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

[kanageddaamen]

Soleron said:

kanageddaamen said:

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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.

I already said if it was blank that wasn't more work. Since the drawing is rendered with the same complexity it's 2x the work and this is already accounted for.

No, it is almost certainly not 2 times the work, due to the reasons I pointed out.

Also note, that from a computer science standpoint, it is extraordinarily unlikely that double a screen's resolution of any rendering system will 1/2 the frame rate.  Increasing the resolution pretty much ONLY affects the fragment (or pixel if you prefer) shader's performance as more fragments are sent to the shader for processing, the vast majority of individual time slices that compose the frame's render time will not care about the resolution what so ever.  Fragment shaders are a significant chunk of the total fram time, but certainly not 100% and probably not 50% for most games.