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snowdog on 11 March 2014
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Soundwave said:
snowdog said:
AnthonyW86 said:

I've been saying this since the day the specs of the Wii-U were revealed: Once thrid party support for PS360 dries up, Wii-U dries up. They are not going to make a whole engine to release on Wii-U.

Though this was before i knew third party support would already be pretty much gone by now.


Blimey. How many times..? They won't have to use a different engine for the Wii U. It's going to be easier for developers to port between the Wii U, PS4 and One than it is to port between the Wii U, PS3 and 360.

And with regards to the difference in power between the 3 current gen consoles it really isn't that big of a deal. The Wii U is quite capable of handling downscaled ports from the PS4 and One. You'll have lower native resolution, less AA, maybe downscaled textures, less environmental effects and more pop-in of geometry and textures - at the worst

I love how people who probably have never programmed anything in their life just throw stuff like this around, like it's as easy as eating cake or something. 

Having only 1/6th of the usable RAM isn't a big deal now? Having one chip that maybe can generate 300-400 GFLOPS versus a target platform that clocks in at 1.8TFLOPS is no big deal? 

I'm sure Nintendo could port Super Mario 3D World to the 3DS, it's not a big deal to port it from the Wii U right? It has a "relatively" modern GPU too. 

Actually I do have programming experience.

Firstly we don't know anything about the RAM setup apart from developers doing nothing but praising the RAM. One even said that the amount of RAM was almost limitless during an interview. I've had the theory for a while that the Wii U uses 3-4GB of its flash as temporary swapspace. It's the only thing I can think of that explains that first update eating away 5GB of storage space.

Secondly you need to forget about floppage, it doesn't tell the whole story. The likes of Super Mario 3D World, Bayonetta 2, Mario Kart 8, X and SSBU wouldn't be possible on a bog standard GPU with 300-odd GFlops. You've got to remember that the ALUs are twice the size that they should be, there's - again -something going on under the hood that we're unaware of.

Just cutting the native resolution from 1080p to 720p means you'll only need half the processing power for the GPU, bringing the texture quality down decreases the RAM needed (although it should be noted that Nintendo have a dog's bollocks compression algorithm so you probably wouldn't need to reduce them that much). Everything I mentioned brings down the resources needed to produce the game considerably.

And because the console architecture is similar it won't need to brute force anything as I've already mentioned before.