http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...-slow-cpu-claim-but-developer-concern-remains
THQ
DICE
Omega Force (Tecmo Koei)
Digital Foundry Chief
THQ
Yesterday Eurogamer spoke with THQ's Huw Beynon, who works full time as a representative of 4A Games and Metro, to expand on Shishkovtsov's comment. [Note: Eurogamer did not talk to the guy who made the comment and is the Chief Technical Officer of 4A Games.]
“It's a very CPU intensive game. I think it's been verified by plenty of other sources, including your own Digital Foundry guys, that the CPU on Wii U on the face of it isn't as fast as some of the other consoles out there. Lots of developers are finding ways to get around that because of other interesting parts of the platform.
“I think that what frustrates me about the way the story's been spun out is that there's been no opportunity to say, 'Well, yes, on that one individual piece maybe it's not as... maybe his opinion is that it's not as easy for the way that the 4A engine's been built as is the others."
“But I understand that there's a real appetite in the media at the moment because the Wii U is a hot topic to spam some stories that are going to attract a lot of links if they present it in a certain way.”
“We looked at Wii U as a target platform,” Beynon said. "It's a really small studio. There were 50 for Metro 2033, there are 80 now. With Metro 2033 most of their experience was with the PC. The Xbox 360 was their first console version. We've now added PlayStation 3 to the mix."
“We genuinely looked at what it would take to bring the game to Wii U. It's certainly possible, and it's something we thought we'd like to do. The reality is that would mean a dedicated team, dedicated time and effort, and it would either result in a detriment to what we're trying to focus on, already adding a PlayStation 3 SKU, or we probably wouldn't be able to do the Wii U version the justice that we'd want."
DICE
Last night Gustav Halling, lead designer on Battlefield 3: Armored Kill at Swedish studio DICE, backed up Shishkovtsov, saying on Twitter he was concerned about the impact the next Xbox and PlayStation will have on the Wii U and "annoyed" that Nintendo "don't think ahead at all".
“This is also what I been hearing within the industry, too bad since it will shorten its life a lot when new gen starts,” he said.
“GPU and RAM is nice to have shaders/textures loaded. Physics and gameplay run on CPU mostly so player count is affected etc.”
“I don't actually know what makes it slow, but enough 'tech' people I trust in world are saying the same things.”
But, “Should be a great fun platform if you are a Nintendo fan the coming years and the memory and GPU part looks good!”
Omega Force (Tecmo Koei)
Eurogamer said:At the Tokyo Game Show in September, Akihiro Suzuki, producer of the Dynasty Warriors franchise, told Eurogamer the performance of the Wii U version of Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper was impacted by it.
"For games in the Warriors series, including Dynasty Warriors and Warriors Orochi, when you have a lot of enemies coming at you at once, the performance tends to be affected because of the CPU,” he said.
"Dealing with that is a challenge."
Digital Foundry Chief
“Outside of dev circles the Wii U CPU is a bit of a mystery. Just about the only confirmed facts are that IBM has produced it and it's been fabricated on a 45nm process - just like the combined CPU/GPU in the Xbox 360."
“Based on rough calculations, the Wii U CPU occupies the same amount of silicon - and so has a roughly similar amount number of transistors - as a single Xbox 360 core in the Xenon tri-core processor. Transistor count alone can't be used to judge 'power' as such (though that's what Moore's Law is based on) but it's safe to say there'd need to be a huge amount of efficiency gains to produce anything like the same amount of processing power as the 360 with that silicon budget."
Leadbetter added: "While we're on the subject of power, it is worth pointing out that an Xbox 360 Slim draws around 70 watts from the mains. The Wii U is closer to 35 watts. In terms of overall performance from power consumed, that's rather impressive.”