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Forums - Gaming Discussion - 720 will Decide if WiiU RAM is enough.

TheJimbo1234 on 16 April 2013
TheLastStarFighter said:

There is an ongoing discussion on how WiiU will handle PS4 games if PS4 is using 7 gig of RAM and Wii U has 1 available.  The answer really is the 720.  Developers are going to want to make games hit as many consumers as possible.  XBox also has a lot of support from western developers as a primary platform. The amount of RAM used for games on 720 will significantly impact the rest of the industry.

Rumors have circulated that 720 would have 4 gig for OS and 4 gig for games.  If this is the case, the extra 3 gig available for games on PS4 is largely irrelevant for multiplats as developers will want the games to run on 720 as well.

If a game can run on 4, can it run on 1?  Maybe.  PS2 ran the same games as XBox with half the RAM.  25% may be enough with some compromises.

In the end the market will decide what is enough RAM and processing power.  If WiiU sells a lot of units, and 720 is using 4 gig then few developers will design games to push the PS4's 7 gig available.  It's just like Blizzard's strategy with WoW, desigining it to be played on as many systems as possible.  And speaking of PC games, that will also be relevant as most multiplats are PC as well so developers will want the game to be able to hit as many of those systems as they can too.

If 720 surprises and goes with say, 12 gig of RAM with 8 available for games, this will have a negative impact on Wii U support, and Wii U will have to be an extremely viable platform to get continued 3rd party multiplats.


Not this time.

Seeing that all devs are getting a massive throbbing one for who can produce the biggest, shiniest graphics engine, this time aorund the devs are going to choose the PS4 & PC first, and then if the others can handle the game, they will get a version of it. If not, that is one less game for your console.

 

NB. And no. If a game needs 4GB+, it needs 4GB+. Old engines and old tech does not compared to modern games and requirements.



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Netyaroze on 16 April 2013
JakDaSnack said:
So if Tomb Raider needed 5 million to make even, can you imagine how much a game would cost to make that actually used 7 gb's of ram? It would take hundreds of artists/developers, and likely any of the big company's that actually try to make those games would likely take massive losses because of it.

The wiiU may end up getting 3rd party support simply because 3rd party publishers need the extra money to make even.


Assets are made in very high quality already and are scaled down for the actual game. Infact they will still scale them down for next gen consoles.

 

Port costs and optimization costs for ancient hardware  will go massively down. Now Devs can spent more time with the creation of content.

 

PS4 was designed to remove as many obstacles for developers as possible. This will make it easy to take advantage of the Hardware and I am pretty sure ìhe 720 too will be easier to develop for. Ports between PS4/720/PC will be cheap. Now devs can take more time to fill 5 -6- 7 GB.

The cost explosion we have seen this gen will not be repeated. Games on consoles are 1080p games we just don't see it but textures already have more detail than we can see for example.

 

It will get more expensive if games become bigger and have more things to do  but simply graphic (higher res, better textures, more polys) will not cost that much more than it does today.



walsufnir on 16 April 2013
Chark said:
I think the more concrete rumor has been 3GB for the OS. That's been rumored for a long time now.

I think this is bs. 3gb is way too much given the 360-os only uses 32 mb. Yes, the new os will have way more features, just like Sony will also do. It could be that MS reserved this while testing the new os and leaving studios with (still huge!) 5 gig of ram to start programming.



happydolphin on 16 April 2013
Metallicube said:

If these third parties are so damn creative and talented, shouldn't they be able to create great games regardless of the technological limitations?

I don't get why so many people here act like it's always the third parties that are the angels here and can do no wrong. If anything, the third parties are the reasons why the industry is currently bleeding money. Costs to create games are skyrocketting and countless companies are going bankrupt, all so these seemingly talented developers can have unlimited horsepower to flaunt their "creativity."

Nintendo knew how to handle third parties. Sony and MS do not. They give them carte blanche to do what ever they want and run free on their platforms, which is a large part of the reason the industry is in massive decline. Third party developers generally don't seem to have a business mind. All they care about is creating what THEY want, even at the expense of the downfall of the industry. That is currently what is happening, sadly. 

And that's why Nintendo is once again here to save the day. They did it once in the 80s, and well time has come once again. They are not only safe forever, but they will also save the industry once again.



Zero999 on 16 April 2013
Zkuq said:
Zero999 said:
Zkuq said:
I'd be more worried about Wii U's other capabilities which don't seem very strong. Also, anything that's not linear is going to be trouble. And there's an even bigger problem: publishers and developers don't seem to be interested in the Wii U and its weak hardware makes it even less appealing because porting games to the Wii U is going to be lots of extra work.

devs didn't seem to mind porting games to ps3, wich was a complete pain in the ass. the games will be on wii u because it won't be a problem to port and devs need the money.

There's a difference: the PS3 actually had the power, even if accessing it was difficult. The difficulty of accessing that power is also the reason many games' PS3 version was inferior. And let me ask you a question: What makes you think devs are going to be porting PS4/Nextbox games to the Wii U when it's going to take huge amounts of work when they're not porting their PS3/X360 games to the Wii U, a more powerful system?

what makes you think it's going to take huge amounts of work? the ps360 games not yet confirmed to wii u were the ones that were probably already in development when wii u became an option and those titles like dark souls 2 and gta5 can still get wii u confirmation. games anounced recently like AC4 and Batman Arkhan Origins were confirmed for wii u immedeately.



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Grandia on 16 April 2013
S.T.A.G.E. said:
TheLastStarFighter said:

There is an ongoing discussion on how WiiU will handle PS4 games if PS4 is using 7 gig of RAM and Wii U has 1 available.  The answer really is the 720.  Developers are going to want to make games hit as many consumers as possible.  XBox also has a lot of support from western developers as a primary platform. The amount of RAM used for games on 720 will significantly impact the rest of the industry.

Rumors have circulated that 720 would have 4 gig for OS and 4 gig for games.  If this is the case, the extra 3 gig available for games on PS4 is largely irrelevant for multiplats as developers will want the games to run on 720 as well.

If a game can run on 4, can it run on 1?  Maybe.  PS2 ran the same games as XBox with half the RAM.  25% may be enough with some compromises.

In the end the market will decide what is enough RAM and processing power.  If WiiU sells a lot of units, and 720 is using 4 gig then few developers will design games to push the PS4's 7 gig available.  It's just like Blizzard's strategy with WoW, desigining it to be played on as many systems as possible.  And speaking of PC games, that will also be relevant as most multiplats are PC as well so developers will want the game to be able to hit as many of those systems as they can too.

If 720 surprises and goes with say, 12 gig of RAM with 8 available for games, this will have a negative impact on Wii U support, and Wii U will have to be an extremely viable platform to get continued 3rd party multiplats.


Epic demanded 8 GB of ram from Microsoft and Sony. Theres no way MS is wasting half of that on OS. Its 1GB or less no doubt.


It has almost no impact if developers have either 7 GB or 4 GB of RAM for Games, the GPU of the PS 3 only takes 2 GB RAM everything above has no impact on the graphics. Almost no Game will really need or benefit of this 8 GB RAM, this is the reason why Sony planed with 4GB till short before PS4 revelation. The PS4 not really need nor benefit really that much of this 8GB RAM it only makes work a little bit easier for the developers, developers must not plane that tight if they have more than enaugh RAM.



VGKing on 16 April 2013

There's so much wrong with this I don't even know where to start....

1. Rumors say 3GB is reserved for OS and 5 for games. Seems a bit much to me so having the OS memory reduced to 1 or 2 GB is very likely.

2. RAM isn't everything. Based on Xbox 720 rumors, it is a generation ahead of the Wii U in terms of tech. Wii U won't be able to run games built for next-gen systems. It's already not getting UE4 and many other engines that will power AAA games.



Netyaroze on 16 April 2013
Zero999 said:

" Wii U's RAM is about half as fast as the PS3's": says who? not the developers praising the wii u ram. not the games that run better on wii u than on ps360.

if you're talking about those numbers of 22mb/s for ps3 vs 12.8mb/s for wii u. I might be wrong here, but I think that's the maximun performance for the ps3 (the game code is optimized the most) against the raw speed of the memory wii u uses. it desn't take into consideration how the wii u works as a whole. if we were to check the ps3 memory separetely from the console I think it would be far less than the wii u's raw 12.8mb/s.


PS3 has two memory pools XDR 25 GB/s GDDR3 22 GB/s

The GPU can access both pools so it can peak @ 45GB/s the CPU has just access to one pool @ 25 GB/s, the split memory however costs performance.

The Wii U has  32 MB EDRAM with unknown speed, and one unified pool with 12GB/s Xbox 360 has 22GB GDDR3 and also 10 MB EDRAM.

EDRAM is supposed to help the System if the ram bandwith is too small. Overall I would say the effective ram bandwith on the Wii U is pretty similar to PS3/360.



VGKing on 16 April 2013
Metallicube said:
S.T.A.G.E. said:
happydolphin said:
S.T.A.G.E. said:

Of course it has relevance to what you're saying and at this point no those games don't really matter on a Nintendo console. Sony put Nintendo in the place that Nintendo put Sega in which is a first party centric console. Nintendo early mid 90s era woud've had great progress with first, second and third party.

Wii-like success is great for first party but a shallow cash grab unless all games were casualized and had Just Dance like sales. Because Nintendo stopped being a gamer console it told the market that only casualized first and third party games and Nintendo core first party could survive because without those gimmicky games it doesnt commit the consumer base to loyalty. They will buy a handful of games and thats it. 

So it wouldn't matter, which means we agree.

However, if Nintendo had 3rd party dominance, and Sony was able to take it away, what's really stopping them from getting it back? I believe Nintendo can't anyways because it would have to use business practices which are self-destructive, such as loss-leading and bending to unreasonable requirements by 3rd parties that have a little too much pull (Epic).

Until the non-Nintendo market implodes, Nintendo just needs to keep doing its own thing.


Actually Nintendo didn't allow third parties room to breathe and be themselves and thats how they ran the NES/SNES era. When Sony arrived they did what Sega couldnt and gave third parties and alternative that will make their own great games and allow third parties to fly. This is why they flocked to Sony for the format perks. Since then its been a beautiful relationship, hands down Sony and Microsoft deal with third party in a fair manner compared to Nintendo. Nintendo expects third parties to drop their aspirations to suit their weak console specs. That wont fly if the market is growing and has money to spend. This new gen will start off a little slower than normal but third parties now have a backbone because of companies like Sony and Microsoft.

If these third parties are so damn creative and talented, shouldn't they be able to create great games regardless of the technological limitations?

I don't get why so many people here act like it's always the third parties that are the angels here and can do no wrong. If anything, the third parties are the reasons why the industry is currently bleeding money. Costs to create games are skyrocketting and countless companies are going bankrupt, all so these seemingly talented developers can have unlimited horsepower to flaunt their "creativity."

Nintendo knew how to handle third parties. Sony and MS do not. They give them carte blanche to do what ever they want and run free on their platforms, which is a large part of the reason the industry is in massive decline. Third party developers generally don't seem to have a business mind. All they care about is creating what THEY want, even at the expense of the downfall of the industry. That is currently what is happening, sadly. 

Look at mobile technology. It is growing very very fast. They can't afford to build $60 games that people will be able to get for free on mobile devices.

AAA games are necessary to keep this industry going. AAA games are what seperates consoles from mobile.



Captain_Tom on 16 April 2013
Zero999 said:
Captain_Tom said:
Zero999 said:

wii u has like 1,5 GB of very efficient RAM available for games and the memory the others have doesn't change how much RAM a game needs. it's an exaggeration to think a home console game will actualy need 3 to 4 GB. i can only see devs using more than that if they don't optmize the code too much.


Then you know nothing about how computers work.  First of all the Wii U's RAM is about half as fast as the PS3's so idk what is so "Efficient" about it.  Second of all, the PS4's GPU is easily capable of 2-3GB of textures and those aren't lazy, they just take up space.  After that you do need at least 4GB of system RAM to feed the beast fast enough.   It's just how things work, and it is why open world games like Fallout look like PS2 games on this gen, and not on PC  (Even a really weak PC looks better than PS360 with Fallout/Skyrim): they don't have enough RAM.

" Wii U's RAM is about half as fast as the PS3's": says who? not the developers praising the wii u ram. not the games that run better on wii u than on ps360.

if you're talking about those numbers of 22mb/s for ps3 vs 12.8mb/s for wii u. I might be wrong here, but I think that's the maximun performance for the ps3 (the game code is optimized the most) against the raw speed of the memory wii u uses. it desn't take into consideration how the wii u works as a whole. if we were to check the ps3 memory separetely from the console I think it would be far less than the wii u's raw 12.8mb/s.

Says facts!  The PS3 uses XDR RAM which is usually around 3000MHz effective (When the PS3 released, modern XDR is WAYYY faster).  The Wii U uses 1600MHz effective DDR3 RAM.  It's not quite double, but it is close.  

I have only heard bad things from "Developers" about the RAM.  Here are posts from people who actually took apart the Wii U and analized the difference in RAM speeds:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=500362

http://gbatemp.net/threads/shocking-wii-u-news-slow-ram-speed-and-ports-issues.337749/

 

These people, like me, do there research before spouting off baseless drivel.  But keep living in your dream world where the Wii U isn't an abomination of design choices.  I sweat I could write an entire paper on how cluster f*cked the Wii U's design is.  It's like they tryed to hold it back from next gen in every possible way...

 

P.S. I could also write a paper on how SONY could have made the exact same launch PS3 for $100 less...