By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
selnor on 24 October 2012
Edit Thread
Viper1 said:
selnor said:

512 mb in 360 ps3 has been an issue for years. Because its one thing saying the entire screen res is 720p but half the problem of textures not being crisp and beautiful is the resolution of those textures. This all becomes so important the more the machine can do. By 2015 I fully expect even with the rumoured 8 gb ram the nextbox will have maybe 2016 that some devs will want more than that. 

All the big guns Crytek, Epic, ID Software, EA etc have asked for much more ram in the next generation than what they upped it to this gen. Hence why I firmly believe the several rumours that Nextbox is 8 gb ram and 12 cores of which 8 cores are for games.

As Watchdogs is being released next year, The nextbox with those specs will easily match the PC version and then some. The Wii U is not going to struggle on GPU. It will struggle as the HD consoles of this gen have the last 4 years. On Ram. Look at Skyrim on PS3. Look at Fallout 3 on PS3 and that was halfway through the generation.

The more I look at the Wii U the more I realise its gonna suffer in Hardware. Because the ram is just to much of an issue. Devs were saying 3 years ago they wish PS3 and 360 had 1 gb ram and that that would help games be much better. 3 years on from that Wii U is releasing with the same ram available that console devs were asking for 3 years ago. Not enough. Wii U should have had at least 4 gb ram for games. At least. 

The major difference is the Wii U is very capable of texture streaming.  This means you don't need nearly as much RAM.

Say a stage or scene has 300 MB's of textures.   That's a lot of RAM to eat up.  But if you just stream the necessary textures that actually need rendering, you can reduce that load significantly.    In other words, you can have a stage or scene that requires more texture capacity than the RAM you actually have and it won't matter.

And don't forget the massive eDRAM.   That also reduces the need for a lot of standard RAM.

That still doesnt compensate for a loss of 7 gb ram compred to competiton. Lets say nextbox has 2 gb for system and games has 6 gb available. Thats still 5x the amount of ram. Not forgetting the same 5 rumours of Nextbox devkits have said 512 mb EDRam also. 

I am worried for the Wii U for certain games from 3rd paties. For example I dont expect to see my fave RPG Elder Scrolls on it. Definately not Elder Scrolls 6 anyway. I believe the ram issue will bite it. 

I hope Im wrong. But theres quite a few developers I feel will just not build a Wii U version due to the cuts it will need because of ram. 

Another thing that caught my attention was how inferior the Nintendo Graphics demos were of Wii U compared to CryEngine 3 next gen demos and Unreal Engine 4. The latter 2 killed the Zelda demo and the wierd lake with bird demo Nintendo had. Not to mention the Samaritan demo running on realtime Unreal 4 development. 

I am worried.