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greenmedic88 on 25 January 2012
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HappySqurriel said:
greenmedic88 said:
Play4Fun said:
o_O.Q said:
lol it seems as if for some people the rumours are only believable when the wii u is said to be considerably more powerful
i actually remember a few weeks back one of the sources saying it may only be 1.5 times more powerful than the ps3
but whatever we'll just have to wait a few more weeks to see


LOL, it seems for some people the rumours are only believable if the Wii U is said to be barely more powerful or equal to current gen.

Oh, and can I get this supposed rumour you remember from a few weeks back with a source sayingit was only 1.5 times more powerful than PS3?

Without any hard facts, people feel free to pretty much pull whatever numbers they want out of their asses.

In regards to the Wii U GPU, about the only "fact" I'm inclined to believe is that it will have an R700 based GPU, most likely a modified RV770 which was the commercial equivalent of the ATI's HD4850 from mid 2008. That GPU is easily more powerful than a factor of 1.5 over the RSX in the PS3.

I have seen a few rumors that claimed the Wii U's CPU was only 1.5 times as powerful as the Cell processor but without more details that is kind of a useless comparison ...

When it comes to theoritical processing power and simple benchmarks the Cell processor is one of the most powerful processors available, when it comes to real world in-game performance the Cell processor is surpassed by outdated hardware. The answer to the question "under what conditions is the Wii U's CPU only 50% more powerful than the Cell?" could imply that the Wii U's CPU is relatively unimpressive or remarkably powerful.

Beyond this, most games are not CPU bound so a dramatic increase in processing power on the CPU isn't really much of a benefit at this point in time.

About the only information I've read about the Wii U CPU is that it is another IBM Power chip (confirmed by IBM), rumored to be based upon the Power7, which is currently produced with 4, 6 and 8 cores that run at 4.25 Ghz max (min 3.0 Ghz). It's obviously not going to be a top spec version of the chip given both the Wii U overall production cost and the retail price, but I'm sure it will still be customized/optimized to Nintendo's specifications.

The CPU is a lot more impressive than the R700 based GPU, which is based upon 2008 GPU tech. There's no question the Power7 is a great CPU in existing form. The question is how well it will translate into game performance. I'm expecting to be impressed. But it may well end up being a better number crunching CPU like the CBE, not ideal for games, hobbled by the GPU, or both in the worst case scenario. 

But again, without finalized specifications on how much embedded DRAM is on the Power7 CPU, how much VRAM will be dedicated to the R700 GPU or how much system RAM will be available, or whether it will use a shared memory architecture, any speculation on the "power" of the Wii U is really just that. Without actual numbers behind the hardware, it's pretty pointless to guess numbers as to how many times faster it will be than the Xbox 360 or the PS3 and even more pointless to state numbers compared to the Xbox 3 since there's even less information about that than the Wii U.