theprodigy
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Log4Girlz vs DragonSworne, battle of the jaded Wii U supporters turned haters
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WiiU "Latte" GPU Die Photo - GPU Feature Set And Power Analysis
- Thread starter Thraktor
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Log4Girlz vs DragonSworne, battle of the jaded Wii U supporters turned haters
I have to ask, since I don't know much about hardware, is this good news? Does it mean the console might be a little better than previously thought? Weren't some developers saying it only ran the open GL equivalent of DirectX 10.1?
OG_Original Gamer
Member
Bg would more than likely squash this rumor or what you want to call it.
Fourth Storm
Member
So much incorrect here. Enough is enough. It's amazing, yes, but nobody outside the dev community knows more about Wii U's innards than some of the people in this thread. It's a DX 10.1 equivalent part. No power 7 architecture. It's not a TSMC part. People need to just...stop with the nonsense.
Correct. It's not DX 11 equivalent. And it's SM 4.1 (IIRC)
What other nonsense has been flying around? Did I miss some juicy garbage?!
Yeah that list is mostly guff. A lot is just purged from the various speculation threads here and elsewhere.
The only similarity to power 7 is that the CPU can access the eDRAM as a cache according to Shin'en (which I think was a major boon for power7 at the time??), but it certainly wasn't "based" on it or anything like though.
The list reads like a 'Best Of WiiU Speculation 2013' compilation or something. Not worth posting here.
We know that it has at least some DX11 equivalent features due to the logs from Slightly Mad Studios for Project CARS, don't we..? Unless I've missed something..?
prag16
Banned
I thought you'd know as well as anyone at this point that saying "10.1 equivalent part, period" isn't quite the whole story, no? Don't feed into the very misinformation cycle you're trying to combat. Just saying...
A
A More Normal Bird
Unconfirmed Member
AMD R700 DX10.1 equivalent hardware + closed box & custom API = DX11 featureset, pretty much.
Fourth Storm
Member
What other nonsense has been flying around? Did I miss some juicy garbage?!
Yeah that list is mostly guff. A lot is just purged from the various speculation threads here and elsewhere.
The only similarity to power 7 is that the CPU can access the eDRAM as a cache according to Shin'en (which I think was a major boon for power7 at the time??), but it certainly wasn't "based" on it or anything like though.
The list reads like a 'Best Of WiiU Speculation 2013' compilation or something. Not worth posting here.
True, haha. As for other nonsense, it's not so much in this thread as elsewhere on the net these days (check out the Latte Wikipedia page for example).
We should also probably specify that MEM1 isn't really a cache. It doesn't move data to and fro automatically like a cache does. For the CPU, I believe Shin'en called it a "scratchpad." POWER7's eDRAM is on-die L3 cache, so I don't think there's much comparison. The CPU's L2 is eDRAM, but that's also a different function from POWER7, so I find most mentions of that architecture do more harm than good.
Yeah, pretty much this. Although I wonder how the GX2 updates are coming along. Last I heard, compute shaders weren't fully enabled.
OG_Original Gamer
Member
What's been bugging me is SMS use of multi threaded rendering. Was this not available before system launch and has now been enabled in GX2?
Another thing that crossed my mine is Espresso having a core with eDRAM and its purpose being,"decompression".
Another thing that crossed my mine is Espresso having a core with eDRAM and its purpose being,"decompression".
I've been trying to follow this thread, but it's been so confusing for the past 10-20 pages. What is the deal with the 160 shader number everyone keeps throwing around? Is it lower than what we though it was supposed to be? What was the number people were expecting it to be around?
And lastly, do you guys think Nano Assault looks better than Super Stardust HD?
And lastly, do you guys think Nano Assault looks better than Super Stardust HD?
lwilliams3
Member
Fourth Storm was pretty sure about that number for awhile now, while others weren't as certain but considered that as a possibility. Only a few people posted, afaik, didn't take what fourth said in consideration.
The issue some people, including me at a certain point, don't think that a GPU with 160 shader units shouldn't be showing the results that we are seeing in some of the newer games and/or the size of certain parts of the die seems to bigger we would have expected it to be.
phosphor112
Banned
I still don't see why people keep trying to nail it as DX anything.
The API it uses is GX2 and I thought that was based on OpenGL. The feature set avilable in it could be anything for all we know.
So far, I've never seen a change log list it as using a DX10 implementation of something for anything. Its always listed as using DX11 features specifically. There also that one Project C.A.R.S. where it listed the PS4 and Wii U version being updated with the exact same exact update at the same time. Would be odd for them to be using DX10 on the PS4, or PS4 features on the supposedly less featured Wii U. This is all that can be confirmed from what I've come across.
Anything aside form that is pure subjective guessing in my opinion.
prag16
Banned
The hardware from which it's derived was originally released during the 10.1 "era".
So while saying "it's a DX 10.1 part" isn't wholly inaccurate, it's also a little disingenuous just leaving it at that.
Looking closely, the shots don't appear to have any AA. Doesn't mean many of them don't look extremely nice.
I know this isn't the thread for it, bit if anyone's interested I uploaded ton of NFS U screens here.
http://thevgpress.com/forumtopics/t...ow-in-hd_2476_3.html&perPage=20#comment179323
This game is fairly depressing. I didn't even think it looked that good when I played it. But can you imagine if all Wii U ports used high resolution textures like this? It took Criterion 10 minutes work to flip a PC textures switch in their pipeline. What's more depressing is that this is an open world game you scream across at 190 mph and there are no framerate problems, no loading problems. The world loads once when you start the game and you can drive anywhere with no further loading. If they can do this in open world then imagine what smaller games in smaller environments could look like? Bah.
http://thevgpress.com/forumtopics/t...ow-in-hd_2476_3.html&perPage=20#comment179323
This game is fairly depressing. I didn't even think it looked that good when I played it. But can you imagine if all Wii U ports used high resolution textures like this? It took Criterion 10 minutes work to flip a PC textures switch in their pipeline. What's more depressing is that this is an open world game you scream across at 190 mph and there are no framerate problems, no loading problems. The world loads once when you start the game and you can drive anywhere with no further loading. If they can do this in open world then imagine what smaller games in smaller environments could look like? Bah.
francisnobleman
Banned
I know this isn't the thread for it, bit if anyone's interested I uploaded ton of NFS U screens here.
http://thevgpress.com/forumtopics/t...ow-in-hd_2476_3.html&perPage=20#comment179323
This game is fairly depressing. I didn't even think it looked that good when I played it. But can you imagine if all Wii U ports used high resolution textures like this? It took Criterion 10 minutes work to flip a PC textures switch in their pipeline. What's more depressing is that this is an open world game you scream across at 190 mph and there are no framerate problems, no loading problems. The world loads once when you start the game and you can drive anywhere with no further loading. If they can do this in open world then imagine what smaller games in smaller environments could look like? Bah.
Top and bottom images seem to be void of any tesselation (?).
But I really can't tell about the central one with rocks. Seems like it's using some sort DX11 feature to bump the... bumps ?
Extreme tech noob in here. Reply with caution and simple wording. Thanks.
prag16
Banned
I think you're thinking of displacement mapping.
Tessellation is for smoothing out blocky objects making poly counts appear higher than they actually are.
I think.
Yeah... it's like a real time subdivision modifier. Devs don't use it a lot because it's hard to control. Maybe you'd want to have it applied to a certain part of a mesh, but not the other part(s) (not everything is supposed to be rounded off). At least that's how i understand. It is also used in combination with normal displacement maps i believe, for terrain and rocks, to get better results and better detail from the map. Maybe that's where the confusion comes from.
Edit: see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uavLefzDuQ
Edit: see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uavLefzDuQ
Indeed. Every once in a while someone comes by and posts what some website compiled as the "official" Wii U specs list, but glaring problems with their information prove they don't know anything special that we don't. Another issue is it says the 4MB embedded memory is used for the gamepad, but there's 2MB eDRAM and 1MB SRAM in split pools. Them being used for the gamepad would be interesting though.
The hastag fact sure adds to their credibility :/
Did they actually say the 32MB eDRAM? Because the CPU has eDRAM on its own, that's a feature from Power7 right there. The Xbox ONe CPU can't actually directly access the 32MB eSRAM on the GPU, it has to copy to main memory first, so the memory is completely dedicated to GPU. Do we know which case is true here? If it's also true that the eDRAM can be accessed at 32(or whatever)GB/s, I'm not sure splitting it would be ideal anymore, as you'd want the GPU to have all the bandwidth if it's that little.
Before we had the picture on the first page, yes, 160 was considerably lower than we were expecting (iirc before the launch and teardowns, people were citing 320 shaders as poor, 480 as decent, 5** as good, etc). but since we got the picture, most reasonable people were saying 160 all along, and there were only a few 320 shader holdouts. Then we got more confirmation of 160.
Watching that video makes me think that Super Mario 3D World and Bayonetta 2 are both using tessellation. Could explain how everything looks so round in the former and how everything looks so high poly in the latter. I've thought that Bayonetta 2 has been using it since we first saw it.
What do you all think..?
Really? I can a lot of aliasing in some shots, but many don't seem to have any apparent aliasing.
Take this shot for example:
Maybe it depends on the level?
Yeah I can see that going on in the background, but I just wondered.
That's weird actually.Really? I can a lot of aliasing in some shots, but many don't seem to have any apparent aliasing.
Take this shot for example:
Some edges that look reasonably clean are either aligned perfectly with the pixel grid, or else are highly rotated relative to it. Edges that don't fit the criteria, like on the lower left of the block, sometimes appear to have no antialiasing.
But then there are edges like the upper left of the block... I'm not sure what's going on there. Would be nice to have a WiiU in front of me so I could see what it looks like in motion.
phosphor112
Banned
That's weird actually.
Some edges that look reasonably clean are either aligned perfectly with the pixel grid, or else are highly rotated relative to it. Edges that don't fit the criteria, like on the lower left of the block, sometimes appear to have no antialiasing.
But then there are edges like the upper left of the block... I'm not sure what's going on there. Would be nice to have a WiiU in front of me so I could see what it looks like in motion.
It doesn't make sense to me.
Nintendo is known to use various FX only where it's absolutely necessary, or for gameplay & functionality purposes. I don't know we can make a case for AA not being absolutely necessary at all times, but certainly, lacking it wouldn't be as bad in some areas, as it may in others. So using AA sparingly - to keep a high performance - isn't out of the question. It's not uncommon for Nintendo to use this approach(though, doing it with AA may be a first). If you remember Luigi's Mansion 2: Dark Moon, you'll notice they didn't just toss in real-time projected shadows in the entire game. Certain areas/rooms have it, while others don't.
Doczu
Member
Yup, just like Silent Hill Origins on the PSP (and propably on the PS2 too). Open spaces had the simplest light/shadow effects, but the closed spaces in the otherworld had some rooms with real-time shadows on enemies and objects). Beautiful little game it was.
Its probably just parallax mapping in the center.
Thanks for pointing this out. Once again, we have a dev directly saying the GPU has DX11 features.
How many shaders does Xenos and RSX have?
To be fair, it seems the Xbone version's kinda ass too.
Apart from Ryse, does it have any not-ass looking games?
They were counted differently back then. The 48 shaders in the Xenos would be something like a 240 shader part now. The 240 coming from (48*5 vector units). Whereas now they just give the total count from the start.
True.
240? WTF? Please tell me that shaders are somewhat like clockspeeds in that they're not really good indicators of a GPU's power.
I mean, up until this shader business, the GPU was supposed to be the one thing that was definitively superior in all aspects compared to Xenos.
They aren't comparable across generations, I'm sure the 160 are more efficient than the 240. However with the clock speeds I'm also sure they're in the same ballpark, it's not like they'll be well over 1.5x as efficient, GPUs have gained most of their performance over these years by going with more and more shaders and bandwidth, the efficiency of singular units hasn't risen that much.
Also, incidentally, both have 8 ROPs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenos_(graphics_chip)
Digital Foundry is finally doing Wii U exclusives, here's 3D World
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-super-mario-3d-world
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-super-mario-3d-world
You've also got to remember that if this 160 shaders info is true then there has to be something else going on under the hood that we're unaware of, I'm still firmly in the Fixed Functions camp. It explains why the ALUs are almost twice the size that they should be and how it can run something like the Bayonetta 2 demo drawing so little juice.
I think the "something" is new shader models, the probably much better tesselator, and double the RAM of the last gen consoles. Honestly I don't see why people are finding 160 without some magical fixed function thing so hard to believe, as you just have to look at what completely unexpected things came out of the Geforce 7800-Radeon X1800 like chips in the PS360. Who would think the 7800 could run God of War 3 or the x1800 Halo 4, or either of them Revengeance at mostly 60FPS?
Also, the die size thing again, different fabrication processes target different optimizations, they could have optimized for low power draw with the layout, or high yields, etc rather than what the original GPU did which could make them fatter. And not only that, different fabrication plants have different sizes for everything, Intels 22nm is smaller than most other peoples 20nm, etc etc.
This is reminiscent of what happened with the Wii, a bunch of theories on why it was better than expected but little that panned out.
Yeah, Xbox 360's Xenos had a unified shader architecture: 48 Vec5 units, so 240 shader ALUs or whatever you wanna call them. The 8 ROPs were on the EDRAM die as part of the GPU package, before the 360 Slim came along where the CPU, parent GPU shader core and EDRAM daughter die were merged into a single SoC.
PS3's RSX was based on an older Nvidia design (even though PS3 launched a year later) derived from the NV47 aka G70 / GeForce 7800 (although RSX was not a full-spec 7800). NV47 was Nvidia's 2005 refresh of the NV40 / GF 6800 from 2004. RSX was a custom variant of that refresh for PS3. It did not have a unified shader architecture (Nvidia did not have USA until G80 / GF 8800 in fall 2006, too late to be used in RSX for PS3). RSX had 8 vertex-shader pipelines and 24 pixel-shader pipelines. 8 ROPs. The full G70 / GF 7800 for PCs had 16 ROPs, 256-bit memory bus, thus clock for clock double RSX's fillrate, and greater bandwidth since RSX used a 128-bit memory bus.
Both Xenos and RSX had different strengths & weakness but overall Xenos was considered to be 'better' by most devs and was certainly more efficient than RSX because devs could allocate as many of Xenos' unified shaders/ALUs toward either vertex or pixel shading operations. Plus there was the extremely high-bandwidth internal bandwidth from EDRAM to the ROPs. The EDRAM's external bandwidth to the shader core was reasonably high. While these cannot be added up, the effect is that it took much of the burden of graphics rendering off the main external 128-bit memory bus to the GDDR3 memory.
Devs later learned to employ CELL to assist RSX, especially with vertex shader stuff since RSX only had 8 vertex-shader pipes, AFAIK it could not use the 24 pixel-shader pipes for any vertex stuff etc. Xenos could allocate any of its shader-ALUs for either type of operation.
I do not understand much about Wii U's GPU. It might only have 160 shader ALUs but they're certainly more capable and more efficient than Xenos' or RSX's Latte is at least a shader model 4.1 equivalent GPU, probably with stuff that goes beyond 4.1. -RSX was shader model 3.0, while Xenos went a bit beyond 3.0.
Yeah, to be precise the Xenos was x1800-ish throughput but with HD 2000 series like features in some regards even well before the latter chip launched, and the RSX was a 7800-ish base but with a few things cut down to 7600 level hardware. I aways thought it was a shame the Cell wasn't paired with the Xenos instead last gen, as any advantage it had was spent trying to make up for the crappy RSX, although even then the Cell was hard to use. Unified shaders were a nice efficiency jump for everyone, reducing unused compute hardware.
I do think the 160 shaders could match or surpass the old 240, but excluding Nvidias old "big" shader design approach (which they canned for a similar "small" shader approach as AMD) the individual units havn't gotten all that much more efficient since unified shaders first hit, rather shrinks allowed more per die size and watt.
I do think the 160 shaders could match or surpass the old 240, but excluding Nvidias old "big" shader design approach (which they canned for a similar "small" shader approach as AMD) the individual units havn't gotten all that much more efficient since unified shaders first hit, rather shrinks allowed more per die size and watt.
Horse Armour
Member
How on earth are you able to tell how many polys are in this screen?I must say that the roundness Latte pulls off in this game is superb.
Either the Wii U GPU can output far more polygons than we realized, or this is using tessellation.
Saint Gregory
Member
I don't think that it even matters, however it's being done it looks suburb in-game. That screenshot has all kinds of aliasing and artifacts that aren't present while playing the game and it still looks great.
I'd like to see how some of these development techniques translate to other art styles before I get too excited though.
You can't, because many polygons are rendered smaller than individual pixels (micropolygons). That's the point I guess.
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