Anonymous Dev documents Wii U experience

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bonzobanana said:
I'm sure wii u development tools have matured now but we are still seeing weak ports of 360 and PS3 games being released. When the ps2, gamecube and original xbox had the same games each was optimised for that particular format despite massive hardware differences. Most developers are doing the best they can with the wii u but unfortunately that is still quite a low level of performance for a console released in lat 2012. We know the wii u cpu is of the same architecture as wii just faster and 3 of them and we know its using a older Radeon design that is still superior than 360 at least in its feature set.

We had all the same debates back in wii time with many claiming there was untapped power in the wii until the evidence came out that it was a gamecube with a 50% clock increase and extra memory bolted on.

The xbox 360 has a triple core powerpc processor running at 3.2ghz and with 2 thread per core. That's 6 processes at 3.2ghz compared to 3 processes at 1.25ghz. Even if the wii u cpu has better architecture that is one huge difference in speed and processes. I'm not surprised the developer said memory bandwidth wasn't an issue for wii u because you first need a processor that would use bandwidth. Clearly the wii u cpu is not going to be too demanding of it. It would be nice to know what gflops level the wii u gpu performs at. I still think its at the lower end 176 gflops not the 352gflops maximum it could be.

It just seems as time goes by that we are lowering our expectations of the wii u performance level. We see new games being released that still under perform and more snippets of information come out about its specification. I wonder if we have reached bottom yet. I fully expect the 176gflops gpu performance level to be confirmed at some point although I'm more than happy to be wrong as I am a wii u owner myself.

Ultimately you just have to look at how the wii u is performing. It's rubbish for 360/PS3 ports but games designed for it that use cartoon graphics and have little cpu demands are very nice looking. It seems to be a console purposely designed to run Nintendo games well and not much else.

1) But with 12 times as much L2 cache. That makes a considerable difference.

2) Claims of the Wii having untapped power that wasn't apparent at launch were proven correct later in its lifespan, by games like Conduit 1 & 2, Metroid Other M, and Jett Rocket.