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curl-6 on 14 July 2013
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zarx said:
snowdog said:
Sensei said:

Ok, so let's assume Wii U's RAM is faster. It's still bottelenecked by nearly everything else. It's like putting 8GB RAM on a Sega Genesis. It just doesn't do much when its CPU and GPU aren't up to speed.

Could be good news to the Xbone against PS4, though, because it is overall more powerful than Wii U to take advantage of that RAM architecture's potential, like Cerny said.



The Wii U hardware has been designed from the ground up to be efficient. Nintendo are aware that bottlenecks are the bane of developers and have designed a balanced console as a result. Efficiency plus balance equals less bottlenecks.


That's a nice sentament for sure but one that has little grounding in fact. Nintendo have a history of bottlenecks in their systems. N64 had it's high latency shared RAM plus a miniscule 4K texture cache. Gamecube had it's small amount of main RAM and complicated memory system (2 shared RAM pools + 3MB  eDRAM). NDS had it's fixed 2048 triangles per frame budget, at least it had 512KB of texture memory lol.

Nintendo are good but they aren't that good...

The developer of Nano Assault on Wii U said of the hardware that: 

“The performance problem of hardware nowadays is not clock speed but ram latency. Fortunately Nintendo took great efforts to ensure developers can really work around that typical bottleneck on Wii U.

They put a lot of thought on how CPU, GPU, caches and memory controllers work together to amplify your code speed."

http://www.vg247.com/2012/11/05/wii-u-avoids-ram-bottleneck-says-nano-assault-dev/