snowdog said:
He's either kidding or is a few pence short of a quid. The architecture is completely new, nothing like the Wii or the 360. Even typing 'Wii and 360' in that sentence above makes no sense as the Wii and 360 both have different architectures. The Wii has a GPU with fixed functions to display shader effects and the 360 has a GPU with programable shaders to display shader effects. To say that developers are close to getting the max out of a console at launch is a ridiculous statement, developers have only had final dev kits for the last 6 months...the majority of development has been done on unfinished/underclocked dev kits with constant SDK revisions, which will still go on for the next few years. You'll have devlopers close to getting the max out of the hardware during the console's third generation of games, not before. |
In 2005, the Xbox had the whole new idea of multiple threads and programmable shaders. Nothing like them had been seen before. The PS3's Cell was also a completely new design that we had no idea how to program for.
The Wii U consists of a GPU every programmer is familiar with, a memory architecture (eDRAM+RAM) the same as the Wii, and a CPU architecture that is either very similar to the Wii or to the 360 (don't know yet). IBM didn't do a whole new custom architecture like they did for Cell.
So I'm speaking in relative terms. It will be a lot faster to get games close to optimised than it was for either of the 360 or PS3. As we saw from Nintendo with the GC, some of their very first games were GC's best looking because they used the GC's shader effects, so first-party games will be there even sooner.
What I'm saying is don't expect it to improve from where it is now to CLEARLY ahead of the 360 and PS3. It's not capable of that.
--
My point about GPGPU was that, even though the Wii U's GPU is capable of it, it will not be used to the extent that it will help performance. Even high-end PC games don't use it in that way except for PhysX. GPGPU in the current meaning arose in the GPU generation after the PS3/360 came out: Nvidia 8000 and AMD 2000 series.
