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curl-6 on 05 June 2015
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bonzobanana said:
curl-6 said:

Wii U can and does stream from hard drive to alleviate loading and streaming issues in Xenoblade Chronicles X.

Also, you're overlooking PS3 and 360's problems that Wii U does not suffer from; the much smaller RAM and more outdated GPUs of both, the much smaller eDRAM in 360, the split memory pool in PS3.

But let's hear what a developer has to say...

http://www.nowgamer.com/wii-u-is-a-truly-powerful-console-more-powerful-than-360-and-ps3-trine-2-dev/

"The console is definitely more powerful than the Xbox 360 and PS3.” - Julius Fondem, Frozenbyte.

Trine 2 is a 2D game that arguably could be done on even android boxes to a reasonable level. It certainly has low cpu requirements. Also Im not saying Xenoblade Chronicles X doesn't benefit from streaming from usb I'm saying its streaming is inferior to 360 and PS3 that can deliver streaming data faster based on having higher bandwidth sata connections. We don't know the full spec of the wii u gpu. It is likely only 176 gflops, yes its later architecture, enhanced feature set and fast connection to a 32MB pool of eDRAM means its probably outperforms ps3 and 360 on every level however in raw gflops performance both ps3 and 360 are superior but in fairness I know in one generation update alone there was a 30% increase in performance thanks to improved architecture and much of the improved feature set reduces the workload of the gpu elsewhere. An easy win for the wii u but there is a possibility based on their raw gflops performance they might have one or two benefits. Lets not forget the cell processors of the ps3 have direct connection to the graphics memory as well as main memory so can be used to enhance the gpu. In fact many of the wii u's enhanced gpu features may be do-able as cell sub-processes.

Also don't forget the memory bandwidth of the wii u is very low at 12.8gb/s and shared by a background operating system that uses 1GB of memory! That is a lot of memory dedicated to the background much more than ps3 and 360. The two pools of ps3 memory means close to 50GB/s of bandwidth and not restricted to a little 32MB pool either but 2 256MB pools.

Anyway you don't even need to analyse spec its clear to see that the wii u performs horribly for cpu intensive games. The same so called lazy developers don't seem to have a problem with wii u for games that need good gpu resources but little cpu resources and gpu's are far more complicated than cpu's to utilise so if they are achieving good results with the wii u gpu why on earth would they struggle with a dated cpu that goes back to the last century that's already been used in two previous consoles. It makes absolutely no sense at all.

Main RAM bandwidth does not bottleneck Wii U because memory-intensive CPU and GPU work can be done out of eDRAM. For a 720p system, 32MB is more than enough.

Even with its bloated OS, you still have 1GB of memory for  games on Wii U; on PS3/360 you have less than 500MB. And on PS3, you had to split that into two pools, with neither system nor graphics RAM able to exceed a mere 256MB.

And don't make the mistake of thinking that because Trine 2 has 2D gameplay that it is not demanding. PS3/360 could not run the Wii U version without downgrades: http://www.geek.com/games/ps3-360-cant-cope-with-trine-2-wii-u-graphics-1521231/