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bonzobanana on 20 November 2016
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omgfk said:
bonzobanana said:

To be honest the ps3 has its issues with ports some are good and some are bad. The 360 maintains superiority over wii u most of the time, the ps3 not so much, frame rates may be better but sometimes the graphics are worse. Some games actually run at lower resolution on wii u like sonic transformed and also have missing detail. One big plus for wii u is it almost always maintains vertical sync probably by virtue of its later gpu architecture. I have to say though as an owner of ps3, 360 and wii u when you see the ps3 firing on all cylinders its pretty incredible. 

However honestly if the wii u was 352 gflops and later architecture and with that 32MB of embedded memory it would clearly have far better superiority over the older consoles. 176 gflops and a weak cpu tallies up perfectly with its actual performance as well as its thermal dynamics, power draw and the actual image of its circuitry.

I feel quite resentful about how low Nintendo went with the wii u. They charged serious money for something that probably cost peanuts to make. No wonder even though the wii u has sold poorly they haven't made huge losses.

Like I already said the wii u had similar problems like the ps3. The OoO Cpu design an GPGPU made ports very hard. Also the low install base doesnt justified to much development time and to big teams to work on those ports to keep it economic. The Wii U Version was definitly never the lead plattform. 

Games like mario Kart 8 show the capabilities of the Wii U and for me it does look alot more like 350 Gflops. But in the end it doesnt really matter, we will see how the switch does perform and how big the gap between switch and wii u will be. Ill say it wont even be noticeable.

 

 

Mario kart isn't that impressive. I've had my wii u on a projector, its simple repeated texturess, missing anti-aliasing and low resolution. It's only its art style that is fantastic and truly beautiful. Nothing complicated about the wii u either,  it's 3 very old 32bit ppc cpu's  developed in the last century with a huge history of documentation and development and a fairly standard low performance radeon gpu. The ps3 has all the cell processors and the 360 multi-threading plus  both have more primitive architecture gpu's that rely more on the cpu for assistance especially the ps3. In one generation alone Radeon reduced the load on the cpu by 30%. The only issue with the wii u is trying to make such low performance hardware even match ps3 and 360. I'm sure for the gpu they had a little more performance to work with but for the cpu considerably less. Anyway the results are in now so to speak and we can see exactly where the wii u wins and fails in performance terms. You only have to look at the wide range of comparisons at digital foundry to see the results. 

The wii u was always good enough for Nintendo games but where it goes outside of its comfort zone requiring realistic physics engines,  real world textures, lighting and weather etc it fails horribly. Cartoon graphics fine. Even Mario 64 on the N64 is still an attractive game for me.

At the start I did the usual its the developers that are lazy or its a rushed port excuses but the reality was everything performed at that level even games developed by hugely competent development studios. It was the same as ps2 where development times were actually much extended on wii u because of the weak hardware. They had to find new ways of compensating for such low cpu performance etc. Often they couldn't do a rushed port that would come out at the same time as other versions they had to spend much longer on wii u developing games and still the games were released with performance lower than ps3 and 360.  

Just think of what the wii u would have been if instead of 3 awful cpu's at 1.2ghz it actually had 1 of the same plus 2 much more powerful 64bit cores all at 3.2ghz and its radeon gpu had 800 gflops. Memory bandwidth was increased from 12.8GB/s to 25..6GB/s.  That console would have had much enhanced versions of ps3 and 360 games and slightly weaker versions of xbone and ps4 games plus Nintendo's own creations would have been capable of 1080p anti-aliased graphics  with a rock solid 60fps frame rate. All that  would have been possible even at the same retail price point just with a smaller margin for Nintendo.

Much of Nintendo's own development has been massively restrained by such weak wii u hardware that its been difficult for Nintendo games to appeal to a wider audience.