| Mnementh said: Or the PS3. Really, people forget the strange design of the PS3. But really all I read from your explanation is, that it isn't about architecture, it is about power. I agree in a way, since the Wii Nintendo decided to have lower specs than the competition. There is a reason the PS3 and the 360 were called HD-twins: power was similar enough to make porting games between easy enough (such low-effort ports usually left the PS3 at disadvantage, the strange architecture needed special consideration to fully utilize, so low-effort ports perfomed bad). But generally people completely go bonkers on the name of the CPU. I'm a programmer, and I can say I couldn't care less. The compiler makes every CPU the same, except you need some special programming, as the SPEs of the Cell in the PS3 did (for which reason they were often ignored or underutilized). For gaming also graphic is more important, but this century the programmers less and less use the graphic card directly but instead using high level APIs. And as you said, Nintendo home consoles had pretty standard graphic chips. So in conclusion: neither Wii, nor WiiU or Switch used an especially strange architecture that makes porting difficult. They all had less power than their competition, which indeed can make porting difficult. Also, Wii and WiiU had bad engine support (Switch has surprisingly good support in that department), which actually has WAY more impact than the CPU. Unreal Engine for instance supported Playstation since the 2, XBox since the 360, but no Nintendo console before the Switch. I never understand why non-programmers get excited about the selection of the CPU-architecture, as every programmer don't care anymore as compilers support everything. The LLVM compiler targets X86, X86-64, PowerPC, PowerPC-64, ARM, Thumb, SPARC, Alpha, CellSPU, MIPS, MSP430, SystemZ, and XCore. The GCC targets even more, including some strange things. And there are many more C++-compilers out there (these are only very forthcoming with informations). |
I don't get that much exited about the name of the architecure. But at the time when Wii U release there were some not so bad low power x86 CPU at the market. And you still have to do different optimizations.
Making ports as easy as possible doesn't seem to be a bad idea.
The Switch architecure being a more or less stock Tegra also seems to have made engine porting faster, easier and cheaper than on Wii U.
