Yeah, that's bullshit.
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Wii U: Not Enough Bandwith?
- Thread starter nordique
- Start date
I see. That sounds like a very bad choice from Nintendo then. Why make it different and harder for developers when getting support is already tricky in the first place?
grimshawish
Banned
Nintendo makes it for their own development teams pretty much.
oh lord
because the architcture should be more similar to the other nextgen consoles, so downports could be possible without rewriting the complete code.
Different doesn't necessarily mean harder. Just that devs haven't yet had the time or experience to really work much magic with the hardware, as they've been doing for years on the PS360.
Portugeezer
Member
Not enough... for what? It has games, it plays games.
TheDrowningMan
Member
That is partially true. It's also true that PS2 wasn't technically inferior in (many) ways to Dreamcast, despite what pretty much every port from said system implied.
That might have been your first mistake.
Saint Gregory
Member
As soon as I read this I knew exactly who posted it without even having to glance over to the username. I have to tip my hat to your persistence however.
tkscz
Member
Wsippel, my dear friend wsippel, my good buddy wsippel, please learn to ignore USC-fan.
OT: Some good news about the WiiU with a title that makes it sound like bad news for the WiiU? Ingenious! Not even being sarcastic about this one.
chertipros
Member
Did you read the article or just look at the title?
)pieatorium
Member
It's not really news though is it? I'm not that far through the whole thing but isn't this just ideamans speculation.
Well, the hypothesis part that is small, yes. The rest, no, it's facts, and there is a part in the second half with statements from two different Wii U developers + a little comment from Hynix at the end also.
tkscz
Member
Ok it's not really news, but it's a little more than just speculation as well. What's said is very well possible to do with the WiiU's RAM, but, and I feel sad saying this, I doubt many devs will even use it that way. Most 3rd party devs aren't now and look at what we get.
pieatorium
Member
Facts about Ram in general though, not so much the WiiU theres an awful lot of speculation in the main body of the article which contains an lot of coulds and mights.
I wouldn't hold up developer comments as a beacon of truth either with how things like Darksiders turned out in relation to the comments they made.
Which comments they made?
pieatorium
Member
WiiU version will be the best because of the consoles power or something alog those lines. DF analysis had it as the worst performing.
They never said that...
Relaxed Muscle
Member
Too much tech text, need a simple explanation
Thanks Durante, basically what a lot of people have been thinking all this time.
Thanks Durante, basically what a lot of people have been thinking all this time.
Unless someone from Vigil claimed the Wii-U version would be the best, I don't see how their comments condradict with the results.
IMO most dev comments are taken out of context or too vague to avoid making headlines for the sites desperate for fanboy hits.
Well, the title of the article is a question, of course there is a certain amount of interrogation and introduction of the several scenarios possible, etc.
And yes, you can't take what they are saying for granted, but it really seems RAM bandwidth isn't an issue, we haven't heard complaints about it since one year, and now, when specifically asked about it, two very different developers, one anonymous who could have literally bash Nintendo, are confirming this.
pieatorium
Member
It seems you are right they did say WiiU was more powerful but only that the game might be the best version not that it is the best.l
TheChewyWaffles
Member
dayyyyyyyyyyuum.gif
Is anyone release surprised by this?
Nintendo have been known to be build efficient consoles. The Gamecube imho was one of the best engineered consoles of all time. On paper it was clearly inferior to the Xbox, yet in the real world the two consoles were far more evenly matched.
The Gamecube featured eDRAM, something we've seen the Xbox 360, Wii, and now Wii U feature. Its IBM PPC Gekko CPU featured double the cache of the Xbox's Intel CPU, and from all accounts despite being clocked almost half that of the Xbox's CPU it was superior in many ways. Its memory was arguarbly the best of that generation with its 1T-SRAM providing high bandwidth and low latency. The Gamecube still had less RAM then the Xbox, but due to its higher bandwidth and lower latency along with some fantastic texture compression tech from ATi the Gamecube was if anything superior in this regard. The Cube's bus configuration betwen memory, GPU, CPU, was incredibly efficient.
I'm not at all surprised to hear that in the real world the Wii U's memory bandwidth is not an issue. The CPU has as significantly larger amount of cache vs the Xbox 360 and PS3, and it also features a very short pipeline and out of order which should help prevent stalls. The MCM likely has allowed for a significantly higher bus speed between the CPU and GPU vs the HD Twins. The 32 megabytes of eDRAM on the GPU is of course a big help, so too the increased register count for the GPU iteself. No doubt like other Nintendo consoles AMD have provided some efficient texture compression and other related hardware features to again reduce bandwidth and data sizes. Then there's the MEM1 pool which by all accounts has significantly lower latenacy then the Xbox 360 and PS3's, is also bidirectional, and with double the amount of physical memory available developers should again be able to significantly reduce memory I/O.
As per the OPs post, in the real world the Xbox 360's memory is not capable of 22 gigabytes per second or anywhere near that. The Xbox 360's bus maxes out at around 10 gigabytes per second each way, and it's bandwidth is even lower then 10 gigabytes per second when factor in over heads and stalls. The Xbox 360 also has less then 512 megabytes of RAM available to games, from memory its around 468 megabytes. This is in comparison to the Wii U's 1024 megabytes which is available to developers. A lot more memory swapping and I/O would need to occur on the Xbox 360 to over come its smaller memory capacity, where as with the Wii U developers can reduce memory reads and writes as they can store significnatly more data at a time.
Nintendo have been known to be build efficient consoles. The Gamecube imho was one of the best engineered consoles of all time. On paper it was clearly inferior to the Xbox, yet in the real world the two consoles were far more evenly matched.
The Gamecube featured eDRAM, something we've seen the Xbox 360, Wii, and now Wii U feature. Its IBM PPC Gekko CPU featured double the cache of the Xbox's Intel CPU, and from all accounts despite being clocked almost half that of the Xbox's CPU it was superior in many ways. Its memory was arguarbly the best of that generation with its 1T-SRAM providing high bandwidth and low latency. The Gamecube still had less RAM then the Xbox, but due to its higher bandwidth and lower latency along with some fantastic texture compression tech from ATi the Gamecube was if anything superior in this regard. The Cube's bus configuration betwen memory, GPU, CPU, was incredibly efficient.
I'm not at all surprised to hear that in the real world the Wii U's memory bandwidth is not an issue. The CPU has as significantly larger amount of cache vs the Xbox 360 and PS3, and it also features a very short pipeline and out of order which should help prevent stalls. The MCM likely has allowed for a significantly higher bus speed between the CPU and GPU vs the HD Twins. The 32 megabytes of eDRAM on the GPU is of course a big help, so too the increased register count for the GPU iteself. No doubt like other Nintendo consoles AMD have provided some efficient texture compression and other related hardware features to again reduce bandwidth and data sizes. Then there's the MEM1 pool which by all accounts has significantly lower latenacy then the Xbox 360 and PS3's, is also bidirectional, and with double the amount of physical memory available developers should again be able to significantly reduce memory I/O.
As per the OPs post, in the real world the Xbox 360's memory is not capable of 22 gigabytes per second or anywhere near that. The Xbox 360's bus maxes out at around 10 gigabytes per second each way, and it's bandwidth is even lower then 10 gigabytes per second when factor in over heads and stalls. The Xbox 360 also has less then 512 megabytes of RAM available to games, from memory its around 468 megabytes. This is in comparison to the Wii U's 1024 megabytes which is available to developers. A lot more memory swapping and I/O would need to occur on the Xbox 360 to over come its smaller memory capacity, where as with the Wii U developers can reduce memory reads and writes as they can store significnatly more data at a time.
A
A More Normal Bird
Unconfirmed Member
This is like buying a Merc as a cost saving measure because you can't fit your golf clubs in your Mini.
There's so much wrong with this post, I'm not sure where to start or if there's even a point considering how your mind is already made up.
chertipros
Member
Wait, Idea Man wrote this? Hmmmmmm. Interesting
Hey this is my article
I've written it one month ago but because of my PC problems + busy irl it was postponed to now.
I want to thanks several gafers, particularly blu and Alstrong, but also Thraktor, Durante and Popstar for their insight.
I hope you find this interesting.
pfft, no shout out to me? last time I ever help your candy ass!
But as he said, it's not speculation, most of it are facts he dug up.
I'd be interested if you or someone else that's technically inclined, can point out what's false about his post.
All this hardware talk since launch as been thoroughly educational.
Relative good news. Its not as bad as we though it was, but its still bad for 2012 console.
Moral Panic
Member
Not really good news, just speculation and supposition.
Their absolute objective was to create small, quiet, and cheap console that is good enough for "hd gaming". They made one.
FreedomFighter
Member
I think it'll make us forget about how much we discussed the speed of the RAM and all the bottlenecks and whatnot.
We'll be absolutely floored.
Haha
Gaf seems to completely misunderstand why I and a few others made NES. It literally started out as a summer distraction and a possible forum for several banned gaf members who frequented the IRC. Emily ended up hitting it big out of nowhere with some key interviews and suddenly everyone thought NES was supposed to be some kind of startup gaming journalism site. But really it's just a place where people can submit editorials and have them posted on something a little more formal than a message board. Our "staff" is made up of like 3 people who do work in their spare time. We have zero ads and have no intention of making the site for-profit. All of our articles are amateur submissions.
And now that Emily is no longer writing, it's going to be mostly editorials with an occasional user submitted review. It's relatively easy now for us to net interviews with indie devs but that's about it. NES is not a meant to be professional journalism! It's just a pet project a bunch of people who ad a desire to write put together for fun!
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