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Forums - Nintendo - Wii U's GPGPU Squashes Xbox 360, PS3; Capable Of DirectX 11 Equivalent Graphics

osed125 on 20 September 2012
Kynes said:

If Pikmin 3 started as a Wii game, the number of objects on screen, and the complexity of them will be smaller than if it were developed with WiiU on mind, so it doesn't make any sense that this is the reason why it won't be in 1080p. It's like saying that you can't play old PC games at very high resolutions because they weren't developed with newer hardware in mind.

To my knowledge Pikmin 3 was almost near the end (or at least very far) of development when Nintendo decided to make it for the Wii U, what we're seeing is a port of a Wii game (obviously with slightly better graphics), so correct if I'm wrong but I don't think they can improve it much more without investing more time and money.



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Crono141 on 20 September 2012
pezus said:
Crono141 said:
BenVTrigger said:
Of course Wii U is going to be more powerful, its much newer hardware. But as someone who has played the console I havent seen it do anything the PS360 cant do. Im sure its capable of more but as of now developers havent taken advantage of the hardware.

What I dont understand are the people who think Durango and Orbis wont be giant leaps over current gen. Because they will be MASSIVE jumps


Because of the many many economic and situational reasons talked about in many many threads like this one and PS4 cutting edge thread.  It does not make any sense whatsoever for there to be this huge leap like last time.  You're going to be disappointed if you don't face that reality.  The amount of horsepower that would have to be included in those consoles to get the same kind of leap we got from PS2 to PS3 would make the consoles prohibitively expensive due to the law of diminishing returns.  We're talking 1000 dollar consoles here.  It isn't going to happen.

1000 dollars? You could get a 600 dollar PC right now that is way more powerful than the Wii U. Keep in mind that the MS and Sony consoles aren't releasing in quite a while

A tower, yes, but not a laptop.  Form factor of the WiiU has much more in common with a laptop than it does with a desktop.  TDP requirements as well.  And that isn't the point I'm making.  I'm not saying you couldn't get a PC with more power than a WiiU for under 1000 dollars.  I'm saying you can't get a gaming laptop that will blow the WiiU away without dropping over 1000 dollars.  More Like 1500.  That is the kind of leap that would have to be made by PS4 or Xbox in order to massively dwarf the capabilities of the WiiU this generation.



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DieAppleDie on 20 September 2012

its obvious, to me at least, that it was a Wii game at the beggining, the models and environments scale smells Wii, but i must admit that those textures look really impressive, specially the fruits
to sum up, the game is a Wii game with the enhancements the WiiU can provide, pretty much like Zelda Oot N64/3DS differences



dahuman on 20 September 2012
ethomaz said:
Kynes said:

Tell that to the Civ V developers. You can use GPGPU to do lots of different things, one of them is fast texture decompression.

Like I said you need to sacrifice graphics to do other thing with GPGPU... for not sacrifice graphics you need to user the CPU for that or another GPU. The best cenario is to use another GPU but the Wii U have just one.

So for consoles the best thing is to use CPU for other things and the GPU just for graphics.

They could easily implement features that would help reduce load times or speed up other aspects like better shader based AA compared to current gen consoles implementations, the idea is that it's flexible enough to do many things if people want to be creative about it.



HappySqurriel on 20 September 2012
pezus said:

Screenshot comparisons vs. Xbox games show obvious improvements though, even the launch games. Same with PS3, it was an obvious jump 


I would say that is open to some debate ...

If you were to take the best looking XBox games (Black for example) and do a comparison against the XBox 360 launch line-up the XBox 360 games would only look a bit better. This isn't an unusual problem for systems released before their competition because developers are often producing games on a tight budget with a strict deadline while working on hardware they don't fully understand while using tools that have yet to be updated; and their games are being compared against the bigest budget games of the previous generation that were developed by the best teams with long development timelines on mature tools by programmers who have been working on the platform for many years (and fully understand it).



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crissindahouse on 20 September 2012

i remember when i walked around my cars in project gotham racing 3, i had an xbox before but one is for sure, it blew me away.



Kenology on 20 September 2012
pezus said:
Kenology said:
I'm going to mention this in this thread too, just so everyone can see it.

If PS4/720 isn't the quantum leap over current gen that everyone expects and it's a less significant jump up, sort of like what we're seeing with Wii U's first gen games, I'm wondering if these guys will start changing their tune and start singing Sony/MS's praises and suddenly marginal steps are ok.

We'll see. Can't wait to see how big of a leap those consoles will be and how fans react after knocking the Wii U. I anticipate hypocrisy if it plays out like that.

Why in the world would the leap be marginal? Why even release new consoles then? Sony and MS don't make consoles around new control schemes like Nintendo have been doing lately. Well MS might

We already had this discussion in another thread.

The cost of a monumental leap that you guys might be expecting just doesn't make sense from an economic standpoint.  Sure, if Sony wants to release another $599.99, cutting-edge box with even higher entry dev costs, they can go right ahead...  I don't think they can go too crazy with their usual razor and blades strategy - even though you're rich pezus and would be able to afford it, you can't support Sony all by yourself!  My guess is that the PS4 & 360 won't be the quantum leap you all are expecting, and when you guys find that out, suddenly marginal leaps won't be such a bad thing like it is with the Wii U.  :)



dahuman on 20 September 2012

So anyways, like I have kind of went over in another thread, if the rumor mill was true and the Wii U is using a AMD Gen 7 GPU then it's capable to features on par to DX10.1 and it also has a tessellation unit, the difference from DX10.1 to DX11 is minor optimizations and a different standard for the tessellation unit(DX11 API standard). So in essence, if it's indeed a Gen 7 AMD GPU, then it's pretty much capable of what DX11 can do, you'd just use a different API tailored to it, and in this case, it's Nintendo's GX2 API, not DX11 which belongs to MS.

Like I have been before where I always said that the PS3 was more powerful in raw power compared to the 360's better flexibility, this time, it's a no brainer that the Wii U is superior to the 360 and PS3, after 7 fkn' years, it's like NO SHIT!



Kynes on 20 September 2012
osed125 said:
Kynes said:

If Pikmin 3 started as a Wii game, the number of objects on screen, and the complexity of them will be smaller than if it were developed with WiiU on mind, so it doesn't make any sense that this is the reason why it won't be in 1080p. It's like saying that you can't play old PC games at very high resolutions because they weren't developed with newer hardware in mind.

To my knowledge Pikmin 3 was almost near the end (or at least very far) of development when Nintendo decided to make it for the Wii U, what we're seeing is a port of a Wii game (obviously with slightly better graphics), so correct if I'm wrong but I don't think they can improve it much more without investing more time and money.


You can render at a higher resolution using the same textures and the same polygon models. If the work that needs to be done is low, as it implies being a Wii game on origin, then the graphics chip won't be taxed that much, so it could render at 1080p. Using Wii assets makes it much easier to render to the WiiU

I think that Nintendo doesn't want to invest too much resources, as they know that it will be good enough.



dahuman on 20 September 2012
pezus said:
DieAppleDie said:
its obvious, to me at least, that it was a Wii game at the beggining, the models and environments scale smells Wii, but i must admit that those textures look really impressive, specially the fruits
to sum up, the game is a Wii game with the enhancements the WiiU can provide, pretty much like Zelda Oot N64/3DS differences

That is why it makes no sense that it isn't 1080p...


You and I are both PC gamers, you know 1GB shared memory would still be questionable at 1080P :P I'm hoping they optimize their shit so more will be for games in the future to maybe make a better stand for games to have 1080p by default. I'm hoping the 32MB eDRAM would either give out free AA or make devs happy with flexibility, we'll see.