By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
curl-6 on 16 October 2014
Edit Thread
darkknightkryta said:
curl-6 said:

The 8 years of optimization didn't go into Wii U's hardware though, it went into the PS3 and 360 hardware, which are very different from Wii U. There has been little effort invested into optimizing to get the most out of Wii U's specific hardware.

Games like Trine 2 Director's Cut were able to push graphics that are by the admission of the devs beyond PS3/360 capacity. As well as being several (GPU) generations ahead of the PS3/360, Wii U's GPU also has DX10-11 features.

The lower RAM bandwidth is compensated for by having 32MB of high speed eDRAM to handle data that needs rapid access. This is more than 3 times as much eDRAM as the 360 had, and the PS3 had none at all.

Just this past month we saw the release of Art of Balance, which technically outdoes any previously released game on Wii U, and the same studio is looking to push the system even further with their next game.

The Wii U's hardware is based off the 360 hardware believe it or not.  GPU is based off of AMD tech much like the 360.  That old tech hasn't changed, the transisters are what they are.  The only thing is that the GPU was updated to take advantage of newer technologies.  But as I have mentioned though, the PS4 and Xbox One can barely handle that tech and they have far more powerful hardware.  My hunch is that Nintendo got something newer with enough grunt to handle old tech well with enough with some power to spare to save on costs.  Said power has to make up for the CPU though which brings the hardware back to square one and in line with the power envelope.  Same with the CPUs.  PowerPC is Power PC, that's not going to change and IBM had processors in the last 3 consoles, and even way back to the Gamecube.  No one is going to be able to do more with those outdated CPUs.  Bottom line, the engines are maxed and that includes what's in the Wii U.

Again, I never said the Wii U isn't more powerful, I said there's not much left, same goes for the ram.  32mb isn't enough for anything, you can't throw in 1 gig of data into 32 mb.  That's impossible.  It's why the Xbox One is currently having problems.  Which goes back to my analysis, they cheaped out on slower ram to save costs.  They put in a gig and edram to try to make up with that deficiency.  But the bottleneck puts it back in line with the PS3 and 360, and as ports have shown, is actually worse off.  

This game?

No, that's the Wii version. This game:

Subsurface scattering, physically based shading, 4k-8k textures, deferred rendering at 60fps. And that's a screen from an unfinished build.

Wii U is quite a bit different from the 360; CPUs may both be PowerPC based, but there's a world of difference between Xenon's Cell-based processor and Wii U's PPC750 based one. Code designed for the former won't transition well to the latter. Memory speed and layout also means Wii U engines need to be built more specifically around eDRAM management. For a machine of Wii U's strength, 32MB is more than adequate.

Ports performing worse on Wii U are because devs were building on 7-8 years of PS3/360 experience and almost none with Wii U. Also, because the games were built around PS3/360 they were not properly optimized to take advantage of Wii U's different hardware.

When devs actually leverage Wii U's advantages we get games like Trine 2 Director's Cut, which was confirmed by its devs to be beyond the abilities of PS3 and 360. Need for Speed is also an example of a Wii U port looking and running better on Nintendo's system.

When all the big third party engines are built around different hardware, and exclusives are mostly technologically conservative, it will take more than two years for a system's best graphics to emerge.