Some interesting Wii U facts

[HappySqurriel]

pezus said:

HappySqurriel said:

pezus said:

 

2. Iwata: “No matter how great the numbers are that you can boast, can you only draw that out under certain conditions, or can you actually draw out its performance consistently when you use it? Insisting on the latter way of thinking has always been at the root of hardware and system development at Nintendo.

Come again?

Essentially, he is saying that theoritical peak performance is not what they're focused on; they wanted to have strong real-world performance with consistent throughput.

So why aren't they showing us this consistent throughput? I keep getting told the graphics will see major jump in future games, but if it's so easy and consistent why isn't the jump happening right away?

I don't think you understand what consistent throughput means ... Using made up numbers and a simple benchmark, there are two approaches that can be taken:

1) Develop a system for peak theoritical performance; while the system can render 240 million polygons per second at peak it regularly runs into a bottleneck that drops performance down to 120 million polygons per second.

2) Develop a system for consistent performance; the system can produce 120 million polygons per second for all games.

This has nothing to do with how well utilized the performance is by developers. In general the more consistent the performance is the better able developers are to be able to enhance visuals over time because they know exactly what the system can do and work around it; while peak theoritical performance usually results in developers struggling to get a steady frame-rate with the visuals they produced.