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bonzobanana on 07 December 2014
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curl-6 said:
bonzobanana said:
curl-6 said:

Dropping frames in a bland room with two characters in it is just piss-poor porting, it's illogical to blame the hardware for that when we've seen it perform far better with more demanding games. If it only happened in the open world fine, but it doesn't, it drops in totally undemanding scenes, which points to a lack of software optimization.

And while you cherry-pick the RAM bandwidth you neglect to mention Wii U has more than three times as much eDRAM as 360 to compensate.

The 176 Gigaflops GPU argument is still unproven.


I can't comment on the bland room, two characters comment as I'm not sure what that is referring to. It may well point to a small part of the game that should have been optimised more. Surely its not significant though. There are many 360 and PS3 games that slow down in unexpected areas. 

You yourself have forgot to mention that 2GB of memory has a 12.8gb/s memory bandwidth but only 32MB of edram has increased memory bandwidth. Hardly much different from cache in the scheme of things and only a tiny percentage of memory with increased bandwidth.

As for the 176gflops performance figure it fits in perfectly with the fabrication and power requirements of the wii u. There is probably about a 40-50% performance gain due to the later architecture of the wii u gpu and also it will need far less cpu support which again helps compensate for the wii u's lack of cpu power.  At 176 gflops the wii u's current performance makes sense but if 352 gflops there is something seriously wrong in the wii u architecture that is holding back all games. 

We are far enough in now surely to be able to judge the wii u by its performance. What seemed likely at the beginning is now basically written in stone by what the wii u is technically achieving. 

It can still punch a bit above ps3 and 360 for games designed to max out the gpu and work a round the weak cpu.

It should have never been like this though. The wii u should have surpassed the 360 and ps3 with ease with every multi-format game being superior on wii u. The gamepad should have had analogue triggers to ensure decent feel for driving and fps games. Nintendo's cost cutting has done massive damage to the wii u. The fact remains there are better more impressive and ambitious games on 360 and ps3. If you compare all 3 consoles technically the best of ps3 and 360 are better than wii u.

Nintendo could have easily produced a console with a quad core 3ghz processor and a decent 6-800 gflops gpu and using a 28nm fabrication process (like ps4 and xbone) it would have been possible in the existing wii u console design but instead we get some cheap and nasty 40/45nm fabrication process that severely limited the power inside the wii u to mainly below that of the 360 and ps3 overall.  That console would have been capable of some amazing game experiences beyond that of 360/ps3 even if still behind ps4/xbone.

There are games on wii u displaying cartoon graphics with lots of repeated texturing that still can't do 720p with decent anti-aliasing. 

Wii U as it is is already capable of delivering amazing game experiences beyond that of PS3/360. For a start, twice as much RAM allows it to do larger worlds and higher quality assets than PS3/360.

Heck, even at launch, we had two games confirmed by their developers to be beyond PS3/360's capability in Trine 2 Director's Cut and Nano Assault Neo.

32MB of eDRAM is still more than three times what the 360 has, and equal in size to Xbox One's ESRAM. This alleviates the need for higher main RAM bandwidth.

And the slowdown in non-demanding scenes is indicative of poor software coding, not hardware deficiency. Games like Watch Dogs are not an accurate measure of the Wii U's full capability because they're clearly not well optimized to take full advantage of it. It takes more than just 2 years to max out a system (especially since almost nobody is even trying on Wii U) so we haven't seen the best Wii U can do yet, just like we didn't see the best that last gen systems could do 2 years in.


You do realise many ps3 and 360 games make use of streaming hard drive data to improve textures something not possible on wii u. The 2GB memory and 12.8GB/s bandwidth is split between game mode and the background operating system.

Why on earth would Nano Assault Neo be beyond the capabilities of 360 or PS3 its on the 3DS FFS and its just a simple shooter and Trine is a typical pretty 2D scroller that at least may be a fair comment due to the wii u's 32MB of eDRAM but still you see Rayman Legends as 1080p 60 frames per second on ps3 and 360 too and that is also a very beautiful 2D scroller. Let's not forget the ps3 for example has titles running at 1080p at 60fps like Wipeout proper 3D games.

Max out what exactly. It has a well documentated radeon processor and 3 cpu cores from the last century. Not much new they're to learn and exploit. The wii u has come to market with low spec mature components it is not cutting edge so the learning curve is not there.  Both 360 and PS3 are vastly more complicated to exploit in comparison especially ps3 because they were cutting edge at the time.

There will never be a magical time when suddenly the wii u is powerful. How many false dawns has their been only for such games to be revealed as 720p without anti-aliasing. The new Zelda case in point, looks like a lovely game but wait until it arrives at 720p with no anti-aliasing and possible frame drops to get the reality of the game. Already games on ps3/360 like oblivion, final fantasy, red dead show similar engines and where they may fail in texture quality they more than make up for with superior physics engines and more onscreen activity including moving clouds, birds etc.

Case in point Skyrim on 360. That console has a triple core cpu running at 3.2ghz and each having 2 threads.  A quick look at comparable benchmarks;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second


PS3 Cell BE (PPE only)		 10,240 MIPS at 3.2 GHz 3.2 3.2 2006  
Xbox360 IBM "Xenon" (Triple core) 19,200 MIPS at 3.2 GHz 6.0 2.0 2005

 

IBM-Motorola PowerPC 750 525 MIPS at 233 MHz 2.3 2.3 1997

 

Thats 8450 mips at 1.25ghz x 3 which doesn't even equal the ps3 PPE before you add the power of the 7 cell processors each at 3.2ghz.

Yes both ps3 and 360 heavily rely on the cpu to support their older architecture gpu's but still its absolute rubbish on the wii u. Comparitively the floating point performance is even worse on wii u but then the gpu takes care of that.

The point is there is nothing to exploit there. The wii u is fundamentally weak in cpu terms and the gpu is only a low level mobile gpu which programmed to the metal will outperform 360 and PS3 but there isn't much potential there.

Lets not forget Nintendo are big achievers with weak hardware. They have done some very impressive games on wii despite its 12gflops gpu and 1,500 mips cpu performance. They are brilliant at working around weak hardware historically. Yet what have they achieved with wii u so far.  How many 1080p games are there? Zelda windwaker was originally running on a console with a 8gflops gpu at 480p and now with a 176 gflops gpu and over 7x the cpu power we get a 1080p version with frame rate drops at 30fps. Thats 22x the gpu power. Surely not unreasonable for such an old game to run at 1080p 60fps with rock solid frame rates.

There is a clearly a big cpu issue in the wii u design which I'm sure they will improve but at the moment the wii u can not even reach parity with 360 and ps3 for cpu intensive games. 

With that in mind how on earth can people keep writing 'weak ports' as if every developer is conspiring against Nintendo to produce weak games. The wii u is a weak console for its time just like the original wii was, nothing has changed.