By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
curl-6 on 08 November 2014
Edit Thread
bonzobanana said:
curl-6 said:
bonzobanana said:
The wii u is weak hardware and no pretending that every wii u game is unoptimised changes that. It's strength is in its graphic's system compared to ps3/360 but in cpu terms it is even weaker. If a game exists on ps3, 360 and wii u it's likely to be inferior on wii u unless its a racing game or a 2D game with low cpu requirements. I'm happy with this as I love the wii u exclusive games but it's pointless buying a wii u version of most non exclusive third party games unless the price is cheaper or they add value like additional gamepad functionality.

If a game is built from the ground up for systems of a different architecture, of course it won't be optimized for Wii U.


That in a nutshell is the problem. Clearly you don't understand what optimisation is. It's not about different architecture its about maximising performance from the hardware. The wii u has a more modern gpu architecture which is easier to develop for. It's not super powerful but at least has some advantages over ps3 and 360. The cpu is well understood, its a very old architecture from the last century run at 1.25ghz. There are 3 cores and its only 32bit. There is no multi-threading. The idea that somehow there is a problem developing for this when the ps3 for example has a dual thread power pc core with 7 minor support processors to develop for is nonsense.  The wii u is even easier to develop for than 360, why wouldn't it be as 360 is far more reliant on assistance from its cpu to aid the gpu but again the 360 has 3 cpu cores at 3.2ghz and each has two threads. Nintendo clearly designed the wii u to be very easy to develop for. The wii u was never designed to be next gen. It has less memory bandwidth than ps3 or 360.

The issue is that Nintendo released a console at the end of 2012 that wasn't capable of matching 360 and ps3 in many areas of performance let alone compete with ps4 and xbone.

I don't think its fair to criticise third party software companies because they can't produce decent ports on weak hardware and I don't think its fair to criticise consumers for not bothering to buy wii u third party games when they are inferior.  Sadly the wii u is all about exclusive games and games that have low cpu resources.  

Instead of saying wii u port is un-optimised we should be saying wii u is not capable of running this software well due to low cpu resources. Like the old snes the wii u design is weighted more to gpu performance than cpu performance and means many mainstream games will not run well on it. It's likely  developers have been working really hard to get around the wii u weaknesses and have failed simply because the performance was never there even after full optimisation.

Wii U's hardware is different from PS3 and 360. If you write your code around the hardware of the latter, it won't be the best match for the former. 

This holds true for any system, which is why it's always exclusives that push a system the furthest, not multiplats.

To max out the Wii U, you'd need to build a game from the ground up to take maximum advantage of every component and the interfaces between these components. You'd need to invest considerable resources in the engine and technology. Nobody's really done that on Wii U.

Any Wii U multiplat that does feature at least enhanced assets over PS3/360 is a smoking gun of lazy development, because Need for Speed has proven bandwidth is not an obstruction to this.