Mario Kart 8 grafix

[Pemalite]

ICStats said:

Yep, thanks Pemalite for taking the time to write this.

The PS3's GPU can access both the system RAM and dedicated GPU RAM efficiently. GPU can read textures out of system RAM, or render to the system RAM too, for example for post-processing on Cell.

So having said that, as was already mentioned with more than double the RAM and a newer, more powerful GPU, we can expect Wii U to have better textures, better models, and higher resolution on Wii U than gen 7 hardware.

One issue could be bandwidth - you need higher bandwidth to go along with all the extra memory and I'm not sure how well Wii U can take advantage of the extra RAM with it's bandwidth.  What do you think?

My belief is still that it does come up underpowered vs PS3/360 in the CPU department, though I'm not directly familiar with it.  The on paper analysis and also (the few) developer articles make me think that.

Had it been a matter of poorly optimized code, or mostly integer scalar code, then Wii U could be competitive - but that's not the thing to compare.  PS3/360 game engines are optimized for 7+ years, and use FPU + SIMD.  That's what Wii U has to compete with, not theoretical benchmarks, and in that it seems underpowered.

Anyway, so I'm prepared to be proven wrong but I'm not going to take a "developers are lazy" as proof.

Bandwidth isn't an issue.
Compared to the Playstation 3 the WiiU can compress textures at a far greater ratio, compounded by the fact it will compress light maps, shadow maps, HDR textures and material properties, normal maps and bump maps just to name a few in hardware.
Thus by extension more data can be shifted if the Wii U had the same amount of bandwidth as a Playstation 3.
It will also mean that the WiiU is more thrifty with it's Ram, meaning every Megabyte will go that much farther.

It also means even more detailed texturing as higher quality assets can fit into a smaller area.

The eDRAM will assist in working as a cache if developers see fit to alleviate some of the bandwidth constraints, which to be honest is more like a bandaid measure, but does have some big bonuses on the CPU side.