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Locknuts on 21 November 2013
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fallen said:
Locknuts said:
Nah. If anything I think they all fell well below my expectations in terms of power. We haven't really seen what Wii U can do yet with proper optimisation and probably never will from third parties which makes direct comparisons impossible (that CARS game might be different though).

In the end I don't think it will affect Nintendo nearly as much as the fact that they pretty much abandoned a lot of their user base with the Wii. Clearly the ports of third party games at the end of the current generation haven't sold as well on the Wii U which leads me to believe that there is almost no audience for anything but Nintendo games on the Wii U.

It will take a lot of time and effort on Nintendo's part to bring their core audience back to the numbers it was once. I would say doing some deals ala Microsoft putting the Wii U logo alongside big third party launches, paying for advertising of third party games, and leading the way with first party games in genres such as FPS and TPS would go a long way.

In short: Power is not the real issue here. If third parties had good reason to port their games to Wii U and do it properly, they would.


It's ever a chicken and egg scenario though. Is Wii U not getting ports because it's not selling, or is it not selling because it was never included in next gen port plans from the beginning because it wasn't powerful enough? Third parties like Ubisoft never gave Wii U "next gen" respect, because they knew early on the hardware beef wasn't there.

The situation is exactly as Wii from a power perspective. Two consoles on one plane getting the same games, one console deficient, not getting those games. This is the situation we were told Wii U was powerful enough to avoid.

 

I think Microsoft would be in the same situation or worse, if the they had put out a Wii U-powered console. Dont you? And Microsoft has tons of marketing dollars, great third party relations, and hardcore support.

 

Consider carefully the discrepancy between X1 and Wii U specs.

 

160 shaders at 550 mhz (older AMD architecture) vs 768 shaders at 853 mhz (newest AMD architecture)

5GB of game RAM vs 1GB

8 1.75ghz modern x86 cores vs 3 ancient Wii-era tiny cores at 1.2 ghz.

12.6GB/s Main RAM bandwidth (+some unknow EDRAM BW, possibly 34 GB/s) vs 68.3 GB/s (+204 GB/s ESRAM bandwidth)

 

You have to make two completely different games on those specced machines. The spec difference is easily 5-8X at every turn.

 

As long as PS360 are around you can port that to Wii U, but after?

Scalability is immense these days. I believe that if gamers were into the Wii U, publishers and their devs would find a way. I think the Wii was a slightly different scenario where it lacked even the basic functionality (programmable shaders etc) as well as being anemic  power wise as well as catering to a different audience. I think the PS360 and Wii U are capable of any "experience" that the 4BONE are, just that the 4BONE will be a more refined version of that experience (more consistent framerates, better assets etc).

I feel that once the 4BONE grows a big enough install base that publishers will stop creating games for PS360 not necessarily because they couldn't possibly scale it back to those systems, but because the audience has largely moved on to the newer systems and the cost will be unjustifiable (the situation the Wii U is getting itself into right now).

Once I have seen a next-gen experience that is beyond this generation I will accept that I was wrong, but it hasn't shown itself yet. I call this the 'Gears of War' moment and I've seen no signs of it yet. Even UE4s greatest strength is supposedly its scalability all the way down to mobile devices, where as UE3 required a significant boost in performance and shader capability, so that's the way I see the industry going.