| richardhutnik said: The Wii U is said to have 1GB RAM available for games (if not even less). The PS4 is going to have 7 GB (of the 8) available for games. My question is this. How the heck does the Wii U have the techical capabilities to do games that the PS4 has, if the PS4 is going to have 7 times more available RAM? I can understand some current games we have now, in transition, and the likes of fighting games being doable, but what about stuff like open world games, where a lot of the RAM will be used? How does the Wii U be able to keep up with this? |
The simple answer is, it WON'T, but I'll go into a little more details why it won't get the same versions if any.
The WiiU will continue to get any PS4/720 ports as long as they keep coming to the PS3/360, however, Once we're 1-2 years into the PS4 and 720 life, the WiiU will find it harder and harder to get down ports because of the limited GPU/CPU but more so with ram.
Think about this, the Wii has 88MB of ram, the PS3/360 has 5.8 times that with 512MB of ram, now the WiiU has 1GB of ram for games, but now the PS4 has 7 times that amount with 7GB usable for games, the disparity has increased and this can only spell disaster for the WiiU in terms of 3rd party games.
I'll give you a recent example with Skyrim on the PS3 and 360 versions to illustrate how insufficient ram causes problems. The PS3 has 512M, removing the OS of about 56MB leaves it with 456MB for game data, the 360 also has 512MB with 10MB of EDram, so it's got 522MB, we then remove the OS (32MB) and it's left with 490MB for games. The 360 in effect has 34MB extra the devs can play with. Now what most people who played skyrim on PS3 found out when it first came out was that the game eventually became unplayable after about 80 hours depending on how much one interacted with the world. It turned out that the games was designed to store in ram what was touched so it remains that way if you came back, unfortunately the PS3 simply ran out of ram so it thrashed the hard drive and caused the game to be unplayable as frame rates dropped to almost zero. The game was eventually patched multiple times to fix this issue, and they did so by minimising exactly what was stored on ram, and to only have the critical in ram...the 360 never suffered from this issue.
I understand that one could argue that perhaps the game wasn't coded in the most proficient way, but the developers initial goal was to ensure a progressive game world that reflected your interactions with it, hence it recording what was touched and how, removing this approach would give a lesser experience, and although the developers optimised it to finally work, they did have to change certain things, lucky the disparity of the PS3 and 360 was only 34MB so it wasn't noticeable between versions, now if we balloon the difference from 34MB to 7GB......an open world games as detailed and expansive as skyrim was made to use 7GB, it could not be ported to the WiiU without significant changes, and there for the final product would be noticeably different from the PC/PS4/720 versions. This isn't even taking into account the massive loss of high fidelity textures as well as variety of textures.
I'd also like to point out that procedural animation, real time destruction, texture variety, or any interactive objects needs ram. Their location, and the rest of the details need to be stored, so if the player comes back the world would be as they left it rather than having it reset it's self....basically it effects immersion.
How many you have notices that allot of games have very little interactivity on random items, how many of you have noticed the repeated textures or enemies, how many of you have noticed how things just disappear like rubble form an explosion, and how many of you have noticed how bodies just disappear...think how different a game would be if bodies didn't just disappear but remained and how that may impact the way you play when you realise that you have left a death trail of corpses as opposed to seeing nothing but a clean space despite you knowing you just wiped out 20 dudes....this is what more ram allows, and now that PS4 and 720 have lifted the baseline, well start seeing less of what we saw on PS3/360 and hopefully more of what I just mentioned.
In any case, the above things I mentioned is why the WiiU will either get really crappy ports when the PS4/720 kick off into their second year, or they'll simply have a different version which may be the same versions of the handhelds, as what we saw happen with the Wii, there’s also the possibility that the WiiU will simply get its own unique version or like it has been currently happening with new games being announced, they'll simply miss out.
That’s my 2 cents, I hope Nintendo fans understand what I’ve written as I simply don't want them to underestimate the disparity as being a non-issue when it clearly is. Don't get me wrong, the WiiU in time will get very nice looking games, that will definitely be above par from the PS3/360 graphics level, it's just when we look at or speak of PC, PS4, 720, they won't be the same. It's just the way things are, only time with the assistance of Digital foundry and lens of truth will eventually reveal that state of affairs. So let’s buckle up and enjoy this journey.
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