Wii U: Reflections, Theories, and how it's a lot more brilliant than first impressions

[HappySqurriel]

thetonestarr said:

If they do a multiple screentroller setup, one thing to remember is that, to support extra controllers, it takes extra RAM and extra CPU (mostly CPU) - it most likely has ZERO drain on the GPU because the controllers will likely have their own built-in GPU to do that work. That's a lot less strenuous for the system, and it evens the load a ton. If there's going to be only one controller EVER supported, then that probably won't be the case - it'll probably strictly be an image transmitted wirelessly, no computing at all in the controller.

RAM and CPU power are the cheaper of the three to upgrade. Additionally, the rumored specs show the system having a multicore processor and a lot of very high-speed RAM. With a multicore processor, supporting the extra screens is very easy. There can be one core specifically dedicated towards processing the data to send to the controllers, then the controllers process that data graphically. That spreads out the burden drastically, and makes it REALLY easy to support extra controllers without sacrificing performance.

From a product perspective, it makes far more sense to have the controller be a "Dumb Terminal" and have the graphics generated by the console ... Especially if you're planning on supporting  multiple controllers. The reason for this is simple, it would probably cost more to add the functionality to 1 controller than it would be to support 4 controllers from the console; so you would have a $350 system with $100 controllers rather than a $325 system with $75 controllers.