| hated_individual said: PlayStation 3 has 256MB of System RAM and 256MB of Video RAM... Video RAM serves same purpose as eDRAM in Xbox 360 thus it can not actually be used for caching/storing game data. At first there was only 126MB available which was a crazy small amount and when Sony updated the OS and Firmware then developers finally had enough memory for their games... 204MB is trully available for games on PlayStation 3 and Wii U has five times that also Xbox one had like 256MB of RAM at first for developers which is twice as much as PlayStation 3 and later it was firmware/OS updated to allow developers 384MB of RAM. It does not matter if visuals have "cartoonish" or "realistic" look since both are equally demanding and it all depends on complexity of visuals like resolution of texture, amount of geometry, draw distance, quality of shadows and amount of lightning plus what kind of shadows and lightning are being used then we have filters and bunch of other stuff let alone discussing AI and effects... Dont believe me? Ask Pemalite, he already explained... Wii U has five times more RAM available for developers compared to PlayStation 3 and nearly three times compared to Xbox 360 while Nintendo could "unlock"/free aditional 512MB of RAM which would meant nearly 5 times in comparison to Xbox 360 and nearly 8 times compared to PlayStation 3. Wii U's CPU is being labeled as weak by many people and by Eurogamer yet that is untrue, Wii U may look on paper weak and yet in practice is stronger than Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 CPU... I would love to explain but it would be such a pain to type it out on my smartphoen and such a drag now to explain it and I am sure Pemalite could explain you and even ICStats but I believe he would not be up to the task. |
Actually in the Playstation 3's case... The "System" I.E. Everything except the graphics processor was limited to 256Mb of Ram.
The RSX however could use it's 256Mb of Ram then start to access the Ram that's reserved for the system.
Keep in mind that GPU's are usually the most memory hungry processor in a gaming machine due to having to handle things like textures.
Say for instance you had a game that was only using 128Mb of system memory, the RSX could use it's 256Mb to make pretty pictures then start using the free memory in the other pool.
As for the Ram counts in the other systems...
You need to be realistic.
Alright.
* Xbox 360: 512mb. - 32Mb for OS. = 480Mb or 0.48Gb.
* Playstation 3: 512Mb. - 52Mb for OS. = 460Mb or 0.46Gb.
* Wii U: 2048Mb. - 1024Mb for OS and other functions. = 1024Mb or 1Gb.
Thus by extension, the WiiU as it currently stands has a 122% memory advantage over the Playstation 3 and a 113% advantage over the Xbox 360.
Over the next few years I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo freed up another 512Mb of memory, the system is young and it's always wise to take more memory than you need with a new machine as you can always give memory back, but never taketh it away.
It would then give the WiiU a 233% and a 220% advantage in memory compacity respectively over the HD twins.
As for the WiiU CPU being weak? Well. Yes and No.
It's a CPU that's designed to be incredibly efficient, it's using allot of the features found in the more monolothic AMD and Intel cores in the PC space but sticks with the PowerPC instruction set (Although PowerPC is RISC, so are x86 processors internally these days.), things like OoO exection, branch prediction and improved interconnect bandwidth and latency allows it to perform more instructions per clock than the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
Some tasks like integer and badly optimised code will literally shine on the Wii U, thanks to it's out of order execution engine and fat caches in comparison to the HD twins. (It can use the eDRAM as extra cache.)
However, the thing to keep in mind with the WiiU is that if you look from the outside, it's mostly designed as a console to take advantage of games today, not tomorrow, hence why Nintendo went with a Triple-Core design with a "Master Core" to take advantage of the fact that games always have a master thread which is more processor heavy than the other threads (Hence the additional cache on that core.) and that not many games exceed 4 threads even in the PC space.
That's not a bad thing by any stretch, it keeps things simple for developers.
Some branches of code will be better on the WiiU, things like iterative refinement floating point will be much much much better on something like the Cell. (Which is a processor that sucks at everything else.)
Textures, lighting, shadowing, geometry and what-ever-else-I-forget should all be of a higher quality on the WiiU compared to the HD twins, it's GPU hardware features are on parity with the Next-Gen twins, however it will simply not be able to handle as many of them at any one time, which is completely understandable, these aren't high-end PC's, they're cost sensitive low-end gaming machines, all of them.
www.youtube.com/@Pemalite
