If the speculation is right i mean
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Sumo: Wii U specs are surprising; "way more memory" than PS3/360
- Thread starter shinobi602
- Start date
No, it is not.
Just because one dev made a 360 game with over 200 sounds at a time and eating one whole core does not mean that just about any other game gets close to doing that.
To is very easy to get worse GPUs and less RAM than the 360 or PS3.
The Wii CPU is tiny, it would perfectly fine to chuck it in WiiU just for BC and a Power7 CPU would have no trouble emulating it either.
Brad Grenz
Member
It's just PR. As far as IBM is concerned both are "powered" by the same PowerPC ISA. There's no reason to draw any additional inference. It's like nVidia promoting the Tegra chips as having GeForce graphics, even though the actual embedded GPUs are based on a really dated architecture that bears little resemblance to their current DX11 enabled unified shader GPUs. Marketing doesn't care if these technologies are from very different parts of the family tree.
maybe an allusion to a new manufacturing process or a new cache technology or others, not core architecture
personally i think is allusion to 45nm SOI process. actually is the same for Power7 and CPU WiiU
shinra-bansho
Member
It's called PR. I think someone's pointed out that technically eDRAM is "technology that powers the Watson."
How difficult or time consuming do you think it would it be to utilise the audio DSP (EDIT for clarification: in porting up from the PS360 or down from the PS4720)?
It sounds like a similar situation to the PS3 where developers could utilise the SPEs when porting from the 360, but often didn't at least early on afaik?
TheGuardian
Member
Many games even use sound middleware like FMOD, so for those cases you don't really have to do anything to use the DSP, just let the middleware provider take care of it, which I sure all of them have done already.
No, having processing power that can be used for anything instead of just audio is much better.
TwilightPrincess
Member
But every game needs sound and using the DSP you have more processing power that can be used for anything, cause the CPU is freed from this one task. Am i wrong?
Thunder Monkey
Banned
You're not.
And considering the things we've heard about the CPU it's probably a good thing it's there.
Less flexible but far more efficient. You get comparable audio processing performance at a fraction of the cost, die size and power consumption.
checkeredknight
Member
If the first game is anything to go by, the main development platform for Transformed will most likely be PS3. I mean, what they've shown off of the Wii U version so far doesn't look any different from the others. The Wii U may possibly have more memory but I doubt multiplatform developers are going to use it.
Personally I think games built from the ground up for Wii U will look great (just take a look at Rayman Legends for reference) but with multiplatform software we wont tell the difference. At the same time I'm quite sceptical with Wii U since Xbox and PS "next gen" is just around the corner. The whole screen in a controller thing just doesn't do it enough for me.
Personally I think games built from the ground up for Wii U will look great (just take a look at Rayman Legends for reference) but with multiplatform software we wont tell the difference. At the same time I'm quite sceptical with Wii U since Xbox and PS "next gen" is just around the corner. The whole screen in a controller thing just doesn't do it enough for me.
The GPU can do 3 generations better effects and new features PS3 nor X360 have.
Trunchisholm
Member
DSPs, and custom chips in general are a good idea for performing specific tasks. I've loved the idea of having custom chips since the 8-16-bit generations and, I particularly liked the way they were implemented on the Amiga, but it doesn't make much sense nowadays. Back in those days, CPUs were quite weak, so it made a lot of sense to have custom chips perform critical tasks, but it's not particularly cost-effective anymore. The industry has been moving away from that concept for a while now. Even modern GPUs are massively parallel CPUs that have moved from being fixed-function to fully programmable, and full convergence between CPUs and GPUs seems inevitable down the line.
I don't think there's any need for DSPs with modern CPUs and GPUs having enough power and being more flexible, but it's nice to have it on the Wii U, seeing as its CPU seems to be a bit on the weak side compared to the rest of the system. The problem right now is that developers, particularly those working on launch titles, might disregard it for lack of time.
That's quite a strange wording. You would be better off simply saying that the Wii U's is a DX11-level GPU, whereas RSX-Xenos are DX9.0c+ level GPUs.
It still is very much cost and energy efficient. CPUs don't perform very well at audio tasks. It's not much different from GPUs - why use a GPU if you have a powerful, massively parallel CPU? Easy: Even that massively parallel CPU sucks at 3D graphics. And it sucks at audio. Chips like an AD TigerSHARC run circles around an i7 at a fraction of the cost and power consumption. Audio processing isn't playing a MP3 in iTunes after all.
The main reason DSPs become less and less common on the PC side is that it's too much work to support them properly. At least in games.
Trunchisholm
Member
It's definitely possible, but it doesn't make any sense. Nintendo invests in cost-effective hardware so they can make a profit from hardware sales early on, but that doesn't mean that they go for the cheapest parts. They invest in what makes sense to them, and going for less capable hardware wouldn't make sense seeing that people are ready to make the jump to a Nintendo HD system. Having hardware capable of easily receiving ports from current or newer platforms is very important for them this time around.
No, the cost of the DSP would have been better spent on a more powerful CPU.
Even the pile of derp that is the xenon does not have a problem with the advanced audio in BFBC2, BF3, Crackdown ect.
CPUs handle audio tasks just fine as proven by all the games that use them for advanced audio effects and the fact that most DAWs only support support software plugins!
Audio is much simpler than 3d graphics.
No, it is because they became pointless in light of ever faster CPUs!
Thunder Monkey
Banned
I'm not saying it's a good choice, but most likely the options were it being there with the same CPU, or not with the same CPU.
Nintendo choices rarely make sense. Did it make sense limiting their hardware with the Wii? No it hindered 3rd party development. Did it make sense on the GCN to have a pool of 24MB blazing fast RAM and 16 MB of incredibly slow and a miniDVD that stored barely over a gig? Or the N64 era cartridges?
Nintendo priorities have always been different from the norm.
Remember that this is all just rumors at this point.
The cost of a hardware DSP and board space need for it would be very unwelcome for such a small console.
TwilightPrincess
Member
We don´t know the WiiU CPU power, do we? That´s all speculating over vague interviews with devs working on quick and dirty ports
Don´t think the CPU will be weaker than the 360s, in my opinion the DSP should be seen as a plus for future games. Devs won´t have to worry about the sound and its costs. I think it will make sense if the devs use it.@Thundermonkey: Wii Discs only had about one Gig? Don´t rememeber that, think you are wrong^^
If it isn't, does that mean Wii U is playing Wii games through emulation?
Bony Manifesto
Member
Probably a bit better on the heat management side of things though.
specialguy
Banned
you're kidding yourself. Just Crysis 3 fully maxed is pretty much next gen (watch the trailer, look at the textures, etc). And at 1080P.
PS4 specs should deliver that with ease as a straightforward port. Optimized PS4 titles 4 years later will be almost unimaginable.
Yeah, this is what bugs me when people trot out "This is Nintendo, they know what they're doing" or the like.
I'd argue evidence shows they definitely do not, know what they're doing, when it comes to hardware.
Bottom line Iwata said it best about Wii U, Nintendo literally does not care that the competition will bring forth machines with better graphics. Those are Iwata's words, not mine. I wish I had the interview offhand but, yeah. He said that. He did not say "we did the best we could" or "we tried to deliver a lot for our budget". He said "we dont care that the other guys will have better graphics".
ALL THAT SAID, I'm not sure better hardware would have done much for the Wii, except decimate Nintendo's bottom line. That machine's appeal was not based on visuals. Unfortunately I think The Wii U is (intended or not) aimed strictly at the heart of the core, and that's why all this consternation over it's capability.
Trunchisholm
Member
Exactly, it's a cost-cutting measure. DSPs can be dirty cheap. It's cheaper to have an inexpensive CPU and offload the audio processing to the DSP. It wouldn't make sense at all to have it in the first place if they had a beefy CPU, because audio processing is hardly taxing on a modern CPU when compared to IA, rendering, physics, etc.
Nintendo doesn't like people focusing on raw specifications.
DragonSworne
Banned
That didn't stop MS and Sony from making their extremely weak CPUs do audio though...
bgassassin
Member
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=40205173&postcount=3195
Wii has a DSP.
You should revisit some of the pasts threads when these demos first came out then. I still remember comments from people not being able to see the difference in PC BF3 vs the console.
Bony Manifesto
Member
Sure, but the reason they don't like people focusing on their specifications is because they're probably pretty lackluster. It's one thing not to make a big deal of the power of the hardware upon it's announcement, but it's quite another to keep them secret and embargoed under penalty of death.
Ironically, there'd probably be a lot less focus on the specs of the Wii U if Nintendo actually confirmed them. That the discussion is dominated by them now is pretty much entirely because we don't know anything about them outside of a bunch of unreliable (and usually contradictory) 'industry sources', so people still have room to speculate wildly.
Thunder Monkey
Banned
That was in direct reference to the GCN. Wii discs are standard dual layer DVD's. Up to like 9 gigs.
Don't get me wrong.
Some of those odd design choices have paid off in the past. Without that blazing fast pool of RAM a lot of the texture effects in something like Star Fox Adventures wouldn't have been possible. But on the other end its fairly small framebuffer ended up with two generations of hardware featuring fairly heavy dithering. I just think most devs would have liked it amounting to more than just 24 MB. Because of that the games ran better when constantly streaming or in bite sized chunks like the Rogue Leader games.
I'm firmly in the camp that the hardware itself will be a meager jump over the two current consoles. Depending on how games are designed for it, they could be stunners (though limited in comparison to what is possible) while showing little in the way of improvements. Higher res textures, higher asset variety, higher precision effects. But like anything time, budget, and talent will decide how beautiful WiiU games are.
consequence? ... maybe relevance.
OS won't reserve more than 200 MB
This high prediction comes from the fact that the game's are suspendable in mid play and you can browse-
Maybe developers who suck out all the RAM will be able to take it all without worrying about this and disable the suspend mode altogether.
screen and controller are irrelevant, you can just have a static menu with practicall no use (5 megs, whatever)
I find it hard to believe that, by 2014/2015, games aren't going to look a hell of a lot better than anything that we've seen on current gen consoles.
specialguy
Banned
I'd actually agree to an extent, but trying telling some PC guy's that. To them, BF3 console, or choose your console version here, might as well be an 8 bit Nintendo game or something. Never mind the horrors of 30 FPS and lowly 720P (which I have to agree, after watching my brother PC game a lot, I am ready for a move to 1080P, which 720P never bothered me before).
In other words ironically I'm typically on your side, arguing that the console version of game X is not THAT far behind the PC version. I'd even argue that for BF3, to an extent. I think this because PC ports are based on the console versions though, not because of any diminishing returns factor.
But I was speaking of Crysis 3 anyways, and again, that trailer, just the textures alone...you run that in 1080P and I think you're in the ballpark of next gen. Though I think next gen will far exceed it eventually (IE, what Killzone 2 was to 1st gen 360 games)
Watch Dogs and Star Wars 1313 are other good examples of sort of next gen, running now. They impress me much much more than say, UE4 demo because they are real.
We knew that for months. Now is the first time a named developer confirmed this rather vaguely.
So you're talking about consoles - that's a good idea to point out, because you cannot say crysis 3 is next-gen if it's out this gen, so what gen are then you talking about.
This talk of gen gen next previus has always been on my "not to say" things. I never use these silly words in my talk.
In the PC world, generations are decided by GPU releases. 1080p is a HDTV standard, PC had more than that for years.
Thunder Monkey
Banned
Assuredly.
But that means different things in this era than it has in the past.
The difference between crunching 3 million pps with no per pixel effects and 20 million with is a hell of a lot more stark than 500 million and 1 billion.
Realtime GI, advanced tessellation techniques may make all the difference in the world alone.
Until we've seen exactly what the next generation of engines are doing I'm not prepared to say WiiU won't be able to do the same, in a stripped down, possibly faked manner.
Well... in 2012? If WiiU is it, Nintendo has a real natural talent to screw an hardware at this point...
shinra-bansho
Member
Related question: wasn't there a relatively thorough albeit old leak of specs a while ago anyway, that was apparently copy-pasted from SDK documentation.
Is there any reason we're not using that for reference anymore?
Is there any reason we're not using that for reference anymore?
Yeah, what do I know? It's not like I actually worked on pro audio applications and drivers for DSP boards or something...
Quite a few modern games waste more CPU cycles on audio than on AI or physics, actually. They have to, as processing audio on a CPU is simply not very efficient. There's a presentation by the Microsoft Xbox Division about CPU usage floating around, feel free to google it. It's quite an eye opener. And with companies like Firelight and Audiokinetic working on middleware that uses production grade effects in realtime in games, it's not unreasonable to expect the CPU load to go up quite a bit - still requiring a similar percentage (~15-30%) even on CPUs an order of magnitude more powerful.
Trevelyan9999
Banned
Those leaked specs did not say as much about the CPU as the GPU:
"Main Application Processor
PowerPC architecture.
Three cores (fully coherent).
3MB aggregate L2 Cache size.
core 0: 512 KB
core 1: 2048 KB
core 2: 512 KB
Write gatherer per core.
Locked (L1d) cache DMA per core."
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=476997
Apparently those specs were right on the money for earlier dev kits from late last year....
shinra-bansho
Member
Yip. Those are the ones. Basically, I'm wondering why we're now essentially ignoring those specs - for example this thread - ignores that we already knew the Wii U will have ~1.5 GB RAM, (possibly more like 2 GB in final units iirc) ergo this isn't really new news.
Presumably, it's just because there isn't any new news.
DragonSworne
Banned
Wii U is rumored to have Compute Shaders ( Shader Model 5), and compiling Shader Model 4 code to run on Shader Model 5 has a negative performance impact.
Could this be the reason why WiiU seems weaker than it's true potential? Poor ports and a lack of understanding of next gen architecture?
Could this be the reason why WiiU seems weaker than it's true potential? Poor ports and a lack of understanding of next gen architecture?
stupidvillager
Neo Member
Question. If the 750 line from IBM has been pretty much phased out and and aside from backwards compatibility, why try to go with that line? Why not build the backwards comp. into a new chip? From what I have read and understand, (though it isnt much) IBM never intended the 750 family to go smaller than 90nm. So instead of retooling and enhancing and shrinking broadway, why not go with a new chip?
Xane
Member
It was a weird number.. 42mb or something? It was non-unified like the Wii's memory (64mb + 24mb).
GoofsterStud
Member
Hurray!
That Sonic & Sega All-Stars series is always pushing the graphic envelope....
Xane
Member
Haters gonna hate, but I like the GFX. :x
But then again, I'm more of a "Graphics Aesthetics / Artstyle > Graphics Fidelity" guy.
Neither of them had weak cpus.
Similar threads
- Poll