http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-secret-developers-wii-u-the-inside-story
The good:
On the GPU side, the story was reversed. The GPU proved very capable and we ended up adding additional "polish" features as the GPU had capacity to do it. There was even some discussion on trying to utilise the GPU via compute shaders (GPGPU) to offload work from the CPU - exactly the approach I expect to see gain traction on the next-gen consoles - but with very limited development time and no examples or guidance from Nintendo, we didn't feel that we could risk attempting this work. If we had a larger development team or a longer timeframe, maybe we would have attempted it, but in hindsight we would have been limited as to what we could have done before we maxed out the GPU again. The GPU is better than on PS3 or Xbox 360, but leagues away from the graphics hardware in the PS4 or Xbox One.
"I've also seen some concerns about the utilisation of DDR3 RAM on Wii U, and a bandwidth deficit compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360. This wasn't really a problem for us. The GPU could fetch data rapidly with minimal stalls (via the EDRAM) and we could efficiently pre-fetch, allowing the GPU to run at top speed."
"Code optimised for the PowerPC processors found in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 wasn't always a good fit for the Wii U CPU, so while the chip has some interesting features that let the CPU punch above its weight, we couldn't fully take advantage of them. However, some code could see substantial improvements that did mitigate the lower clocks - anything up to a 4x boost owing to the removal of Load-Hit-Stores, and higher IPC (instructions per cycle) via the inclusion of out-of-order execution."
The bad:
"So a basic comparison/calculation makes the Wii U look, on paper at least, significantly slower than an Xbox 360 in terms of raw CPU. This point was raised in the meeting, but the Nintendo representatives dismissed it saying that the "low power consumption was more important to the overall design goals" and that "other CPU features would improve the performance over the raw numbers"."
"Soon after the decision was made the development kits started arriving. As is usual for early hardware they were bigger than the final design with a mixture of connectors and ports used specifically for development. So we plugged them in and flashed them to the latest system code, then tried to get a simple "hello world" type game running, which proved harder than you might think."
"This doesn't sound bad, but when you are debugging and making lots of changes, these additional times add up. If you made 10 changes to a file in a morning, you could be spending over 50 minutes waiting for the linker to complete, which is a lot of wasted time."
"As a team, we lost days of time to the compile/link/debug overheads and this negatively impacted the amount of features that we could put into our game before the release date."
"After about a week of chasing we heard back from the support team that they had received an answer from Japan, which they emailed to us. The reply was in the form of a few sentences of very broken English that didn't really answer the question that we had asked in the first place. So we went back to them asking for clarification, which took another week or so to come back. After the second delay we asked why it was taking to long for replies to come back from Japan, were they very busy? The local support team said no, it's just that any questions had to be sent off for translation into Japanese, then sent to the developers, who replied and then the replies were translated back to English and sent back to us. With timezone differences and the delay in translating, this usually took a week!"
"At some point in this conversation we were informed that it was no good referencing Live and PSN as nobody in [Nintendo's] development teams used those systems (!) so could we provide more detailed explanations for them?"
"We started to ask questions about how they could possibly launch the console, which was a matter of weeks away, with a partially developed OS... Launch day came around and the answer became clear: Nintendo was late - very late - with its network systems."
"Larger studios had a choice. Would they port of an existing game to a console with limited capabilities and limited market penetration? Or put their teams to work on developing new features and concepts for the 'real' next-gen consoles?"
