By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
bonzobanana on 11 December 2016
Edit Thread
curl-6 said:
bonzobanana said:

It still has the same function as a large buffer because its data bus to the main cpu and gpu is slow compared to the other memory . The gamecube discs were quite small at about 1.2GB but wii has 8GB dvd discs with a dual layer on some discs and the absense of a hard drive means caching the optical drive is very important. I'm pretty sure when I read articles about development on wii it was exactly the same use just upgraded due to a optical disc 7 times larger but much slower seek times. Nintendo seemed obsessed with making the gamecube discs almost seem as fast as loading from cartridges and pretty much did the same again with wii. It is noticably faster and less pauses than ps2 and dreamcast games only beaten by the xbox thanks to its built in hard drive. However even the xbox is slower if its a new game that hasn't been stored in one of 3 700mb caches set aside for the last 3 games played.

With regards additional processing of the wii remote I believe it causes additional input lag above that of the wireless input lag and requires tracking of motion to respond to games. I.e. if your playing a tennis game for example it takes additional measurements regarding the swing of your arm and presents a sequence of values to the program to be calculated. It tracks your motion in 3 dimensional space and Nintendo even went beyond this to increase the sampling rate and accuracy of movement with the wii remote plus to improve the feature. It's pretty much the same as kinect except it uses electrical data from sensors rather than processed video data but it still has to be processed and so additional cpu work is required. Of course how much additional processing is debatable but I don't think there is any debate that additional processing is required.

Devs like High Voltage talked about how Wii's larger RAM allowed them to render more elements per scene compared to Gamecube. It was not just a buffer. Let's be realistic here; no console is going to reserve over 70% of its memory for caching, that's absurd. And totally unnecessary; with the amount of data Wii games have, a DVD drive and no HDD is just fine. Feeding 88MB of RAM is quick and easy. It's once you get up to PS3/360/Wii U levels of RAM that optical drive speed becomes a bottleneck.

And you're overestimating the complexity of the Wiimote. Its beauty was in its simplicity. It did not actually track movements in 3D space it all, it used simple gyros and accelerometers to register angle and movement, which give feedback no more complex than an analogue stick.

I don't think you've grasped how it works. It's caching so the data can be quickly loaded into main memory. It's fully utilised but the whole point is its not waiting to be pulled in from the optical drive. The fact its in the GDDR3 memory means it can be quickly moved to the main 24MB of very fast memory with the wide databuse's to cpu and gpu. Your making it sound like the cpu and gpu works directly with the data held in GDDR3 memory as if it can bypass needing to use the main 24MB of memory which I'm pretty sure it can't. Have you seen the GDDR3 chip on the wii motherboard its completely away from the main gpu and cpu and only has a slow databus.

When I said tracks movement in 3D space I guess that would be better as calculates movement in 3D space which is what the my explanation previous to that explained. I totally disagree with your point about no more complex than an analogue stick and I think you would too if you actually took time to read what you wrote. A game has to be purposely developed for motion controls you can't just add a motion controller to any game that has joypad input.