that, I think in the speculation threads. I'm sure a lot of people here remember that.
Watch Dogs is what I'm waiting to see.
Fourth Storm
Member
Oh, we remember. I can only speak for myself, but when arkam said "slow RAM," I took it to mean DDR3 or something w/ a low clock frequency. It's the 64-bit bus that seems truly damning.
Yeah, considering its Unisoft, it should be a lock if its possible on this hardware.
I don't need a direct quote, thanks. I just wasn't on GAF years ago so I was curious. =p
Plinko
Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
I thought that was about 6 months ago. From what we're seeing though, he was absolutely accurate. I remember everyone in the WUST being so hesitant to believe him because of how ridiculous it sounded. Looks like Nintendo went the "ridiculous" route.
do you have any info on the Embedded RAM?
Gamer @ Heart
Member
43% less fun.
This doesn't mean streaming/buffering issues for open world games. The hard disk or disc drive are still the bottleneck there. The only bottleneck here is for processes that start and end in memory (i.e. pre-process filters/transforms such as texture filtering and MSAA).
Fourth Storm
Member
A bit blunt, but I think you hit the nail on the head with the bolded segment. This is Nintendo's HD solution. It's enough power to give all their franchises a significant shot in the arm. When it comes to ports, I think Nintendo still honestly holds to the Wii philosophy. They would rather have unique entries in a series (even if they are spinoffs) that utilize the Gamepad. Next gen ports are not a concern. I think Nintendo's strategy is to rope in a few more core gamers than they had on Wii with this initial batch of 3rd party offerings, and then when those franchises jump to 720/PS4, if 3rd parties feel it is worth it, Wii U will get a unique game ala AC: Liberation on Vita, for example. Hey, at the very least, the Wii U is powerful enough that we won't be stuck with only the rail shooter version of top franchises...right guys?
In what context are they to be taken?
Quoting myself here...anyone know how shaders are applied to a scene? Is the framebuffer rewritten to the memory after every shader pass? Can the framebuffer fit in the EDRAM if that's the case?
Oh wow, I do remember this.
metalslimer
Member
What does that have to do with anything? And yes it looks like arkham has been redeemed with a lot of his statements.
The problem is that Nintendo did not have the PS4 and 720 in mind when they were making the WiiU; it seemed as if all they were focused on is cutting into the third party pie of current gen games.
It might work to their advantage if Sony really wants to bleed out the PS3 for as long as humanly possible without a major jump (and if the 360 recuses in the same manner). But for the most part, this is probably going to be another Wii scenario all over again. Not "doom and gloom" or anything like that, but another case of Nintendo clearly standing quite solitary in their own home console.
the xbox 1 ran half life 2, the question is how much work does it take to run half life 2, and how well.
opticalmace
Member
Someone needs to find a link!
metalslimer
Member
Which not to be doom and gloom, is not a good situation for them in the west because their Wii Sports type sales are over.
Eh, shaders are applied to everything that's rendered and the frame buffer is writtern to for every triangle rendered.
I'm guessing what you're actually meaning to talk about is post effects. In which cast you'll have to have a at least a couple of frame buffers to toggle between while rendering different effects
Father_Brain
Banned
It probably won't be quite as bad as on Wii; I'm sure multiplatform support will benefit at least somewhat from having a modern GPU architecture, but I suspect the lifetime percentage of multiplats received will still end up closer to that of Wii than even GC. (Though I don't think specs are necessarily the primary reason for poor third-party support.)
Nintendo probably could have future-proofed it quite a bit more than they did at a fairly low additional cost, had they not been so set on keeping the size and power draw of the actual console as low as possible. Sigh.
staticneuron
Member
Because it is the only visible point of comparison people can track for now?
In the west, yeah, I agree it's not a good situation to be in. It doesn't help that unlike the Wii, there doesn't seem to be any big "hook" for the casual market this time around. But if worst comes to worse and they find themselves in another 3DS scenario, I wonder what they'll end up doing; Western competition is going to put up an infinitely tougher fight than the Vita is doing for the 3DS and securing things like Monster Hunter might be a boon in Japan, but not so much in the west.
Multiplatform will work better in the short-term for the Wii U much more than it did for the Wii. I just have to wonder exactly how powerful Sony and MS's next steps are going to be, assuming they can even get those out in a time effective fashion (late 2013-ish); if too powerful, the Wii U will become almost as much of a non-issue the Wii was in terms of third party ports later in its life. Of course, if the other two manage to price themselves out of the gaming market or wait around too long for the Wii U to fully establish itself, this may all be not too much of a worry.
PetriP-TNT
Member
I played through Half Life 2 on this computer, 1,4ghz AMD Duron with Geforce MX440SE with 512kbs of RAM. UNDER pre v1.0 WINE. Everything on ultra low, ran decently.
What does that have to do with anything? Nothing really, but cool story me and thanks for listening.
What does that have to do with anything? Nothing really, but cool story me and thanks for listening.