PigPen on 12 May 2014
| bonzobanana said: While the wii u may not be that powerful, you have to factor in the huge jump in performance from wii to wii u. I personally thought Mario Kart wii was very good. I really liked the graphics but that console had a gpu of 12 gflops performance (4 gflops more than gamecube). At the bare minium the wii u gpu is 176 gflops that's 15x as powerful, then you have 32MB of very high speed video memory, over 10x as much. The 32bit cpu is 5-6x as powerful and instead of 24MB of main memory (with a 64MB sound buffer and disc cache) it has 1GB of main memory over 44x as much. Then a optical drive which stores 3x as much as wii. It's a huge upgrade. Yes cpu performance is weak compared to 360 and PS3 and the main memory bandwidth is low at 12.8GB/s and there is no hard drive to assist loading or caching important game files but the overall jump from wii to wii u is huge and Nintendo achieved a lot with the humble wii. Mario kart is not a game that will need high cpu resources and cartoon graphics don't feature sophisticated physics engines but do use a lot of repeated textures which makes it easier. AI is basic for driving games. I see no reason why this game shouldn't outperform 360 and PS3 there main advantage if cpu resources which aren't needed here. wii u has loads more memory and superior gpu architecture. I think games like Sonic transformed which perform poorly on wii u is basically because it was a rushed port for the launch of the wii u but also a conversion from the ps3/360 versions which have higher cpu resources and that may have been factored into the code. In the end the programmers had to use a lower resolution on wii u than 360 and PS3 to keep the frame rate up. Nintendo would have written this game to work with lower cpu resources but max out superior graphics hardware and additional memory. It doesn't mean the wii u is more powerful than 360 and PS3 though. They still have more versions of games which are superior on those platforms when you look at eurogamer face offs etc. Ultimately all I know is Mario Kart 8 looks utterly beautiful and the type of game I bought my wii u for. The 2 month offer of a free game is incredible value too. Anyway my point is mario kart is exactly the type of game that should perform well on wii u but should not be used to indicate that the wii u is capable for other genres of games. Cartoon graphic games with low cpu requirements are a good fit for wii u. We will still see games like Watchdogs struggle to perform as well as 360 and PS3 I'm sure. The wii u in technical performance terms is still below 360 and PS3 overall for game experiences and graphics going by games released so far and selecting the best titles for each format. |
The Wii U is powerful.
