RazorDragon said:
bonzobanana said:
I don't know how it effects all the views here but the latte wii u gpu has built in compression to generate the gamepad screen when it's showing the main game visuals (no additional processing required) and at other times it is believed the old wii gpu inside the latte generates the gamepad screen for maps etc. The likely gpu the latte is based on (I think) is the Radeon HD 6400. Clearly though when the gamepad is just generating minor map screens with minimal colours it will not require much processing. Unless we get wii u games that have full on action graphics being generated on both tv and gamepad simultanously I don't think we have to add both resolutions together.
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The compression part has nothing to do with what you said, it's just to mirror TV image to Gamepad. When you're rendering two different things, it's using more processing power, it doesn't matter if it's just a 2D map or something more complex, performance is being taken away from the main screen to render the second one.
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As I said the gamepad screen frame buffer is likely stored in the wii gpu part of the latte gpu. As for how much processing power it would need it would be absolutely minimal. If you basically have a 2D map screen that could be generated by a 8bit computer then that's all the processing it will need. My point is you can't add the two resolutions together if the gamepad screen is not a full action independent screen. This idea that the wii u has some huge extra burden on its gpu is complete rubbish with no foundation unless it also generates a full independent action screen on the gamepad which it doesn't as far as I know. The fact the wii u has a wii gpu built in which by some strange coincidence is fully capable of generating a 800x480 screen is surely a huge clue as to why the gamepad has the resolution screen it has. Nintendo have made sensible use of the wii gpu in wii u mode for the gamepad. The point is the gamepad screen is not going to require resources from the main gpu but will need a tiny amount of cpu resources for the map screen etc.
http://www.amd.com/uk/products/notebook/graphics/amd-radeon-6000m/amd-radeon-6400m/Pages/amd-radeon-6400m.aspx#2
