| fatslob-:O said: Intel easily does way more to improve it's x86 architecture than IBM ever does for Nintendo's PowerPC 750 derivative and the modern core architecture is NOTHING like the P6 ... |
But it's still based on P6. The P6 evolved into the Pentium 2, Pentium 3... Then with a momentary lapse of judgement with Netburst... Was used in Pentium M, which then formed the basis of Core Solo/Duo. - Then Intel developed the Core architecture, an iteration of P6.
The point was, despite them all sharing the same "starting point" they all increased performance over the Pentium Pro for one reason or another, sometimes those changes were tiny fundamentally and Intel simply took advantage of clockspeeds and better interface technologies.
Fact of the matter is, Nintendo's PowerPC derived CPU would have gone through a few revisions and respines and changes for the WiiU, it's a CPU based on broadway, it's not an exact clone with higher clocks... And let's be honest, Broadway/Gecko weren't completely inadequate anyway, they managed to get the job done.
In the end I personally think the WiiU has a better CPU to GPU performance balance than what the Xbox One or Playstation 4 does, even if it is still laughable in the grand scheme of things.
To put it into perspective anyway...
A Pentium Tualatin released in 2000 on a clock for clock, core to core basis would still be faster than an In-order Intel Atom released almost a decade later.
| fatslob-:O said: The only post-process AA that I remember gaining a lot of traction was FXAA, the rest was meh for the devs from what I saw ... |
Subpixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing or SMAA gained traction too. Was used for Watch Dogs and Dying Light and other games.
Pretty much every Unreal 3 powered game late in the generation used MLAA or a variation of.
| fatslob-:O said: Xenos is also VLIW since it shared some features from the ATI R600 architecture and it's not like the PS3 couldn't do it's own type of "GPU compute" like using the cell processor to perform graphical tasks too ... |
Xenos wasn't VLIW. Or "Very Long Instruction Word" in the traditional terascale sense.
VLIW is a "SPU" or a "Unit" Broken down into 4-5 processing units, each capable of executing individual instructions in parallel.
Now, you *could* trace that back to the Radeon 9000 days, before the Radeon x1900 series, before the Radeon x800 series, but Xeno's being Terascale like? It's not.
Xenos shares more of it's funademental architecture principles with the Radeon x19xx series, which is actually a good thing, the Radeon 2xxx series was a dog.
| fatslob-:O said: The tessellation unit is meaningless in the WII U's case since it hardly has the shading power or rasterization performance to scale with it. |
I used to think so too. But I suggest you take a look at Morrowind with Tessellation, you might just walk away surprised on the difference that a "Primitive Tessellator" can make.
| fatslob-:O said: The WII U is definitely more advanced from a functionality standpoint however the more important question is if it's an improvement from a performance standpoint ? That can not be answered so easily ... |
Normally I would say "Wait for the software". - But considering how poorly the console is selling... Everyone has abandoned that ship.
From my own playing around with a Radeon 6450, you would be surprised how well you can make something like Unigen Heaven look, even with low level factor Tessellation whilst keeping it at 30fps.
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