SubiyaCryolite said:
Is the PS4s GPU off the shelf either? No. And yet people compare it to the 7870/7850 all the time. Same applies to the XBox one. The WiiU isn't alien tech and it does not perform the way a 620 gflop card would. Nothing indicates that the systems GPU runs circles around the 360s Xenos. GPU bound games like trine, most wanted and pikmin all run at 30fps on the system for a reason. The difference between Wii U multiplats and 360 ports are minimal at best. There isn't a single game AAA or indie that runs at 30fps on the 360 and 60fps on Wii U. There isn't any game, indie or AAA that runs at 720p on the 360 and 900p on the Wii U. Would you call those titles CPU intensive? No. Lazy ports? Intellectually dishonest. Were looking at a 40 to 60% processing power boost over the 360. 336 to 384 GFLOPs is reasonable and explains all the 720p60 games. Anything else is wishful thinking. The RAM helps but if I was to describe a powergap I'd the the 360 is a Nintendo 64 and the Wii U is a Nintendo 64 with the memory expansion pack. |
Actually the PS4's GPU is a standard pitcairn with a few modifications (lower clockspeed, fewer shading units, etc) , but nothing like what was discovered in the analysis of the Wii U's GPU (which doesn't look very similar to an r700 that it was supposed to be based off of.) I don't know the details of the Xbone's hardware, so I won't comment on it.
At the very conservative estimates, the Wii U's GPU is about 1.5 times (or 50%) Xenos in raw power. If we consider the extra memory bandwidth the Wii U has over the 360, then that is an even more significant difference. Frame-rates tend to be locked. Let's say that the game runs 31 fps unlocked on a Xenos, but 45 fps on the Wii U (average) unlocked. That represents a 1.5 times difference, which if the port wasn't a straight port can go into other features (like anti-aliasing or geometry detail.) Still, they'll lock the game to 30 fps because of monitor and television standards, and dedicating resources to vsync won't be worth it. Having said that, many 360 games run sub-HD and sub-30 fps while an overwhelming majority of games run 720p on the Wii U with a locked 30 fps. Furthermore, we see games like SSBB run at 1080p 60 fps on the Wii U. I have a hard time believing the 360 would keep up with this, for the sole reason of memory bandwidth alone. Most of the 360's 1080p games were much simpler than SSBB.
Notice how first party, exclusive games, which take advantage of hardware that is unique to the Wii U tend to outperform multiplats. How can you say it is intellectually dishonest to call these multiplats poor ports in reflection of that?
Your statement of the 360 is a N64 and Wii U is an N64 with a memory expansion is ridiculous. Even if we ignore raw power, the Wii U's GPU supports more modern features than the 360's, including things like hardware tesselation. This is evident in the effects found in Wii U games. Additionally, the GPU is at the very low estimate 50% faster, and the ram amount and bandwidth is greatly excessive. The CPU is a bottleneck of course, and that is the main reason why multiplats don't run that great, but also not the only reason.
