Wii U has “capability issues” due to single processor,says VentureBeat’s Takahashi

[kanageddaamen]

Soleron said:

JEMC said:
Just to clarify, what does he mean with "single processor"? Is he talking about the CPU, the GPU or another thing?

I don't think he understands technology at all.

--

Rendering to two screens is as hard as rendering to one screen with twice the resolution or framerate, and the tablet screen is optional much like the second screen on the DS was. Number of cores/GPUs doesn't come into it; game devs can just have the tablet screen blank if they want to make the TV screen look better.

Not exactly.  For most games, almost all of the games' non-drawing functionality will only need to be done once, and will be handled by the CPU (Physics, AI, Animation, script processing, etc) Depending on how the 2nd screen is used, some optimization code may need to be done multiple times (LOD calculations, etc)

How much time it takes to render what is on the screen depends on a number of factors, such as Number of polygons, number of shader runs per vertex, number of fragment shaders per fragment, and screen resolution.  For a game with highly complex 3d graphics rendering on the screen (ala using the screen a a viewport into the game world) this could take a fair amount of time on the GPU to render.  However, a lot of the overhead (loading shader code, loading textures, etc) could be shared by both screens and so even in the most complex of cases, rendering to 2 screens will not be equal to rendering to one screen twice.