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Forums - Nintendo - Wii 'U'nder powered?

Rhonin the wizard on 08 June 2011
Viper1 said:
Underpowered? In a word, no.

Have you had a chance to try it? Can you talk about your experience with it?



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Fumanchu on 08 June 2011
HappySqurriel said:
Dr.Grass said:
HappySqurriel said:
From what has been displayed in the HD-Experience demo, the Wii U seems to be able to display graphics at a level where it would be difficult/impossible to create something significantly better without hardware that was an order of magnituded more powerful.

If the rumours are true and the Wii U is using an R700 it should be able to render polygon and texture detail at close to the limits that 1080p can display, and the main difference between the Wii U and systems that come after it will be the lighting and effects. With how far lighting effects have come we're hitting the limits of what can be done under a local-illumination system and we will need to move to a global illumination lighting model to really see a major change; and the successors to the HD consoles would need to more powerful than any system we can currently buy to pull that off and, unless they release in 2015 or later, this would mean that they would be very expensive.

What on earth does that mean!?

I implore you to go watch Avatar on Blu-Ray on a nice big TV and tell me that anything we've ever seen in real time comes close to that.

At 1080p there are (roughly) 2 Million pixels per frame, the R700 can probably render between 90 and 180 Million polygons per second with better lighting and texturing (per polygon) as the HD consoles. When you increase polygon output beyond this level most of the polygons you're adding to the scene will be smaller than a pixel and will not contribute to the scene.

By the way, the primary difference between Avatar and what might be possible with hardware similar to the R700 is lighting effects ... Crysis has tons of environmental detail but doesn't come close to resembling pre-rendered movies because its lighting is far less realistic.

Surely this can't correct? The highest density real-time 'hero' character this generation is capped at around ~35,000-40,000 polys.



NJ5 on 08 June 2011
Fumanchu said:
HappySqurriel said:
Dr.Grass said:
HappySqurriel said:
From what has been displayed in the HD-Experience demo, the Wii U seems to be able to display graphics at a level where it would be difficult/impossible to create something significantly better without hardware that was an order of magnituded more powerful.

If the rumours are true and the Wii U is using an R700 it should be able to render polygon and texture detail at close to the limits that 1080p can display, and the main difference between the Wii U and systems that come after it will be the lighting and effects. With how far lighting effects have come we're hitting the limits of what can be done under a local-illumination system and we will need to move to a global illumination lighting model to really see a major change; and the successors to the HD consoles would need to more powerful than any system we can currently buy to pull that off and, unless they release in 2015 or later, this would mean that they would be very expensive.

What on earth does that mean!?

I implore you to go watch Avatar on Blu-Ray on a nice big TV and tell me that anything we've ever seen in real time comes close to that.

At 1080p there are (roughly) 2 Million pixels per frame, the R700 can probably render between 90 and 180 Million polygons per second with better lighting and texturing (per polygon) as the HD consoles. When you increase polygon output beyond this level most of the polygons you're adding to the scene will be smaller than a pixel and will not contribute to the scene.

By the way, the primary difference between Avatar and what might be possible with hardware similar to the R700 is lighting effects ... Crysis has tons of environmental detail but doesn't come close to resembling pre-rendered movies because its lighting is far less realistic.

Surely this can't correct? The highest density real-time 'hero' character this generation is capped at around ~35,000-40,000 polys.

Multiply 40,000 by 30 (number of frames per second), and rendering that character alone requires more than 1 million polygons per second, 2 million if at 60 frames per second.



My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957

Scoobes on 08 June 2011

AMD are doing the graphics chip and considering how cheap GPUs are these days its probably going to be significantly more powerful than the GPUs in the 360 and PS3. Even if it's only in-line with the 4850 it'll still be capable of DX10 effects (and as it'll probably an updated chip, it'll probably be able to do DX11) and be a lot more powerful than the current HD consoles. Considerring the difference in graphics between multiplat games on my PC (which is a cheap build with a 4850 GPU), I think the Wii U will be fine.




Get your Portable ID!

dahuman on 08 June 2011
Scoobes said:
AMD are doing the graphics chip and considering how cheap GPUs are these days its probably going to be significantly more powerful than the GPUs in the 360 and PS3. Even if it's only in-line with the 4850 it'll still be capable of DX10 effects (and as it'll probably an updated chip, it'll probably be able to do DX11) and be a lot more powerful than the current HD consoles. Considerring the difference in graphics between multiplat games on my PC (which is a cheap build with a 4850 GPU), I think the Wii U will be fine.


It won't be doing DX of any kind =P That's MS shit lol. OpenGL most likely. It might even be faster than the fastest single chip R700 based video card depending on what they do with it. Nintendo can also just come up with their own tessellation libary for the chipset.



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dahuman on 08 June 2011

BTW, this is the basic information from Nintendo's site, no detailed specs but at least it's something, http://e3.nintendo.com/hw/#/about



Scoobes on 08 June 2011
dahuman said:
Scoobes said:
AMD are doing the graphics chip and considering how cheap GPUs are these days its probably going to be significantly more powerful than the GPUs in the 360 and PS3. Even if it's only in-line with the 4850 it'll still be capable of DX10 effects (and as it'll probably an updated chip, it'll probably be able to do DX11) and be a lot more powerful than the current HD consoles. Considerring the difference in graphics between multiplat games on my PC (which is a cheap build with a 4850 GPU), I think the Wii U will be fine.


It won't be doing DX of any kind =P That's MS shit lol. OpenGL most likely. It might even be faster than the fastest single chip R700 based video card depending on what they do with it. Nintendo can also just come up with their own tessellation libary for the chipset.

Lol, good point. But it'll be capable of similar effects was my point. But yeah... DirectX on a Ninty console,




Get your Portable ID!

Fumanchu on 08 June 2011
NJ5 said:
Fumanchu said:
HappySqurriel said:

At 1080p there are (roughly) 2 Million pixels per frame, the R700 can probably render between 90 and 180 Million polygons per second with better lighting and texturing (per polygon) as the HD consoles. When you increase polygon output beyond this level most of the polygons you're adding to the scene will be smaller than a pixel and will not contribute to the scene.

By the way, the primary difference between Avatar and what might be possible with hardware similar to the R700 is lighting effects ... Crysis has tons of environmental detail but doesn't come close to resembling pre-rendered movies because its lighting is far less realistic.

Surely this can't correct? The highest density real-time 'hero' character this generation is capped at around ~35,000-40,000 polys.

Multiply 40,000 by 30 (number of frames per second), and rendering that character alone requires more than 1 million polygons per second, 2 million if at 60 frames per second.

OK, so I'm guessing we should be able to render ~150,000-200,000 polys for the lead characters, in allowing for other enemies on screen and other lighting effects etc.  This is a great step-up, but going back to the earlier Avatar comparison - the zbrushed meshsmoothed x10 iteration characters that takes a render farm 24 hours to render a single frame could still be classed as a 'primary' difference. 



tarheel91 on 08 June 2011
HappySqurriel said:
Dr.Grass said:
HappySqurriel said:
From what has been displayed in the HD-Experience demo, the Wii U seems to be able to display graphics at a level where it would be difficult/impossible to create something significantly better without hardware that was an order of magnituded more powerful.

If the rumours are true and the Wii U is using an R700 it should be able to render polygon and texture detail at close to the limits that 1080p can display, and the main difference between the Wii U and systems that come after it will be the lighting and effects. With how far lighting effects have come we're hitting the limits of what can be done under a local-illumination system and we will need to move to a global illumination lighting model to really see a major change; and the successors to the HD consoles would need to more powerful than any system we can currently buy to pull that off and, unless they release in 2015 or later, this would mean that they would be very expensive.

What on earth does that mean!?

I implore you to go watch Avatar on Blu-Ray on a nice big TV and tell me that anything we've ever seen in real time comes close to that.

At 1080p there are (roughly) 2 Million pixels per frame, the R700 can probably render between 90 and 180 Million polygons per second with better lighting and texturing (per polygon) as the HD consoles. When you increase polygon output beyond this level most of the polygons you're adding to the scene will be smaller than a pixel and will not contribute to the scene.

By the way, the primary difference between Avatar and what might be possible with hardware similar to the R700 is lighting effects ... Crysis has tons of environmental detail but doesn't come close to resembling pre-rendered movies because its lighting is far less realistic.


According to a comment on beyond3d (I trust that forum's analysis because of it's reputation), the Zelda demo used global illumination, and apparently the birdy demo uses it too (you can tell based on the way the light hits the bird belly or something).  Personally, one of the most important things I picked up on the tech demos is how much more natural the light looks.  This is a big thing for me, especially in regards to games that go for a more realistic style.

Also, in regards to the thread, IBM confirmed the Wii U is running a custom version of the Power7 with "lots of embedded ram."  AMD confirmed the Wii U is using a custom version of one of their GPUs, and if it's the rumored 4850, then I can confirm it will obliterate the X360/PS3 as I can run pretty much any multi-plat game on my PC maxed out at 1920x1200 without even trying.



Alby_da_Wolf on 08 June 2011
Dr.Grass said:
Rhonin the wizard said:
thetonestarr said:

All we know about the Wii U's technical specs are that:

-it uses a Power7 CPU
-it uses flash memory

Now, the Power7 CPU can be anywhere from approximately equal to the 360 (on the very low end), to as much as four times more powerful (on the extreme high end).

And flash memory as the main storage means much faster load times, which is a technical benefit as well.

Anything beyond that is 100% pure speculation and shouldn't be given any heed to. There were a million rumors about the WiiU and still are, and most of them have already been proven false. Don't add to the shitpile.

The GPU will be a custom AMD Radeon HD GPU. The source is a press release. And here's one for the CPU.


@thetonestarr Thanks for pointing that out. I can't believe some of the hate I'm getting for making a simple thread. Why are people so high-strung out there!?

I guess some misunderstanding come from the fact that, given how fast CPU and GPU performance grow, if a gen is launched 6 or more years after the previous, making a new console twice as powerful as the average previous gen would be very, very conservative, while even 4 times as powerful would still be cheap and prudent. Heck, when I built my last PC, choosing cheap components, including onboard graphics (Radeon HD3300), I made it more than twice as fast as the previous in its slowest parts (excluding disk speed that didn't grow very much), and its main RAM is 6 times as large (4GB, vs. the previous 768MB). And I spent less than for building the previous one, those 4GB for example cost me a half of what I paid the previous 768MB.



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