bonzobanana said:
The split memory of the ps3 has some disadvantages but also many advantages. If anything the ps3 has the most o f the three with regards 1080p games and also 3D support. I think the ps3 had something like 25.6 GB/s for video and 19.2 GB/s for main memory. Where as wii u is only 12.8 GB/s for main memory. Most open world games suffer on wii u. Watch dogs for example. Xenoblade is always a spanner in the works trying to access the capabilities of a console because the original looked fantastic on the wii which only had 11 gflops for its gpu. It's purposely designed to impress but the engine itself has very weak texturing and a very basic physics engine. The wii u game enables you to walk through cars because the game engine couldn't afford the collision detection routines. It reminds me of Factor 5 on the N64 they achieved miracles by hand coding time critical parts and made efforts beyond normal developers to optimise their games. Rogue Squadron on the gamecube still looks amazing. Many ps3 and 360 games use texture streaming from hard drives to maintain a detailed attractive world at all times in open world games and this just isn't possible on wii u. Again Watch dogs was very difficult development on wii u due to lack of hard drive, the game often has missing graphic features or textures, much slower frame rate especially under high load but at least doesn't suffer from lack of vertical sync which both the ps3 and lesser extent the 360 suffer from. The xenoblade system of installing to wii u memory or external hard drive is obviously a similar system but a far fewer number of wii u owners could do that. The wii u would have been a perfect competitor for 360 and PS3 back in 2006 as its overall capabilities are broadly similar to those platforms. Some games would be weaker and some stronger but in 2012 for a console to have inferior ports to consoles which are just being dropped by their manufacturer seems ridiculous. Still love my wii u and enjoy playing many games on it but Nintendo's rubbish tech, high price, massive profit approach is really getting on my nerves nowadays. |
PS3/360 wouldn't be able to run XCX though, they simply don't have the RAM for it. Open worlds filled with stuff are memory intensive, and Wii U had double the memory of PS3/360. Hell, in the case of PS3, since it's memory was partitioned into 256MB chunks for video and system RAM, Wii U could devote considerably more than twice as much memory to, say, video data.
Regarding bandwidth, PS3's 25-19GB/s was all it had for all operations, whereas with Wii U, its eDRAM offered sky-high bandwidth for operations that needed it, meaning its main RAM simply didn't need to be as fast, because the eDRAM was there to take a lot of the load off it.
And games like Watch Dogs aren't really good example for the Wii U's full capability as they weren't exactly high priority ports with a ton of money and effort poured into them. It's kind of like judging PS3's power by its many poor quality ports.
All this being said, I do understand your frustration that a system released in 2012 didn't overpower 2005/2006 consoles in all ways and by a large margin.
