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elektranine on 09 April 2016
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Miyamotoo said:
elektranine said:

Lol what good is having even 1000x more RAM if you can't ever use it. As a developer you would be more concerned with the speed than anything else. What good is having a 16 lane freeway when the speedlimit is only 35mph. I'd rather have a 4 lane highway running @ 70 mph so you can get all those cars home faster.

Lets review the Wii U's system specs vs PS3/Xbox 360:

 

  • 50% slower RAM (12.8gbps vs 25.6gbps for PS3)
  • While Wii U has 2GB of RAM Nintendo reserves a full 1GB of that for System resources. That 50% wow. (PS3 was always lamented by developers for reserving 19% of RAM). So in reality developers only have ~2.4x more RAM not 4x as you claim and its slower.
  • 50% slower CPU. This is being really generous here. The Wii U is 32-bit. Has a clockrate of 1.24ghz. And is based on the IBM PowerPC 750 (1997). 32-bit architectures started going out in the late 90's/very early 2000's. Even comparing the clock speeds is bad (1.24 vs 3.6) because the Wii U can't do as much per CPU cycle due to being only 32-bit. GIgaflops paints even worse picture: (3.72 gigaflops Wii U vs 10.8 gigaflops Xbox 360 vs 23.04 gigaflops PS3).
  • GPU is next...
You say that the Wii U has "much better stronger GPU" but that is just plain wrong. We live in a world where the PS4 having a 50% power advantage is labeled as just "marginally" better. And I will even admit that I was wrong when I said that the Wii U's GPU was only 50% more powerful....
  • The PS3 gpu has a performance of 228.8 gigaflops.
  • The Xbox 360 gpu has a performance of 240 gigaflops
  • The Wii U gpu has a performance of 352 gigaflops
  • Meaning the Wii U GPU is between 32% and 35% more powerful not 50%
So being that the PS4 difference is seen as "not noticeable" and "marginal" there is no way one can honestly say that the Wii U is seen as having a "much better stronger GPU" than the PS3/Xbox 360.
Combine the slightly better GPU with the slower RAM and slower CPU it is not surprising why many devs did not care to develop games for the Wii U. Hopefully Nintendo can do better this time around.

 

Even Wii U CPU is weak on paper, if its used on right way (use of huge and very fast EDRAM section and the big CPU caches in the cores) it can punche well above own height, just look how Nintendo used it for its game, most of Nintendo games working 720p/60Fps. Shin'en wrote how to use most of Wii U CPU and whole hardware.

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2013/05/shinen_wii_u_has_enough_power_for_years_to_come_gpu_is_several_generations_ahead_of_current_consoles

 

So no, Wii U CPU is not 50% weaker than PS3/Xbox360. About GPU, its not just about power, Wii U GPU is several generations newer GPU than Xbox360/PS3 and that "allows many things that were not possible on PS3/Xbox360 consoles".

At end we have: somehow slower CPU and RAM but stronger and much more modern GPU and 2.4x more RAM. So similar performance like Xbox 360/PS3, but if hardware is used on right way it can have pretty impressive results for that hardware.

 

Nintendo made great hardware in Wii U for what they were aiming, very efficient, small, silent and in same time very capable 720p console, even if we know that aim wasn't good decision. I don't think they will use same philosophy this time again.

Can't believe the "wii u is only weak on paper" claim. lol kinda sounds suspiciously familiar to the "PS4 is only powerful on paper" routine i always used to see.

Also if i were you I'd refrain from going to places with nintendo in their URL they tend to be biased and spout lies favoring nintendo. Some of those places even claimed the Wii U having memory bandwidth rivaling that of the PS4/xbone and quite obviously thats not even close to being true.

I didn't mention the Wii U's edram because its basically just the same thing the Xbox 360 has only more of it. Edram is only used in a handfull of operations with most having to do with image post-processing. Besides the Wii U edram is embedded on the CPU not the GPU where it should have been. So the technical advantages of the Wii U having edram are rather limited and not worth discussing here.

As for the Wii U gpu having new hardware features: Yes of course it would. The GPU is basically off the shelf , a slighty downclocked AMD/ATI Mobility HD 4650 variant. So yes it has unified shaders that the ps3/xbox 360 lack. But having some new hardware features is only useful if it is exposed properly through a software API. Nintendo would have to do that. With the Wii developers complained about not having access to programmable shaders even though the Wii gpu supported GPU shaders. This is because Nintendo decided not to expose those features in the Wii API even though they could have. Same thing happend with the Wii U.

And what's with the "somehow" slower CPU and memory. It is not "somehow" it is mathematically proven, the numbers don't lie. I even ignored the fact that the Wii U has a 32-bit CPU, lower clock speed, older design, etc. The Wii U cpu comes from a design that competed against the Intel Pentium 2. The memory the Wii U has is a function of its slower CPU and 32-bit architecture. The WII U's system ram could actually be about 55gbps but is limited by the CPU's low GHZ rating (which controls the system bus) and 32-bit word size (which controls how much data can be moved around at one time).