Wii U GPU new info and more speculation

[HoloDust]

RazorDragon said:

ninjablade said:

actually that maximum is 320 SP, if you read the last page on beyond3d many think its below 320 SP, the perefromance is not amking sense when even the most bottled necked system the pc, can blow past 360 with an HD5500 cloed at 550mhz.

Agreed. And i know the maximum is 320 SPs in Wii U's case, however PC cards like the HD 4770 with a die size of 118mm^2 had 480 SPs, which doesn't happen on the Wii U, of course, because of different achitectures. Anyway, Wii U's  case can't be analyzed by only looking at it performance-wise.  Games on the market now are launch titles, and the system may have bottlenecks not known by us and developers that go beyond the SP count of the GPU.

Actually, HD4770 die size is 137mm^2, but that's 640:32:16 GPU @40nm. 118mm^2 is for Turks based cards (6570/6670) which are 480:24:8 GPUs @40nm. If my math is correct, they should be able to pack 320:16:8 config into 80-90mm^2 @40nm.

Though for most time I thought it's Redwood inside, cause of DX11 equivalent capabilities rumours, I'm starting to think what we're looking at might be based on RV730 (HD4670/4650), that is 320:32:8 GPU, whith die size of 146mm^2 @55nm, so once shrank to 40nm there shouldn't be any problem fitting it there. 4650 performs (17.8VP) at around 5550 DDR2/128bit level (16.5VP), which is equivalent to 5550 DDR3/64bit - considering 360 is around 13-14, it would be consistent with what real tests are showing.

If something like this is indeed inside of WiiU, I can see how games like Trine2 can really benefit from it with little extra dev effort, while other games, that are scene heavy and tax CPU a lot might suffer....in my opinion, real shame Nintendo haven't opted for just slightly better hardware (like AMD CPU), with that it would be clear from the get go that it is a more poweful than PS360, and all titles would easily show that.

BTW, code name for RV730 was Mario ;)