Heres a amazing breakdown of the Wii U’s specs in response to a thread asking if the Wii U is powerful enough to handle GTA 5. Get the full breakdown below.
That game was made on older development kits for Wii U, later Nintendo released an updated one that had 20 to 40% higher clocks than previous one. Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper, Darksiders 2 and other launch games used only 2 cores, maybe a third though that was probably barely.
Wii U CPU:
- Tri Core IBM 45nm PowerPC750CL/G3/Power7 Hybrid
- Core 0; 512KB Core 1; 2MB Core 2; 512KB L2 Cache
- Clocked at 1.24Ghz
- 4 stage pipeline/not Xenon-Cell CPU-GPU hybrid
- Produced at IBM advanced CMOS fabrication facility
- Can use eDRAM as cache(!?)
- Dual Core ARM for background OS tasks clocked at 1Ghz with 64KB L1 cache per core
Wii U Memory:
- DDR3 2GB, 1GB for OS, 1GB for Games (12.8/Gbps is speculation)
- eDRAM 32MB+4MB Memory/VRAM/Cache(UNIFIED, 4MB for gamepad)
- Clocked at 550Mhz
- CPU for Cache and GPU for VRAM use eDRAM
- eDRAM acts as unified memory, similar to AMD’s hUMA/HSA by function/behaviour(?!)
- Little to no latency between CPU and GPU with eDRAM Cache/Memory/VRAM
Wii U GPU:
- VLIW 5/VLIW4 Radeon HD 5000/6000
- DirectX 11/Open GL 4.3/Open CL 1.2/Shader Model 5.0
- Supports GPGPU compute/offload
- Customized, Using custom Nintendo API codenamed GX2(GX1 Gamecube)
- Clocked at 550Mhz
- Produced at TSMC
- Uses eDRAM as VRAM
- DirectX can only be used by Microsoft thus silicon/hardware/feature is removed replacing with transistors for performance and maintaining full Open GL 4.3/Open CL 1.2/Shader Model 5.0/GPGPU compatibility
Wii U Note;
- Can’t use DirectX 11 except Open GL 4.3 that is ahead DX11
- Easier to program, no bottlenecks causing trouble like on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3
- more efficient hardware with no bandwidth bottlenecks
- Most early ports and even now use 2 cores and 3rd is barely used #fact
- Wii U CPU has much higher operations per cycle than Xbox 360/PlayStation 3
- It is maybe in fact most efficient performance per watt in the world in terms of 45/40nm chips
- Power7 architecture allows shave off 10% of texture size without loss of quality(special compression)
It is ahead of 7th generation, developers will learn to handle and optimize for Wii U properly. I was digging on the internet for various information’s for a month and all you read is what I compiled and gathered. It can handle 1080p because it has 3.5 times more eDRAM than Xbox 360 also has no severe memory/bandwidth bottlenecks that Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 have all over the system with their FSB that is choking. Xbox 360′s GDDR3 that has theoretical 22-28Gbps is reduced to 10Gbps thanks to piss poor FSB.
Wii U has same amount of eDRAM as Xbox One, remember that and also Wii U’s CPU utilizes Power7 architecture a bit so maybe just maybe Wii U’s CPU can use eDRAM as CPU cache as GPU uses it as VRAM so in a way something like AMD’s hUMA/HSA is possible on Wii U.
If Grand Theft Auto 5 was on Wii U then you can only expect better visuals/details, less pop ups, higher framerate that would be 60 fps most likely since Wii U is light years ahead of current generation and that is factual and you can be in denial but I did one whole month of dedicated digging on the internet in search of all sort of information’s related to Wii U’s hardware.
It can run it harder, better, faster, stronger and more sexier than 7th generation consoles by far.
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You are not a core gamer if restricted to handhelds/consoles from one company thus limiting amount of games, further by genre’s and graphical style of the game.
It’s crazy that people would even question if GTA 5 could run on Wii U.
'Video games are bad for you? That's what they said about rock-n-roll.'
-Shigeru Miyamoto
