EA’s “Unprecedented Partnership” with Nintendo and Other Fairy Tales...

[Viper1]

Scoobes said:

Viper1 said:
Excellent article, Ricard,

To further raise ire with the technical director and the Frostbite 3 engine, their issue seems to stem from the clock rate the Wii U's CPU. Similar to how the Dynasty Warriors developer had a problem with the CPU clock.

What makes me wonder is how they plan to port the Frostbite 3 engine over to the PS4 and Next X given that they too have lower clock speeds than the current HD consoles (both rated at 3.2 Ghz)?

Clock speed has been THE main issue for any developer that has complained about the Wii U's CPU or performance or power, etc... Yet that same clock speed issue is staring them in the face for ALL next generation consoles.

They can easily come up with reasons/excuses; X86 architecture, more cores/threads available, the extra 500(?)MHz making all the difference etc.

Sadly, that's likely what they'll say.  Which won't fly for any of us that understand the technology.

curl-6 said:

The guy who unveiled the Wii U's CPU speed stated that it should "win big on IPC (Instructions Per Cycle) for most code" compared to the PS3/360 CPUs, and Criterion stated that "while it is a lower clock speed, it punches above it's weight in a lot of other areas," and that comparing it to Cell/Xenon (PS3/360's CPUs) based on clockspeed was "apples to oranges."

Espresso may be slower clocked, and have less hardware threads, but it has advantages of its own; a shorter pipeline which means less processing time is lost if it makes a mistake, an audio DSP to handle sound so the CPU doesn't have to, (apparently sound can take up a whole core on Xenon) a GPGPU to further take the strain off Espresso, out-of-order execution compared to Xenon/Cell's in-order execution, and three times as much L2 cache as Xenon.

It's not as weak as it's made out to be.

Indeed.  But that doesn't fit the narrative of many.  Including many developers/publishers it seems.

Cj2i3 said:

Whatever Nintendo and EA's relationship is at the end of the day they both would like to make a profit. I don't know how much it costs to a port game to the Wii-U but if EA lost money on porting ME3 and they feel that porting games later down the line will only lose them money than so be it. Obviously this is all assumption for all I know ME3 U was a massive success.

As for Ubisoft I feel they are onboard with the Wii U, because they may lose money on a few ports early on but later down the road when Wii U owners start getting accustomed to AC, maybe Far Cry, Watch Dogs they may be more likely to purchase them down the line. But I'd rather not speculate, just this time.

So the lose now make profit later model is OK for Ubi but not EA?

I'd also like to point out that EA will lose money on launch titles from all consoles.   Launch titles as a loss have been the reality since the advent of 3rd parties.

I'd also like to point out that Ubisoft stated that it cost about $1.3 million to port a game to the Wii U.   At a $20 profit per title, they only need to sell about 65,000 copies to make the investment worth it.  If EA can't do the same, no wonder they hemorrhage money so badly.