Soundwave said:
bonzobanana said:
This thread is a little confusing as 'being easy to develop for' and 'hard to port to wii u' can both be true. The wii u is a console based on a highly documented gpu and cpu's with a huge amount of previous development time. There is nothing innovative or unknown about the wii u hardware. It's just a Radeon gpu and 3 old powerpc cpu's. Assuming development software is in a fit state there is no problem.
However if you are trying to port a game developed for more powerful hardware to the wii u then clearly you will run into huge problems because the hardware isn't easily capable of running it. Then the wii u becomes very hard to develop for because you are trying to achieve something the wii u can't do without massive optimisation.
We saw many games like Call of Duty Black Ops 2 that was rock solid 60fps on xbox 360 but dropped into the low 20's for frame rate on wii u. Many wii u games were delayed from release or abandoned because they were difficult to port to wii u because of the low performance level.
It's clear the wii u had a gpu of superior architecture than 360 and ps3 with a superior feature set, plus high memory bandwidth for the 32MB on the MCM board so despite its low gflops performance could easily punch above 360 and ps3 but was crippled by a terrible cpu arrangement that wasn't even close to the performance of 360 or ps3.
If your porting a game of low performance requirements the wii u will be easy but if your porting something that needs more cpu performance like many 360 and ps3 games it may suffer.
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Yeah I think people are confusing two different things here.
Every Nintendo console since the N64 has been easy to develop for. After the N64 Nintendo took great pains to design systems that were very easy to get games up and running and even apply effects to.
That doesn't mean the same thing as "so easy to port to, that two people can just fart out the port". Ports are going to be difficult even with an architecture developers know if there are technical limitations to the chip.
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Your replying to me but you are basically making the same points I have done. Was this meant to have been a response to a different comment?
Personally I think the only last gen console that can be described as difficult to develop for was the ps3. It's initial games looked easily inferior to 360 often with lower frame rates but then the final games making use of all the cell processors, the huge blu-ray disc and full 7.1 sound were pretty amazing and didn't look like they were possible on 360 or wii u. Such was the gulf between early and final ps3 games it looked like a console of maybe 5x the performance at the end. If you look at the early 360 games from decent developers and final the gulf was much smaller and it seems smaller again for wii u. Not only that but the ps3 was providing a lot more 1080p and 3D games than the other formats with an amazing quality 7.1 less compressed soundtrack too.
