Wii U "surprisingly powerful," textures "could be used in a movie."

[F0X]

selnor said:

Viper1 said:

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.

Those Wii U demos were made with the earliest versions of the hardware. UE4 is very far into development.