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Forums - Nintendo - Wii 'U'nder powered?

ghost_of_fazz on 08 June 2011

As a render artist, I can tell you that the Nature demo is FAR ahead of anything on current consoles, in terms of quality and technologies used. It has a massive amount of polygons, tessellation, global illumination, dynamic fluids physics and the texture size is brutal compared to anything the PS3 and the 360 have done.

Also, as a computer hardware aficionado, I'm starting to think that a R700 GPU is not enough to give the detail and performance seen on that demo. Might as well be a R800 GPU, with OpenGL 4.1.



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HappySqurriel on 08 June 2011
tarheel91 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.


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.


I'm not going to disagree with their claim, but I think that what they're talking about when they say global illumination and what I'm thinking about are (probably) two very different things ...

In 10 years time, when we have 100 times the current processing power, it is possible that we will see games rendered with ray-tracing and radiosity where all of the surfaces in the scene use bidriectional reflectance functions with subsurface scattering; while it would be far from perfect, the quality of images produce from this type of set up would be approaching photo-realism.

In contrast, there are many hybrid and pre-computed methods that are used in realtime applications today that are supposed to eliminate some of the most obvious problems with local illumination.



Mr Khan on 08 June 2011
Viper1 said:
Underpowered? In a word, no.

Have you seen the rumored backstage "Japanese Street" tech demo? The one that's supposed to slaughter the garden demo?



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

ghost_of_fazz on 08 June 2011
Mr Khan said:
Viper1 said:
Underpowered? In a word, no.

Have you seen the rumored backstage "Japanese Street" tech demo? The one that's supposed to slaughter the garden demo?


Hey, I heard about that one. Any idea where I can see it?



Mr Khan on 08 June 2011
ghost_of_fazz said:
Mr Khan said:
Viper1 said:
Underpowered? In a word, no.

Have you seen the rumored backstage "Japanese Street" tech demo? The one that's supposed to slaughter the garden demo?


Hey, I heard about that one. Any idea where I can see it?

Behind closed doors only, that's why i was asking Viper. Sadly it means the most we could expect is a shakycam smartphone video...



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

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Viper1 on 08 June 2011

Not seen it but know those that have. The system is certainly not underpowered. The Zelda and Japanese garden demo's prove that themselves. But the street demo, from what I'm told, takes things even further.



The rEVOLution is not being televised

zarx on 08 June 2011
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.

A top end Power 7 CPU (which couldn't be used in a console as it is to power hungry and hot) is a hell of a lot more than 4 times more powerful than the 360's CPU. The 360's Xenos has 3 cores at 3.2Ghz and is capable of 2 way multithreading per core allowing it to handle up to 6 hardware threads and has 1MB of L2 cache. The top Power 7 CPU has 8 cores at 4.7Ghz and is capable of 4 threads per core and has 32MB of cache plus has several other optomisations that improve performance. Top power 7 is more like 10x in real world performance but as I said their is no way it would be used in a console...



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BoneArk on 08 June 2011

Graphics are just graphics to me.
Gameplay will always be the most important part of gaming to me.



                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

thetonestarr on 09 June 2011
zarx 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.

A top end Power 7 CPU (which couldn't be used in a console as it is to power hungry and hot) is a hell of a lot more than 4 times more powerful than the 360's CPU. The 360's Xenos has 3 cores at 3.2Ghz and is capable of 2 way multithreading per core allowing it to handle up to 6 hardware threads and has 1MB of L2 cache. The top Power 7 CPU has 8 cores at 4.7Ghz and is capable of 4 threads per core and has 32MB of cache plus has several other optomisations that improve performance. Top power 7 is more like 10x in real world performance but as I said their is no way it would be used in a console...


It's confirmed to be in the WiiU. Confirmed. Meaning it's not a rumor. Meaning it IS being used in a console.



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dahuman on 09 June 2011
thetonestarr said:
zarx 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.

A top end Power 7 CPU (which couldn't be used in a console as it is to power hungry and hot) is a hell of a lot more than 4 times more powerful than the 360's CPU. The 360's Xenos has 3 cores at 3.2Ghz and is capable of 2 way multithreading per core allowing it to handle up to 6 hardware threads and has 1MB of L2 cache. The top Power 7 CPU has 8 cores at 4.7Ghz and is capable of 4 threads per core and has 32MB of cache plus has several other optomisations that improve performance. Top power 7 is more like 10x in real world performance but as I said their is no way it would be used in a console...


It's confirmed to be in the WiiU. Confirmed. Meaning it's not a rumor. Meaning it IS being used in a console.

He's talking about the high end one not being used, would be too expensive and resource hungry(as in electric bill and heat production.)