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curl-6 on 07 February 2013
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BlueFalcon said:
curl-6 said:
Trim those quote trees, guys. ;)

And for those of you who weren't into it or around then, we had spec wars like this at the start of the 6th and 7th gens too, and people claimed the PS2 was stronger than the Xbox and Gamecube or the 360 was stronger than the PS3 based on specs like these Wii U ones.

This is completely different. PC gamers now have an entire history of AMD GPUs spanning from HD7000 and below. When the GPU in Xbox 360 came out, we didn't even have a unified shader GPU architecture on the PC as that only arrived in 2006. At Xbox 360's launch time this made it impossible to estimate or understand how the GPU compared to PC parts.

We know the die size of Wii U's GPU and the console's total maximum power consumption and die sizes of all of the important R700 chips made on 40nm nodes. There is no magic in GPU design. If the architecture is not Graphics Core Next, the GPU in Wii U is already outdated automatically, no matter what it is. If the power consumption of the Wii U in games is 35-40W, the console cannot be powerful. It's just not possible. 

Look at the size of flagship GPUs on the PC. They are nearly the size of the Wii U itself on their own. They also use 230-290W of power, on 28nm node (which is 60% more efficient than 40nm one). This would mean those GPUs would use 368-464W of power if they were made on 40nm node of Wii U. Also, since the GPU inside the Wii U is clocked at 550mhz, that's only HALF of the clock speeds of today's flagship cards. That means a Wii U GPU with 1.05Ghz clocks of modern GPUs made on 40nm node would use yet again 2x more 50% more power due to go from 550mhz to 1.05ghz or 736-928W of power if it were to be exactly as efficient in its GPU architecture as today's high-end GPUs. Based on this estimate alone, and Wii U's power usage of 35W in games, the GPU in the Wii U is roughly 21-25x slower than a GTX690.

21-25x slower than a GTX690 would put the Wii U's GPU power at 18 VP, or roughly only 40-50% more than the GPUs in Xbox 360/PS3.

No matter how you look at it, from a power consumption, die size, or maximum specs of R700 vs. die size comparison, you end up arriving at very similar conclusion = Wii U's GPU is extremely underpowered to be a next generation console.

You still need to know all of the customizations made to Latte, which we don't yet. It's not off-the-shelf.

You and Matzy seem to be under the mistaken impression that I'm arguing for a "top of the line PC"/"rivals PS4/720" level of power in Wii U. I'm not. I'm saying that (A) the evidence so far suggests it is more powerful than the PS3 and 360, and (B) that we don't know enough to make a conclusive ruling yet.

50% better than PS360 is fine by me. It's about what I expected.

It should also be noted that as a console, Wii U has the advantage of having uniform innards which means games can be more specifically optimised for it than PC games. Consoles always blow away what a PC with the same amount of raw power can do in gaming because of this, so directly comparing it to PC parts often paints an inaccurate picture.