elektranine said:
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). |
Like I wrote, CPU is weak on paper but if its used in right way (use of huge and very fast eDRAM section and the big CPU caches in the cores) it can punched well above own height. Shin'en is well known for their knowledge about technical things of hardware and how to use most of hardware they having. Wii U has eDRAM of 32MB (3x more than Xbox360 and same amount like XB1), and if eDRAM is used on right way it could make quite difference for CPU, but almost any developer beside Nintendo (and Shin'en) didnt used that on right way and most of those things, that's why Nintendo games looking gorgeous and in most cases working at 720p and in locked 60 FPS.
Numbers dont lie, but tests for istance dont using eDRAM that can make quite difference for capability of CPU in games.
Like Shin'en wrote:
"You need to take advantage of the large shared memory of the Wii U, the huge and very fast EDRAM section and the big CPU caches in the cores. Especially the workings of the CPU caches are very important to master."
