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dahuman on 23 November 2012
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ethomaz said:

dahuman said:

OK, let me enlighten you on a few things:

1.) How a CPU is used is based on the devs, we are not working with a standard PC library here, it is most likely than not slower in overall performance vs the Xenon and the Cell, but you do bring up an interesting topic in stating that it's mostly for OS, and OS is going to be the defining factor in next gen consoles, the current 360 GUI and the XMB just won't do for the 8th gen(of course, also limited by RAM, which Wii U certainly doesn't lack for what it needs to do), having an OOE CPU means that it can handle that situation better without having a huge die behind it. It's smart design over raw power, kinda like the GPU situation in the 360 vs PS3, where the Xenos is clearly superior to the RSX in features, but not RAW power.

2.) You are completely mad to think that a CPU can do physics better than a modern GPU, not to mention that they don't need to load the entire physics system to the GPU, they only need to offload what they would need to, the fun thing about consoles is that you can not thinking about a wide range of hardwares like a PC, you can concentrate on that one piece of technology, so it doesn't need to have GTX680 power to produce cool stuff.

All the talk about GPGPU is most people don't understand how things work, and thinks that all the physics work would be done on the GPU via an API like how Nvidia does it with PhysX, but we are not dealing with a PC, so it's completely moot.

We know nothing about the eDRAM, so people hoping that to be the Wii U's savior are also weird, that's also moot.

Finally, we really know nothing about the efficiency of the console, knowing Nintendo, prolly not a lot of bottlenecks. They have never designed things based on how to build a muscle car, which are fun cars, but also the most inefficient pieces of toys on Earth.

1) I agree... OOE is more for the evolution in consoles OS and not for games itself... I think just AI can have benefic in OOE execution in games.

2) The PhysX lose a lot of performance with running in the same GPU (graphics + physx)... the best case is to use a GPU for graphics and other for Phyxs * SLI *... and the Physics in CPU (Havok) is way better than PhysX yet (the CPU instructions like SSE and others do "miracles" in performance).

I expect the eDRAM to do something with the slow memory of Wii U because the bandwidth is not sufficient to 1080p games or complex AA filters.

We also don't know enough about the Wii U's CPU instructions to make any calls on that either, the only thing we know is that the raw power aspect won't be very impressive, but there is no rule that says you have to do all the physics calculations on the CPU or GPU by themselves, we aren't talking about a PC with a monster Core i7 or a SLI or Hybrid PhsyX setup here, we are talking about a console that's designed in a way where it'd have low enough cost, not use a lot of power, while packing in a entirely new way to play console games that has many good software features from what I've tested thus far. I sure as hell didn't buy a PS3 for 600 bucks, but Nintendo managed to make it nice and affordable while not being a piece of shit at 300-350 bucks so I had no problem picking it up day 1.

The future is MLAA BTW, we've all known that since it became part of the practice on PC, PS3 and 360. I for one am glad that side is evolving because the MSAA and QAA are bitches on performance cost vs quality(QAA is horrid) compared to MLAA solutions.