Fourth Storm
Member
Did you see wsippel's reply? I think that settles the matter.
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WiiU technical discussion (serious discussions welcome)
- Thread starter blu
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Did you see wsippel's reply? I think that settles the matter.
I'm happy with you doing it Thraktor. I assume whoever does would work with others if they need extra input anyway, so no worries from my perspective.
As you say we need to be sure we're getting the GPU chip
Ah, I missed that. Yes, that definitely settles the matter. The Renesas D813301 it is then. The 2010 copyright is probably for the eDRAM or something.
Gahiggidy
My aunt & uncle run a Mom & Pop store, "The Gamecube Hut", and sold 80k WiiU within minutes of opening.
It'd be great if there was a way to kind of fund this through a "dutch auction" way... by having the first two peeps pitch in $100 each, as a deposit, with subsequent donations dropping the price divided evenly... 4 gets it down to $50 each, 8 $25, etc. I reckon there are close to 50 people who'd be interested... making the individual donation only $4 bucks.
Probably the easiest way to manage would be to pick a low number that's sensible and it doesn't happen until we reach the amount. For instance, $5 per donation. Until we get 40 donations, we have to wait. After that, those that held off are just lucky and get the info for free but a fiver ain't too bad for those that paid.
JordanN
Banned
There's so much wrong in this post. Like, actually trying to defend propaganda value.
Schnozberry
Member
Seemed entirely accurate to me. What's your beef?
As I say, it was a reported polygon rate, just like the ones I'm comparing it to. We have nothing to go by except for developers' words when it comes to these numbers, but of course anyone could easily see from the Gamecube's launch titles that it was hardly a less powerful machine than the PS2.
JordanN
Banned
I find these two statements dubious:
"they managed to create a console that could produce some really nice graphics, they did a full reveal of the specifications, and they got none of the benefit from it,"
"Nintendo learnt that the tech race is something they aren't going to win, and they're better off with more modest, low power consoles that they never release the specs for."
As if releasing an overclocked N64 in that era would have done more good, people were going to shit on them either way, specs or no specs. Just look at how many people still think 3DS is a DS or Wii is weaker than PS2.
In what way is that propaganda though?, its just his opinion.
The Gamecube sold 20 million. The Wii is on track to sell over 100 million. I don't see where the confusion is here.
JordanN
Banned
How does this relate to my point?
The gaming press bit. I don't think what they said matters.
Edit: If he thinks that's apart of the "tech race".
chaosblade
Unconfirmed Member
I don't really see what your point is, or how it says he's wrong. Nintendo was going to get screwed regardless, but that doesn't go against anything in Thraktor's post. In fact it kind of goes in with it, because of the PS2 riding off the success of the PS1 (which is the only reason the Gamecube and Xbox never really had a chance).
But this is getting off topic again and isn't related to WiiU tech.
JordanN
Banned
Again, see the two points. The notion that creating a powerful console had "no benefits" and that creating a weaker console was going to cover "their previous faults" are wrong.
And the PS2 riding off the PS1 fits within my point. Gamecube could do nothing to stop it so it's hardly a fault of hardware (hence releasing an overclocked N64 wouldn't change things and could of made the situation GRAVELY WORSE).
True, I guess.chaosblade said:
Schnozberry
Member
I think Iwata clarified this pretty well in a Space World Speech in 2002 when he took over as President of Nintendo. He said that gaming is evolving quickly, and there will come a time when the mainstream of the gaming public will no longer be easily impressed merely by images. It was there he first revealed his inclinations that led to the Wii, and he declared that Nintendo would focus on creating innovative experiences rather than simply focusing on ramping up hardware for every generation.
What Thraktor said was accurate. The Cube sold like shit, while lapping the PS2 in terms of capability. The Wii did the opposite, despite being the weakest machine by far. Nintendo is late to the party on a lot of things, but they do grasp that creating novelty is a big reason for their success, and that reaching out to people outside the bubble of the gamer crowd is essential to their survival. They don't need to bleed money on hardware sales to do that, and so they actively choose a different path.
Am I the only one kind of impressed how much the Wii U is able to do with 40w of power? I don't think this design is incompetent at all. It certainly isn't as powerful as I hoped for when it was first announced, but it is well engineered.
lostinblue
Banned
Actual polygon throughput of the GC put Xbox to shame. They most likely didn't go for theorectical numbers because GC's advantage was small hit whilst texturing, if they were untextured polygon figures it wouldn't be that impressive (not to mention they'd amount to nothing as they did for PS2 and Xbox)
Anywho, as if they didn't have the texturing upper hand before, it was further evidenced by the xbox "polygon trick" being put to work all the time in order to achieve the detail of 8 textures per pass that the GC did natively for free. Doing that via the polygon trick was down to rendering the same scene twice, effectively halving the polygon count.
Of course this resulted on two approaches, GC doing games like Metroid Prime with more than 10 million polygon's per second at 60 frames per second being viable and Xbox opting for 30 frames per second with bump mapping and less polygons (Halo 2 had less polygons going for it than Halo 1 did for instance). In the end though, GC couldn't do Halo 2 (probably mostly due to RAM constraints) and Xbox certainly couldn't pull Metroid Prime (and others) "as is".
All in all, I'd actually say GC topped out the Xbox, never in specs but actual performance capabilities, almost by dumb luck (dudes at ArtX outdid themselves and later gave ATi it's R3xx revolutionary architecture after all); saying it like this though is really over-simplifying things a little bit too much (and a bit down to personal taste too) seeing they were really different at the end of the day.
Just to be fair, GC also had tons of disavantages, not being shader model compliant against shader model 1.1 was a non-factor back in 2001 if anyone was willing to learn their way around the TEV pipeline, but worked against them in multiplatform from early on (why master something that's like a dead end techonology?) and in a big way with the Wii. Also, Xbox did 720p on some games something the GC would have quite of hit doing (going over the SD specification, whereas Xbox had a desktop part meant for it) and the GC's framebuffer... ugh, dithering; just horrible. Also hampered the use of anti-aliasing in a big way.
Anywho, as if they didn't have the texturing upper hand before, it was further evidenced by the xbox "polygon trick" being put to work all the time in order to achieve the detail of 8 textures per pass that the GC did natively for free. Doing that via the polygon trick was down to rendering the same scene twice, effectively halving the polygon count.
Of course this resulted on two approaches, GC doing games like Metroid Prime with more than 10 million polygon's per second at 60 frames per second being viable and Xbox opting for 30 frames per second with bump mapping and less polygons (Halo 2 had less polygons going for it than Halo 1 did for instance). In the end though, GC couldn't do Halo 2 (probably mostly due to RAM constraints) and Xbox certainly couldn't pull Metroid Prime (and others) "as is".
All in all, I'd actually say GC topped out the Xbox, never in specs but actual performance capabilities, almost by dumb luck (dudes at ArtX outdid themselves and later gave ATi it's R3xx revolutionary architecture after all); saying it like this though is really over-simplifying things a little bit too much (and a bit down to personal taste too) seeing they were really different at the end of the day.
Just to be fair, GC also had tons of disavantages, not being shader model compliant against shader model 1.1 was a non-factor back in 2001 if anyone was willing to learn their way around the TEV pipeline, but worked against them in multiplatform from early on (why master something that's like a dead end techonology?) and in a big way with the Wii. Also, Xbox did 720p on some games something the GC would have quite of hit doing (going over the SD specification, whereas Xbox had a desktop part meant for it) and the GC's framebuffer... ugh, dithering; just horrible. Also hampered the use of anti-aliasing in a big way.
It relates to my point. What I said was that Nintendo tried going the bigh-performance, in-depth specs route, and the console did very poorly. They changed strategy to release a more technically modest machine, and didn't release the specs, and they were hugely successful. It shouldn't be surprising that they continued with that route.
Of course there were other factors in play here, but good companies learn from their failures and their successes, and that's what Nintendo did.
While we can debate about the impact of the press on this, it was very clear that their strategy didn't do them any favours in that department (hell, we even had a thread here a few months back about which console was more powerful).
JordanN
Banned
PS2 went big on performance and revealed its specs and sold more than the Wii, so I'm not sure how "specs" become the above all game changer in this.
Actually, to say the Wii was successful because it was so weak boarders on the realm of correlation doesn't imply causation. Were a 100 million people racing to the Wii because they wanted shitty graphics or was it because they wanted motion controls and or games? Now that's something to think about (hint, Wii sports sold more than all Gamecube's combined).
Schnozberry
Member
The Wii was novel and innovative. It was a defined business strategy that Nintendo spoke about frequently. They knew their competitors had the capital to release a more powerful machine and sell it at a loss to buy market share. They didn't have the capital and took a different route.
lostinblue
Banned
Nintendo went for big performance by cherry picking though. Because you could cherry pick and get away with it back then.
I honestly believe GC simply turned out better than they thought it would when compared to the other machines. I mean they didn't go with 3dfx, matrox, ATi or Nvidia, whatever brand was big at the time, Artx wasn't it... And they were able to compete neck to neck with a part that was custom, had no previous PC heritage and lacked some standardized features even if it could recreate them via other method's.
That's impressive and totally impossible to do nowaday's. I mean we're talking about the day's when Sony actually designed their own GPU with no embedded features, who outputted 0 Gigaflops (relying on the CPU gigaflops instead) and got away with it.
For what it's worth, I know that AMD/ATI licenced out all the graphics chips they put in consoles, so that the console maker could shrink it/modify it on their own schedule to their liking. I'd imagine they would be similarly compliant with their CPUs, being more like IBM than Intel.
AMD needs any deal it can get right now too, that would make them even more compliant.
I didn't say anything about why the PS2 was successful, nor did I say anything even close to "Wii was successful because it was so weak". What I said was that Nintendo's strategy changed from one where specs were important to one where specs weren't important. That's not to say Wii succeeded because it was weak, Wii succeeded regardless of how powerful it was. It would have done exactly the same even if it were twice as powerful or if it were ten times as powerful.
Anyway, we're moving well off topic here, so I think we should move back to the topic at hand.
JordanN
Banned
Yeah, I doubt that. They had capital for the N64, Gamecube and now the Wii U.
And your Wii comment either stealthy agrees with me or tries to dodge my point about Wii being successful purely on weak hardware.
I think this point should have been said more sooner.Thraktor said:
This time at least the GPU will be mostly feature compatible, not the archaic one in the Wii. Even if the power difference was the exact same as wii-ps3, the difference wouldn't be so large because the GPUs are feature compatible at least.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand, I had a discussion with Fourth Storm over PM, and I think it's best if we let him do the honours. I'll help out as I can, and Durante and Blu should be able to give some advice as well. The most important stuff will be pretty straightforward for him anyway. So, if people want to chip in, they can send Fourth Storm a PM and he'll sort stuff out via PayPal. You don't have to contribute any particular amount, even a few dollars each should be fine. He'll get the photo hopefully tonight, and then it'll probably take him a day or so to put all the details up (he'll run them past the rest of us so that we can determine, as best as possible, that everything checks out). We'll keep you guys updated with progress, and then probably post a thread with the details in a day or two.
neo-berserk
Neo Member
it will be interesting to see what nintendo can do to max 1gb of ram; big enviroments at 720p+8af+ssao+2xmsaa should do it i think.I dunno about the loading though;bd drive@6x+slow ram and slow cpu?
Fourth Storm
Member
Thanks, Thraktor.
Ok folks, I believe the easiest way for me to go about this is for all who wish to contribute to PM their email address and the amount they would like to donate. I'll be manning the battle station all evening, so the faster this happens, the faster we can all get the answers that have alluded us for far too long.
True to my word, I'm in for the initial $20. All those who contribute will be recognized and then promptly hunted down by Nintendo Ninjas.
Ok folks, I believe the easiest way for me to go about this is for all who wish to contribute to PM their email address and the amount they would like to donate. I'll be manning the battle station all evening, so the faster this happens, the faster we can all get the answers that have alluded us for far too long.
True to my word, I'm in for the initial $20. All those who contribute will be recognized and then promptly hunted down by Nintendo Ninjas.
Monolith's X should be the interesting one. The Wii U's 1GB of MEM2 is 16 times as much as they had to play with for Xenoblade, and their games are the type you would expect to really stretch memory constraints.
neo-berserk
Neo Member
yes indeed! but i have a question for you...if i remember well the ram is@1600mgz so the gpu must be at this speed too? sorry if it already talk in previous post.
ps; and if someone can estimate the bandwith of the gpu will be great.
Fourth Storm
Member
Oh, rubbish! Although I must admit, things do seem to have taken a turn towards the gray.
no way. the game's just lacking colors which is odd considering Xenoblade was a rainbow game.
neo-berserk
Neo Member
OH! someone have seen the complete game! SPOILER ALERT!!!
Schnozberry
Member
Sign of the times. Maybe other areas than what we saw will be more varied. I hope so anyway. Fantasy worlds that look too much like Earth bum me out.
Fourth Storm
Member
I don't mind it as much. My favorite RPG, Final Fantasy 6, is full of browns and grays. Bottom line is that I am ecstatic that Nintendo seem to be giving more of a budget to this one than Xenoblade. If the aesthetic must be less anime-esque in order to ensure this title sells more and is given its proper respects in the U.S., I am all for it.
We're a little over halfway to our goal with donations. Thanks to everyone so far who is helping to bring this information to the world! If you haven't read the last page and don't know what I'm talking about, go ahead and do so, and then if the feeling compels you, shoot me a PM!
Schnozberry
Member
I don't mind it as much. My favorite RPG, Final Fantasy 6, is full of browns and grays. Bottom line is that I am ecstatic that Nintendo seem to be giving more of a budget to this one than Xenoblade. If the aesthetic must be less anime-esque in order to ensure this title sells more and is given its proper respects in the U.S., I am all for it.
We're a little over halfway to our goal with donations. Thanks to everyone so far who is helping to bring this information to the world! If you haven't read the last page and don't know what I'm talking about, go ahead and do so, and then if the feeling compels you, shoot me a PM!
It's not going to deter my purchase. The perfect is always the enemy of the good.
Glad to hear we are on our way. Send this man money!
Smurfman256
Member
Wait, where are people sending the money to? I haven't seen anything on ChipWorks. Is there somewhere else that tears the heat spreaders off chips and scans them?
A few pages back; Chipworks DID scan the chips, but they aren't releasing the scans for free, it's 200 bucks for each chip.
DeuceGamer
Member
Send a PM to Fourth Storm if you want to donate for it.
Fourth Storm
Member
Chipworks is selling hi res photos for $200 a pop. I've been collecting donations, and once that amount is raised, will purchase and analyze the photo with a small team of our own Neogaf experts. Results of the analysis will be shared in a new thread in the coming days.
Smurfman256
Member
Didn't see it on their website...need to check again.
EDIT: Nope. Still haven't found the page that has the scan of the chip for sale. Would you kindly be able to post a link to the page that has it for sale?
neo-berserk
Neo Member
i think we should do a petition against nintendo to have the entire details specs of the machine to get done with it,come on! the thing is out it's our right to know.
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