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curl-6 on 14 July 2013
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biglittlesps said:
curl-6 said:
zarx said:

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/


So, Nintendo sacrificed horse power to the speed of caches and latency. They have only 320 Stream processors, when compared to PS4's 1152 and Xbox one 768 stream processors. They should have balanced the hardware atleast to the level of Xbox one.

They choose they hardware they did because they prioritised the tablet controller, backwards compatibility, quietness, cool running, reliability, and affordability over raw power. Would they have been better off going for an X1 level of power? Probably, yes. In its current form, however, I don't believe it's as weak as is widely believed.