Wii U GPU new info and more speculation

[RazorDragon]

timmah said:

RazorDragon said:

Tachikoma said:

Lighting - Doesn't look any better, or any worse, you're just selectively comparing different areas of the game where lighting and weather conditions are different.

draw distance - actual draw distance is the same, ps3 version fades in assets slightly slower, 360 fades them in more or less the same as the wiiu, only difference is wiiu's fade is more aggressive and applies lighting to the asset later, resulting in some foliage/trees appearing lighter for a few moments before the correct lighting is applied in the distance, that's neither a benefit or a negative in each case, again however you're most likely comparing to footage from another console where weather/time is different. - you would need a direct comparison to tell properly.

textures - are you even serious?, even set to 720p youtube still has significant media artifacting the degredation of image, don't be rediculous.

[EDIT] - Actually sorry, i take that back, just read the DF review and they are infact using the PC higher resolution textures, but everything else is exactly the same.

Well, if you think better textures, lightning and draw distance don't mean a thing, i don't know what kind of graphics you're expecting from PS4 and Nextbox, but i'm sure you'll be disappointed. And, even if you don't see improvements in draw distance and lightning, if the developers said they did improve those areas, i'm inclined to believe them.

 

However, i can't believe improving the graphics would be possible with a 160SPs GPU like the Radeon HD 6450. I mean, as we can see on this video, it barely runs the game on low settings and with lower than Wii U resolution:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSfdep-rPk0

 

Wii U version looks like it's running on high, at least texture-wise. No amount of optimization can give these kinds of results, even if the DirectX API's overhead damages performances on PC. I'm inclined to believe we're indeed talking about a 320SPs GPU on Wii U, that, or the measured clock rate of Wii U's GPU is wrong.

I definitely saw a difference in lighting (especially the reflection effect on the road), having played the game on my friend's 360. The reflections in the other versions seem overly shiny to me, while the reflections on the PC/WiiU versions appear more realistic side by side (this may be due to the WiiU/PC using shader model 5/DX11). The draw distance appears a bit better to me as well, and there is a noticable difference in texture resolution (mostly seen in the close up shots of the road & buildings after a crash on the Youtube vid) I went over and watched a few city races on the 360 for comparison, the surfaces of the buildings appear much flatter & textures appear a bit blurry until you're right up on them, and the overall look of the game seems a bit fuzzy (maybe the 360 version isn't native 720p?).

Is it possible that one issue is that other ports originated from the 360, while this one originates from the PC version? Maybe the benifit we see here is due to using more modern instructions & features specific to Shader Model 5 and DirectX 11 + assets designed for more modern hardware? It's also possible that the early WiiU ports didn't utilize some built in optomization features designed to overcome memory bandwidth, such as hardware texture compression & EDRAM management for example? I also wonder if the early SDK was missing some features initially, or if the porting teams were not able to study & utilize the optomization features properly due to time constraints.

EDIT: Looking at the Youtube vid of the 6450, there's no way that's in the U, as the quality of the NFS video we saw wouldn't be even remotely possible at that framerate (the 6450 is running at low detail and is barely playable). Since 30% of the die is unknown and nobody can even say for certain what part it's based on, there's definitely something going on beyond what meets the eye.

Lightning wise, yes, it's probably because of newer instructions like Shader Model 5 and APIs with DX11-like features. However, Shader Model or DirectX version differences wouldn't explain better textures and draw distance. For a GPU to do better textures and geometry(draw distance is included in that) than other, it needs to be more powerful, as Shader Model version or DX version only affect shader operations. For example, a Radeon HD 4890(DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.1) can drive more polygons and run better textures at a higher framerate than a HD 5770, which is a generation ahead of it and has a newer APIs such as Shader Model 5.0 and DX11, even if the effects it can produce are limited compared to a HD 5770 by the Shader Model and DX version.

Like i said in another post in this thread, ignoring this 30% part of the die that's still unknown, by size measurements it would mean that Wii U's GPU would probably be something similar to a HD 6450. However, based on this Most Wanted Wii U video, I can't believe this card would be able to do these kinds of visuals no matter which optimizations they made in the game.