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Wii U Speculation Thread The Third: Casting Dreams in The Castle of Miyamoto

guek

Banned
Why complain about something that would only enhance the experience? I can't really see Haptic putting a damper on anything so it would seem only natural to be excited about something like this.

Oh, I'm not complaining per se. But any expensive feature like that is a trade off for something else. The cost doesn't seem worth it to me, though admittedly I might change my mind if I heard some good ideas, and a lot of people feel the exact same way about the upad.
 

Hoo-doo

Banned
Surely, I will take a closer look at the Vivitouch page. A cursory glance seemed to suggest that it emulates feeling on screens, but I cannot view the videos which go in more detail here at work. The dev page give way too vague an explanation. Almost sounds like it's a rumble pack from how they describe it. :|

Vivitouch is pretty much exactly that.
 

StevieP

Banned
I wonder..... I wonder if BMF (Grampa Simpson!) has been right all along...

CU45HP... Project Flanker... = customized multicore variant of PPC 476FP/470S?
My post from another thread:

StevieP said:
This whitepaper is from the underlying basis for the Wii U's (very custom) CPU:
ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/...D03009USEN.PDF

I don't know where it went from there, but it's unrelated to any one specific Power ISA and from what we've gathered over the past year extremely customized. (Much as The PPE for Xenon/Cell was very customized from its Power ISA counterparts)

StevieP said:
GAF user wsippel has done most of the digging in that regard. But if you look at the press release and look at that whitepaper, you can sort of see why.

Regardless, IBM, AMD, and Intel are all selling much lower-spec CPUs than what they do in their mainstream. IBM are still taking lots of orders for 476FPs and 470S, for example. Those are based on much older IBM designs and are designed for embedded applications.

They are both newer CPUs, based on IBM's SOI 45nm technology, and are "energy saving"... and what do you know, the IBM CU-45 monicker appears here too:

https://www-01.ibm.com/chips/techlib...04_07_2011.pdf
 
Vivitouch is pretty much exactly that.

Optimism deflated. I will still continue to act out wildly whenever anybody uses the term "haptics", though. I don't honestly believe that we'll see it any time soon, but I do think that there's room for improvement with regards to how we interface with touch screens, and electrostatic feedback as well as proximity detection (ie, knowing when a finger or stylus is close to a portion of a screen) are two very interesting points for me.



Yeah, I've been all crazytime about that sort of thing ever since reading that last year.
 
It's a bit of both. The system should be able to run some AA, especially if the 32MB eDRAM is true.

Again kind people if Nintendo monitoring this thread: please focus on good AA. It makes even mediocre looking games so much more pleasurable to look at. Just have a look at the enthousiastic responses in the Dolphin thread.
 

AlStrong

Member
Is AA a software thing or a hardware thing?

It's both.

Normally, MSAA is the way to go (hardware sub-sampling), but it generally gets too expensive to implement properly into the rendering pipeline once you start using deferred/post-processing (lighting, bloom, tone-mapping HDR, motion blur, etc) of all sorts since you need to store all the buffers in order to properly resolve afterwards, and then there's the increased shading load as well. Typically, if developers even use AA, they will do the AA resolve to the base image, but all the added visual post-effects will break the AA. There's been a general move towards deferred lighting anyway, so hardware AA is generally a moot point for performance.

It's cheaper to use a post-effect "AA" that just detects edges (software/shader), but it has its own problems with subpixel crawling and the sort. It's better than nothing depending on how sensitive the edge detection can be - it might end up blurring the entire image too much if it's not tweaked/adjusted properly.
 

wsippel

Banned
Remember how I recently wrote that a certain engine increased performance by several hundred percent over a couple of weeks? Just found out that another, even more common middleware solution seemingly had it even worse: If you tried to actually use some of the unique hardware features, the engine just crashed. I guess anonymous developer statements should be taken with a ton of salt at this point...
 

Thraktor

Member
I wonder..... I wonder if BMF (Grampa Simpson!) has been right all along...

CU45HP... Project Flanker... = customized multicore variant of PPC 476FP/470S?
My post from another thread:

I'm pretty sure CU45HP just refers to the manufacturing process. Cu is the symbol for copper, 45nm is the manufacturing node, and HP would stand for high-performance (most manufacturing nodes have two variants, one for high performance chips, and another for lower performance, energy-sipping hardware).
 

guek

Banned
Remember how I recently wrote that a certain engine increased performance by several hundred percent over a couple of weeks? Just found out that another, even more common middleware solutione seemingly had it even worse: If you tried to actually use some of the unique hardware features, the engine just crashed. I guess anonymous developer statements should be taken with a ton of salt at this point...

Interesting. Has that since been fixed?
 
I wonder..... I wonder if BMF (Grampa Simpson!) has been right all along...

CU45HP... Project Flanker... = customized multicore variant of PPC 476FP/470S?
My post from another thread:

Reminder: quote your posts from another thread, rather than just C&Ping. The latter breaks all but the shortest links.
 

D_prOdigy

Member
Remember how I recently wrote that a certain engine increased performance by several hundred percent over a couple of weeks? Just found out that another, even more common middleware solution seemingly had it even worse: If you tried to actually use some of the unique hardware features, the engine just crashed. I guess anonymous developer statements should be taken with a ton of salt at this point...

I'm reading this as: the hardware is so secretly powerful it blows up engines.
 

test_account

XP-39C²
Haptic touch for the WiiU controller wont happen. It doesnt even have multi touch (unless something has changed since last E3). It is probably not a big deal for the gaming purposes though, but since it doesnt have multi touch, i cant imagine that it has haptic touch.
 

StevieP

Banned
To add more fuel to my fire, here is what else I've found:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_400#PowerPC_470
Wikipedia said:
ChinaChip CC2000 is a 476FP core based processor with integrated DSP and GPU for game consoles.

Then I found this on a random internet blog from November 2011:
http://www.dingux.com/2010/11/back-from-china.html
I'm back in one piece. It's been an exhausting trip and an amazing experience. I'm still in conversations with ChinaChip and will be writing some more updates in the following days. Meanwhile, a quick trip log:

yadda yadda yadda
- The next generation of consoles will be based on the CC2000 and expected to roll out by Q2 next year. The CC2000 will be announced in a month or so, and I've been kindly asked not to reveal the details

I wonder if the PPC 4xx family has any merit to discuss at this point, because it might make a lot of sense in context to what we've heard and what the IBM press release says:

IBM Press Release said:
ARMONK, N.Y., June 7, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it will provide the microprocessors that will serve as the heart of the new Wii U™ system from Nintendo. Unveiled today at the E3 trade show, Nintendo plans for its new console to hit store shelves in 2012.

The all-new, Power-based microprocessor will pack some of IBM's most advanced technology into an energy-saving silicon package that will power Nintendo's brand new entertainment experience for consumers worldwide. IBM's unique embedded DRAM, for example, is capable of feeding the multi-core processor large chunks of data to make for a smooth entertainment experience.

IBM plans to produce millions of chips for Nintendo featuring IBM Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technology at 45 nanometers (45 billionths of a meter). The custom-designed chips will be made at IBM's state-of-the-art 300mm semiconductor development and manufacturing facility in East Fishkill, N.Y.

https://www-01.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/techdocs/D393643EC6B662E78525763200547AED/$file/476fp_wp_04_07_2011.pdf

IBM Press Release for PowerPC 476FP in 2011 said:
The PowerPC 476FP processor core is designed to meet the high-end and low-end demands of multiple market applications. By maintaining the Power instruction set architecture (ISA), existing code for set top boxes, game consoles, communication devices, and other embedded applications can adopt this core and meet the current performance requirements of these applications.

Relevant Specs (for the vanilla, non-customized versions obviously):
- up to 2ghz/core
- up to 1mb l2 cache per core
- support for multiple DDR3 controllers
- 9-stage 4-issue out-of-order
- dynamic branch prediction
- support for embedded DRAM
- 0.85 to 1.1v voltage range on IBM's 45nm SOI process (CU-45)

Interesting... very interesting. I feel very jeff_rigby-like all of a sudden. Edit: note that some of those links may mean nothing at all, and not related to the Wii U in any way. But an interesting prospect if the 4xx series is already being used in gaming applications - especially from IBM's point of view.
 

Instro

Member
Remember how I recently wrote that a certain engine increased performance by several hundred percent over a couple of weeks? Just found out that another, even more common middleware solution seemingly had it even worse: If you tried to actually use some of the unique hardware features, the engine just crashed. I guess anonymous developer statements should be taken with a ton of salt at this point...

Interesting, so perhaps porting won't quite be as easy as we may have initially though.
 

wsippel

Banned
At the same time, kind of makes me wonder how Nintendo's e3 is going to go, if some of the engines.. are just getting up to being ran on the device...

Though guess Darksiders 2 was ported in a few weeks
I really wonder about that. Many middleware solutions weren't even available on the system three months ago, and are buggy as hell to this day. That engine performing like ass until recently? Darksiders 2 uses it.
 
So we may figured out that the early rumor "similar architecture to xbox 360" may just have been false. Looks like the platform differs vastly from the Xbox 360 and thats why developers can't just move their code to the WiiU, do a little something here and there and BAM its working. This may stirred the whole "Its weaker than PS360" rumors aswell, because from what i see now, they may have to put way more effort into it that i/we first anticipated!
 
Remember how I recently wrote that a certain engine increased performance by several hundred percent over a couple of weeks? Just found out that another, even more common middleware solution seemingly had it even worse: If you tried to actually use some of the unique hardware features, the engine just crashed. I guess anonymous developer statements should be taken with a ton of salt at this point...
im glad I already got a head start on ignoring all of the statements
 

D_prOdigy

Member
So we may figured out that the early rumor "similar architecture to xbox 360" may just have been false. Looks like the platform differs vastly from the Xbox 360 and thats why developers can't just move their code to the WiiU, do a little something here and there and BAM its working. This may stirred the whole "Its weaker than PS360" rumors aswell, because from what i see now, They may have to put way more effort into it that i first anticipated!

But on the other hand, I never got the impression from Vigil that it was particularly complicated to port Darksiders II.

In fact, did they not specifically say the set-up was very similar to the 360?
 

Instro

Member
So we may figured out that the early rumor "similar architecture to xbox 360" may just have been false. Looks like the platform differs vastly from the Xbox 360 and thats why developers can't just move their code to the WiiU, do a little something here and there and BAM its working. This may stirred the whole "Its weaker than PS360" rumors aswell, because from what i see now, They may have to put way more effort into it that i first anticipated!

Considering the initial devkits were some off the shelf PC parts, the mentions of it being architecturally similar to the 360 make sense. So not necessarily false, but apparently not reflective of how the the dev kit has since shaped up. Perhaps this also explains why Nintendo has been testing 3rd party engines internally, looking for ways to assist devs in getting their stuff working on the system?
 
But on the other hand, I never got the impression from Vigil that it was particularly complicated to port Darksiders II.

In fact, did they not specifically say the set-up was very similar to the 360?

They said they had it running pretty quickly, but now how it ran or how it looked...

Or at least no one saw this game... Who could say how it ran/looked...

They wouldnt just come out and say "Hey, we got it working in a few weeks, but it looks like crap and runs like shit", now would they ;)
 

BY2K

Membero Americo
They said they had it running pretty quickly, but now how it ran or how it looked...

They DID said they had it running in 5 weeks AND looking AT LEAST AS GOOD as the PS3 and 360 version.

They said last E3 that they were ready to show it off on Wii U, but Nintendo said no.
 
Considering the initial devkits were some off the shelf PC parts, the mentions of it being architecturally similar to the 360 make sense. So not necessarily false, but apparently not reflective of how the the dev kit has since shaped up. Perhaps this also explains why Nintendo has been testing 3rd party engines internally, looking for ways to assist devs in getting their stuff working on the system?

This could have happened aswell. Missed that, im glad you paid attention :)

So early dev kits were made from "off the shelf" parts that resembled the architecture as close as possible.

So when the sillicon was ready, it differred propably quite a bit from the early kit, leaving the devs with more work to get things running.

Makes sense to me!
 
They DID said they had it running in 5 weeks AND looking AT LEAST AS GOOD as the PS3 and 360 version.

They said last E3 that they were ready to show it off on Wii U, but Nintendo said no.

Read the post from Instro. That could explain this "DS II" phenomenon...
 

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
I'm not sure I understand why Metroid or Donkey Kong were part of the poll.

Kirby and DK I have no clue as to why they're on there.

I see Metroid, though. Other M killed that franchise.
 
I'll never the understand the love for Star Fox. Together with Animal Crossing and Golden Sun the three Nintendo franchises I don't care for.
animal crossing is the shit, feel ashamed.

Golden Sun on the other hand I find a bit generic? Maybe that's not the right word. I enjoy star fox a ton but don't really care if they make another.
 

J-Rock

Banned
I'll never the understand the love for Star Fox. Together with Animal Crossing and Golden Sun the three Nintendo franchises I don't care for.

BooThisMan.gif
 

wsippel

Banned
I see Metroid, though. Other M killed that franchise.
Only for people who knew fuck all about the franchise to begin with.

Man, Other M was great. I want Metroid 5 by Sakamoto. And that fucking awesome Other M based Samus figure releasing in June.
 

Instro

Member
Kirby and DK I have no clue as to why they're on there.

I see Metroid, though. Other M killed that franchise.

Oh I didn't notice Kirby on there as well, how dumb. I can understand the Other M sentiment to some degree, but considering all of these franchises had games come out over the last few years, they don't need a "revival". Kirby and DK in particular were hugely successful last gen.
 

Thraktor

Member
To add more fuel to my fire, here is what else I've found:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_400#PowerPC_470


Then I found this on a random internet blog from November 2011:
http://www.dingux.com/2010/11/back-from-china.html


I wonder if the PPC 4xx family has any merit to discuss at this point, because it might make a lot of sense in context to what we've heard and what the IBM press release says:



https://www-01.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/techdocs/D393643EC6B662E78525763200547AED/$file/476fp_wp_04_07_2011.pdf



Relevant Specs (for the vanilla, non-customized versions obviously):
- up to 2ghz/core
- up to 1mb cache per core
- support for multiple DDR3 controllers
- 9-stage 4-issue out-of-order
- dynamic branch prediction
- support for embedded DRAM
- 0.85 to 1.1v voltage range on IBM's 45nm SOI process (CU-45)

Interesting... very interesting. I feel very jeff_rigby-like all of a sudden. Edit: note that some of those links may mean nothing at all, and not related to the Wii U in any way. But an interesting prospect if the 4xx series is already being used in gaming applications - especially from IBM's point of view.

The 476FP architecture is strictly single-threaded and maxes out at 2GHz, both of which directly contradict what we've heard and would prevent the CPU from matching the XBox360's unless it has 8+ cores.

The Wii U's CPU will be, for all intents and purposes, a completely custom chip. To the extent it's a derivative of any existing chip, it would be best described as the bastard child of the XBox360's Xenon and a Power7.
 

StevieP

Banned
The 476FP architecture is strictly single-threaded and maxes out at 2GHz, both of which directly contradict what we've heard and would prevent the CPU from matching the XBox360's unless it has 8+ cores.

The Wii U's CPU will be, for all intents and purposes, a completely custom chip. To the extent it's a derivative of any existing chip, it would be best described as the bastard child of the XBox360's Xenon and a Power7.

There was somebody that recently stated, in a completely unrelated thread, that the Wii U is NOT SMT and that it was single-threaded... I balked at first, because I thought we'd heard here that it was.
But...
 

Penguin

Member
I really wonder about that. Many middleware solutions weren't even available on the system three months ago, and are buggy as hell to this day. That engine performing like ass until recently? Darksiders 2 uses it.

That would actually explain Vigil's recent comments then, no?
 
The 476FP architecture is strictly single-threaded and maxes out at 2GHz, both of which directly contradict what we've heard and would prevent the CPU from matching the XBox360's unless it has 8+ cores.

The Wii U's CPU will be, for all intents and purposes, a completely custom chip. To the extent it's a derivative of any existing chip, it would be best described as the bastard child of the XBox360's Xenon and a Power7.

So the CPU could be named Xenon 7 :D
 
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