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timmah on 06 February 2013
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RazorDragon said:
ninjablade said:

not really simple as that, trine 2 was a game that played into wiiu strength the gpu, even the developer admited the games light on cpu use, fact is wiiu has a weaker cpu and slower bandwidth then 360 two major bottle  necks and as for colonial marines, please don't use that as an example cause we heard the samething from activision, tecmo and vigil that wiiu version would be the best, when they turned out to be the worst.


While it's true(depending on the game) about the CPU part, the bandwidth part is not fully explained yet and shouldn't be taken in consideration before knowing more about how the Wii U uses it. I suggest you reading this article:

http://www.notenoughshaders.com/2013/01/17/wiiu-memory-story/

One part of the article:

"We also must take into account several intricate concepts of bus and direction of RAM. For starters, the 22.4GB/s bandwidth of current gen systems buses is often an aggregated rate, distributed between reads and writes with the RAM. In the case of Xbox 360, the CPU doesn’t reach this speed as its access to the RAM is bound by the FSB, the interface connecting it with the GPU where resides the memory controller. And this FSB bandwidth is 10.8GB/s for read and 10.8GB/s for write.

Click to see the full Xbox360 block diagram – In red, the 10.8GB/s bandwidth related to the CPU

For that reason, and strictly speaking about the CPU transfers with the main memory, it’s possible that the Wii U RAM full write or read bandwidth (12.8GB/s) isn’t as much at a disadvantage as the marketed numbers might suggest if the interface between U-CPU and U-GPU authorize this peak rate. As they are on the same substrate (the Multi Chip Module), it’s expected, although U-CPU bus to the GPU might be split like for Xenon. Still, since the CPU and GPU share the same bandwidth with the RAM, we’re talking of very specific circumstances here, like data processing sequences where the GPU might not use much RAM by extensively leveraging the eDram for example, allowing the CPU to get the most out of the transfer capabilities with the main memory.

Wii U CPU and GPU on the MCM

Likewise, this RAM bandwidth isn’t only common for all the components consuming it, it’s also bidirectional, meaning it can be used either for reads or writes. This characteristic could be combined with the eDram too, working as a “scratchpad” where the important writing operations will be aimed, reducing the amount of writes to the RAM which could then benefit of its full bandwidth potential for data reads. However, this asymmetrical memory organization undoubtedly requires optimization, especially from ports that may have put to task the greater bandwidth of the Xbox 360 and PS3 GDDR3 RAM for concurrent reads and writes."

 

Also, there are no complaints about bandwidth from developers, so that should tell something.

Excellent and well balanced article. I especially liked the interview with the anonymous developer at the end.