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Forums - Nintendo - Lets analyze the potential of the Wii U Memory

d21lewis on 13 October 2012

 This video should explain it all.



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samuship on 13 October 2012
bananaking21 said:
Conegamer said:
I'm not the best person on computers, but I'd say it should be able to do more in the same way that a 2GHz Dual Core is more efficent than a 4GHz Single-Core.

It has more than enough RAM...for now...so that's the important thing, and even when the next-gen starts it should still have enough to have games ported to it with no issues.


more than enough ram? lets be honest here thats no way "more than enough" modern day PC's usually have 8 GB of ram (a good one for gaming that is) some go up to 16 GB's. so 1 GB honestly is a littel ram, much better than the PS3 and 360. but in term of RAM the WiiU doesnt pack much

 

Again? I thought everyone knew that PCs differ from consoles. The PC uses RAM for a lot of things, on the Wii U is 1GB for games and 1GB for the OP.

 

Crysis 2 for PC doesn't need more than 1GB on ultra settings, for example.



We need moar Zelda, now!

We need moar Unchartedzz!

We need less DLCs.

JEMC on 13 October 2012
drkohler said:
JEMC said

@drkohler: I also noticed the different shapes, but my optimistic side prefers to think that all the 4 chips are of the same kind of RAM, otherwise the 1GB for games and 1GB for the system won't change during its lifetime.

I think you misunderstand that. "Reserving memory for OS purposes" does of course not equate to having physically different ram chips. This is purely a software solution. Having 1G DDR and 1G GDDR ram does not seem to be unusual, either. You'd want much more ram speed for the GPU (particularly if you start with the multi-display idea right from the start). A good memory controller can live with slower DDR ram for general code any day.

Nintendo said that WiiU has 1GB of RAM for games and 1GB for OS, and the way I see it is that the 1GB GDDR will be the one used by the GPU and the CPU for the games, while the other 1GB DDR will be used for the system in things like the OS, Miiverse and whatever Nintendo thinks they need.

Of couse the best way to use them would be using all the GDDR for the GPU and use the DDR for the CPU and the rest of the system. But that doesn't equal to 1 GB for games and 1 GB for OS.

We'll see.



Please excuse my bad English.

Former gaming PC: i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070

Current gaming PC: R5-7600, 32GB RAM 6000MT/s (CL30) and a RX 9060XT 16GB

Steam / Live / NNID : jonxiquet    Add me if you want, but I'm a single player gamer.

dahuman on 13 October 2012
JEMC said:
drkohler said:
JEMC said

@drkohler: I also noticed the different shapes, but my optimistic side prefers to think that all the 4 chips are of the same kind of RAM, otherwise the 1GB for games and 1GB for the system won't change during its lifetime.

I think you misunderstand that. "Reserving memory for OS purposes" does of course not equate to having physically different ram chips. This is purely a software solution. Having 1G DDR and 1G GDDR ram does not seem to be unusual, either. You'd want much more ram speed for the GPU (particularly if you start with the multi-display idea right from the start). A good memory controller can live with slower DDR ram for general code any day.

Nintendo said that WiiU has 1GB of RAM for games and 1GB for OS, and the way I see it is that the 1GB GDDR will be the one used by the GPU and the CPU for the games, while the other 1GB DDR will be used for the system in things like the OS, Miiverse and whatever Nintendo thinks they need.

Of couse the best way to use them would be using all the GDDR for the GPU and use the DDR for the CPU and the rest of the system. But that doesn't equal to 1 GB for games and 1 GB for OS.

We'll see.


It'd be one pool of RAM, the OS will just reserve 1GB for itself is about it, they are not doing it so one is dedicated to one and not the other. They will also have 32MB of eDRAM to play with, so memory won't be much an issue.



JEMC on 13 October 2012
dahuman said:

It'd be one pool of RAM, the OS will just reserve 1GB for itself is about it, they are not doing it so one is dedicated to one and not the other. They will also have 32MB of eDRAM to play with, so memory won't be much an issue.

I hope so.

It's just that I find it odd that they are using 2 kinds of RAM, which I admid is only a speculation based on the shape of the modules.



Please excuse my bad English.

Former gaming PC: i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070

Current gaming PC: R5-7600, 32GB RAM 6000MT/s (CL30) and a RX 9060XT 16GB

Steam / Live / NNID : jonxiquet    Add me if you want, but I'm a single player gamer.

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bananaking21 on 13 October 2012
Viper1 said:
lilbroex said:

I notice that the Wii U has 4 RAM chips. That means that it is 512X4 as opposed to 1024X2 as I thought before. This means that the consoles houses RAM equivelent to 4 PS3/360s.

Now, being it that it resereves 1GB that would mean that it reserves 512X2.

Now here are the big questions. Does it support loading RAM in parrallel and what type of RAM is it?

If it loads in parralel then how much of an improvement would that be to loading and managing data? Also, it will more than likley free up one of the RAM chips for gaming in the future so how much would it benefit from loading to 3 chips at once?

Parallel?  Are you talking about dual channel memory?   That's not dependant on the number of chips (number of DIMM's on a PC motherboard, yes, but not the number of chips itself).  However, modern IBM CPU's are dual channel CPU's.  So long as the motherboard itself can support dual channel, then yes it can be dual channel.  But consoles are designed such that the memory bandwith is rarely a bottleneck to begin with.

bananaking21 said:

more than enough ram? lets be honest here thats no way "more than enough" modern day PC's usually have 8 GB of ram (a good one for gaming that is) some go up to 16 GB's. so 1 GB honestly is a littel ram, much better than the PS3 and 360. but in term of RAM the WiiU doesnt pack much

1 GB for games on a console is actually enough.   Take a look at the exe file for Battlefield 3 running at 2560 x 1600 on ultra high textures...uses 1.8 GB.

A PC runs a whole lot of extra stuff and your games either never take advantage of all of it or simply don't need to.     Hell, most games are 32 bit applications and can't address more than 4 GB anyway. 

And let's not forget about texture streaming.   Given the Wii U's media drive gives 22.5 MB/s bandwidth, it can easily stream enough textures to never worry about taxing the system RAM.

 

ok lol looks like i was wrong, i wont act stuborn just because i was, but from what i am hearing is that is it enough now, but is it more than enough? and is it enough for the future? 



Viper1 on 13 October 2012
bananaking21 said:
Viper1 said:
bananaking21 said:

more than enough ram? lets be honest here thats no way "more than enough" modern day PC's usually have 8 GB of ram (a good one for gaming that is) some go up to 16 GB's. so 1 GB honestly is a littel ram, much better than the PS3 and 360. but in term of RAM the WiiU doesnt pack much

1 GB for games on a console is actually enough.   Take a look at the exe file for Battlefield 3 running at 2560 x 1600 on ultra high textures...uses 1.8 GB.

A PC runs a whole lot of extra stuff and your games either never take advantage of all of it or simply don't need to.     Hell, most games are 32 bit applications and can't address more than 4 GB anyway. 

And let's not forget about texture streaming.   Given the Wii U's media drive gives 22.5 MB/s bandwidth, it can easily stream enough textures to never worry about taxing the system RAM.

ok lol looks like i was wrong, i wont act stuborn just because i was, but from what i am hearing is that is it enough now, but is it more than enough? and is it enough for the future?

More than enough and enough for the guture are hard to say specifically.  What I can say is that if developers become comfortable with texture streaming then the answer to both questions is yes.

Say you have 4 different level of detail object assets (level of details gets increasingly more complicated as it gets closer).  This is pretty common in modern games.  In fact, you may have many more LOD assets than that.   Normally, all of them would be loaded at once and then displayed as you get closer.   With texture streaming, only the LOD asset you currenly need would actually reside in RAM saving you tons of space.

PC's are going RAM crazy these days because it's cheap, not because it's necessary.   



The rEVOLution is not being televised

dahuman on 13 October 2012
JEMC said:
dahuman said:

It'd be one pool of RAM, the OS will just reserve 1GB for itself is about it, they are not doing it so one is dedicated to one and not the other. They will also have 32MB of eDRAM to play with, so memory won't be much an issue.

I hope so.

It's just that I find it odd that they are using 2 kinds of RAM, which I admid is only a speculation based on the shape of the modules.


it's just the angle



snowdog on 13 October 2012

Not sure if anyone has mentioned this but if it's only 4 chips (we can't see underneath the motherboard) then it's definitely DDR3. What's more important is that the eDRAM is on-die for both the CPU and GPU so you're going to have a ridiculously small amount of latency. Good times ahead!



Kynes on 13 October 2012
snowdog said:
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this but if it's only 4 chips (we can't see underneath the motherboard) then it's definitely DDR3. What's more important is that the eDRAM is on-die for both the CPU and GPU so you're going to have a ridiculously small amount of latency. Good times ahead!


The easier way to know if it's GDDR3 or GDDR5 is to look at the memory traces. If all of them have approximately the same length, then it's gddr3. If they have very different lengths, it's GDDR5, as GDDR3 is much more sensible to different memory traces resistance, and the traces resistance depends on the trace length. GDDR5 has made the PCBs much easier to design, as you don't need as intricate paths as with GDDR3.

Looking at the traces, it seems that the memory standard is GDDR5 or DDR3, probably GDDR5.

Another point is the number of chips. AFAIK there aren't any 4 Gb GDDR5 chips, so if you want 2 GB memory you need 8 chips, so the most probable configuration is 256 bits memory channel, and 8 chips, or 128 bits memory channel with 8 chips on a pop configuration (2 chips package on package sharing the same 32 bits bus, this is a cheap solution thinking in the future 4 Gb chips, but this is inefficient in the short term)

PS: Talking with lilbroex of nintendo hardware is like talking with a zealot.