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bonzobanana on 06 November 2013
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curl-6 said:
bonzobanana said:
curl-6 said:

Sega, Criterion, Frozenbyte, Shin'en, and Black Forest games have all said that the Wii U is more powerful than PS3/360.

Other developers have also said how weak it is with statements like 'a really horrible cpu'. The fact remains you would never look to developers or publishers for honest information about a console they support and in fact many of the developers who have criticised the wii u don't develop on it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating though, the actual games.

Clearly though the wii u technically is superior to 360 and PS3 on many levels. Better gpu feature set, more memory, more fast embedded memory, faster optical drive, larger capacity optical disc than 360, better hardware upscaler plus other features. The fact remains though;

No hard drive unless you buy an attach one but you only get slow usb 2.0 speeds

Main memory has very low memory bandwidth of 12.8GB/s less than 360 and PS3.

expresso cpu is only 3 last century powerpc cpu's running at 1.25ghz. Even allowing for its superor architecture over 360 and PS3 Cell it is still only 3x1.25ghz for an old 32bit cpu. The xbox cpu is 6 threads at 3.2ghz. The fact is the powerpc chip in the wii u maybe only 2-3x as efficient as the 360 processor. End result is expresso is likely only in the region of 60% performance of the 360. The PS3 is even more powerful with regard cpu performance than 360 maybe by a factor of 50%. Even using some of the compute functionality of the latte gpu won't fully make up this shortfall completely at least not without compromsing graphic performance.

As I said before the wii u is performing exactly as expected for the hardware on offer. No surprises. It's just consumers have different expectations of what the wii u performance level. We have seen this all before with the original wii.

Lets face it though if the wii u can't come in and compete successfully with 360 and PS3 there is something massively wrong. The xbox one which many are claiming is a compromised design is massively exceeding 360 performance day one without problem and the ps4 is more powerful again.

The reason the wii u isn't managing to surpass 360 and PS3 for multiformat games is simply because both 360 and PS3 are designs that have high cpu performance for their day.

Which devs hve said it's weaker? I'm willing to bet their Wii U games fall far short of those of Frozebyte, Shin'en and Criterion.

There's more to CPUs than just clockspeed and thread count. Espresso has three times as much cache as the 360 CPU, for instance, and a shorter pipeline which means it loses less to performance-robbing pipeline bubbles.

The multiplat problem is that (A) modern console engines are built on 8 years of optimization for the high clock speed, long pipeline, low cache CPUs of 360/PS3, (B) due to low sales expectations, third parties are simply not making an effort to optimise for Wii U, and (C) they know PS3/360 inside out by now, while Wii U is still comparatively new and unfamiliar.

It's exclusives that show a system's real capabilities. We saw this with PS3, Wii, and 360, and we'll see it on Wii U as well.

On RAM bandwidth, I haven't seen a single dev complain about that, and it's been stated by Shin'en that: "Theoretical RAM bandwidth in a system doesn’t tell you too much because GPU caching will hide a lot of this latency".

PS3/360 were indeed incredibly powerful for 2005/2006 hardware while Wii U is only modest in power for 2012, but in a direct comparison I'd say Wii U just has too many advantages not to be considered decidedly stronger.


No one is saying the wii u cpu isn't superior in architecture and performance per mhz than 360 and PS3 but it's 3 cores are single thread at 1.25ghz. Even being generous and stating the wii u cpu is 3x as efficient per mhz still means a huge drop in performance compared to 360. Lets not also forget the tiny amount of power the wii u uses compared to 360 or PS3 and its on the same fabrication process.

The evidence so far shows most eurogamer faceoffs have the wii u at current gen levels with perhaps 2/3rds of games perfoming better on 360 and to a lesser extent ps3. Even more recent games like Resident Evil Revelations which the wii u is really struggling to match 360 and PS3.

At this point in time the wii u appears if anything slightly weaker.

I own wii u, ps3 and 360 and have to say at this point its hard to tell them apart but technically the 360 and PS3 are more impressive to me at the moment. This may change but I don't think the wii u will ever perform much beyond ps3 and 360 I see the wii u as Nintendo's entry into the current generation. It doesn't really matter though, I bought the wii u for Nintendo exclusives and any other decent third party exclusive games. I never had any expectation of the wii u being a next gen console in performance and so the performance level of the wii u has brought no surprises to me. Ok I'm a little surprised at how low Nintendo went but I expected them to go cheap just like they did with the wii.