| curl-6 said: We don't know the precise specs for Wii U's GPU, (though devs have said it is better than PS3's or 360's) but twice as much RAM is a pretty signifiant advantage. Need for Speed, for example, was able to use better textures on Wii U than on last gen because of the increased memory. |
That's not true, we have the amount of bandwidth figured out and even if were not given the rest of the specs we can put a hard limit on the amount of other units the Latte graphics has based on lithography technology and emulator documentation ...
When half the die space is consumed by the on chip memory along with the other stuff and the GPU microarchitecture is a hybrid between the R6/700 and consider that it's made on Renesas's 45nm process node that gives at most 400 million transistors for Nintendo to play with ...
You pretty much get the magic ratio of 160 ALUs, 16 texture units and 8 ROPs (It's most definitely 8 ROPs since since AMD never increases the rasterizer rate of GPUs below 1 billion transistors.)
I don't deny that RAM is a significant advantage but it's not that clear and cut since bandwidth plays a BIG part of texture sampling performance ...
The WII U has a bandwidth of 12.8 GB/s which puts it at a maximum of just over 3.4 billion texture reads at 4 bytes per texel per second whereas the Xbox 360 can do just over 6 billion texture reads at 4 bytes per texels a second ...
