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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Anonymous Dev documents Wii U experience

TheLegendaryWolf on 11 January 2014

Non ambitious developers can't do anything on it, but those that try like Slightly Mad Studio's Project CARS, can scratch the surface of the Wii U's potential. As you know the PS4 and XBOX One have a 8-core x86 CPU code named ‘Jaguar.’ They also have 8GB of system RAM. It is said that the PS4 GPU is either a 7870 or a 7850 and the XBOX1 GPU is a 7850. x86 architecture uses what is called CISC or (Complex Instruction Set Computing.) This allows for the hardware to do the majority of the work and gives developers most of the power available right away. The Wii U has 3 CPUs. A custom tri-core PowerPC750 built to run like a Power7 code named ‘Expresso.’ It also has a dual-core input/output ARM processor and a dedicated sound CPU. So altogether the Wii U has 6 available physical cores. PowerPC runs on what is called RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing.) This approach uses a much smaller memory footprint and has much faster communication. For those who are lazy this is kryptonite, but for those that are ambitious and talented this is a dream because it allows for better performance with very low power consumption.



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IsawYoshi on 11 January 2014
FlamingWeazel said:
Just what I thought, nintendo fans still in massive denial, Nintendo cannot do any wrong.

Odd, seems to me that you think this wouldn't happen if this was about a different console manufacturer.

 

Hopefully I'm wrong, because there's like two guys here in denial (of the article that is), which is a norm on the interwebz. 



curl-6 on 11 January 2014
walsufnir said:
curl-6 said:

Whether it will be maxed out remains to be seen, but there are certainly promising future games that could push it farther than anything we've seen thus far: X, Project CARS, FAST Racing Neo, whatever Shin'en's other mystery game is...

Thing is, nobody has made a ground-up Wii U game with the aim of being graphically intensive yet.

 

Exactly, and I doubt we will see it from Nintendo, so this leaves not much left, sadly.

Btw, just realized a few weeks ago that Shin'en is in fact a German team... And iirc they have origins in the demoscene which would explain a lot.

The wonders of German engineering. ;)

I agree Nintendo EAD don't seem interested in pushing the limits of the hardware, but Monolith Soft, (X) Slightly Mad, (Project CARS) and Shin'en, (FAST Racing Neo) might go there.



curl-6 on 11 January 2014
drake4 said:
curl-6 said:

Some interesting excerpts:

"Code optimised for the PowerPC processors found in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 wasn't always a good fit for the Wii U CPU, so while the chip has some interesting features that let the CPU punch above its weight, we couldn't fully take advantage of them. However, some code could see substantial improvements that did mitigate the lower clocks - anything up to a 4x boost owing to the removal of Load-Hit-Stores, and higher IPC (instructions per cycle) via the inclusion of out-of-order execution."

"The GPU proved very capable and we ended up adding additional "polish" features as the GPU had capacity to do it. There was even some discussion on trying to utilise the GPU via compute shaders (GPGPU) to offload work from the CPU - exactly the approach I expect to see gain traction on the next-gen consoles - but with very limited development time and no examples or guidance from Nintendo, we didn't feel that we could risk attempting this work...The GPU is better than on PS3 or Xbox 360"

"I've also seen some concerns about the utilisation of DDR3 RAM on Wii U, and a bandwidth deficit compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360. This wasn't really a problem for us. The GPU could fetch data rapidly with minimal stalls (via the EDRAM) and we could efficiently pre-fetch, allowing the GPU to run at top speed."

Sounds like exactly what I and others have been saying for over a year now; an eccentric design that isn't fully utilised by quick and nasty PS3/360 ports due to its different architecture.

We haven't what Wii U can really do, not by a long shot.

LOL sure, better could mean anything, we have have heard from there devs, that are not calling them self secret say it's slighty more powerful, this dev says it's better but,  doesnt really go into detail, like the othere dev does, he also says the cpu is very weak. i find it funny how you call the ports quick and nasty, when developers asked nintendo to make the console more powerful, so they can port 360/ps3 games easily, infact they even did tests that showed it would have problems running, 360/ps3 and no way it could run xbone/ps4 games, the whole article explains nintendo just doesnt care for third party's and its nintendo being lazy not devs.

Wii U's been out for all of 14 months. You never see the best that new hardware can do within 14 months. Look at the best PS3/360 games; they all launched 3 years or more into the system's life.

And the vast majority of ports are quick and nasty from a technical perspective. The fact that they don't feature higher resolution textures and assets depsite having twice as much RAM exposes them as such.



IsawYoshi on 11 January 2014
drake4 said:

AC4, batman orgins, and COD ghosts are all running 5-10 frames behind the 360/ps3 versions, and most launch games had the same problem, AC3, blops 2, micky mouse, and batman arkham city, even resident evil revelations.

Haven't had a single framrate drop for Ghosts on my Wii U. 

 

But hey, what do I know. I'm just a owner of the system.

 

Joking aside, this hasn't anything to do withWii U having trouble running them, it the games not being properly optimised. In the case of Ghosts, I think it is properly done. Haven't had any problems with it so far.



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curl-6 on 11 January 2014
Kresnik said:
curl-6 said:

We haven't what Wii U can really do, not by a long shot.


Do you reckon we ever will?

I mean, judging by this, Nintendo's first parties are the ones who will achieve it.  But I'm just wondering if there's any among their roster who would actually push the hardware to its limits other than Retro.

Maybe we will, maybe we won't. 

But we will see games that go beyond anything released so far. Monolith Soft's X already looks to be one such game.



Conina on 11 January 2014
TheLegendaryWolf said:
Non ambitious developers can't do anything on it, but those that try like Slightly Mad Studio's Project CARS, can scratch the surface of the Wii U's potential. As you know the PS4 and XBOX One have a 8-core x86 CPU code named ‘Jaguar.’ They also have 8GB of system RAM. It is said that the PS4 GPU is either a 7870 or a 7850 and the XBOX1 GPU is a 7850. x86 architecture uses what is called CISC or (Complex Instruction Set Computing.) This allows for the hardware to do the majority of the work and gives developers most of the power available right away. The Wii U has 3 CPUs. A custom tri-core PowerPC750 built to run like a Power7 code named ‘Expresso.’ It also has a dual-core input/output ARM processor and a dedicated sound CPU. So altogether the Wii U has 6 available physical cores. PowerPC runs on what is called RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing.) This approach uses a much smaller memory footprint and has much faster communication. For those who are lazy this is kryptonite, but for those that are ambitious and talented this is a dream because it allows for better performance with very low power consumption.

Really? Adding every CPU core you can find in the box? Why stop at the I/O and sound processor? We surely can add the WLAN, Blue-tooth, HDMI and memory controllers as well... and many other ICs on the mainboard and in the tablet controller.

RISC and CISC both have advantages AND disadvantages. Modern x86-CPUs and APUs are hybrids to take advantage of both instruction sets.



chris_wing on 11 January 2014
curl-6 said:

Wii U's been out for all of 14 months. You never see the best that new hardware can do within 14 months. Look at the best PS3/360 games; they all launched 3 years or more into the system's life.

And the vast majority of ports are quick and nasty from a technical perspective. The fact that they don't feature higher resolution textures and assets depsite having twice as much RAM exposes them as such.

GameCube released Sept 2001, so any game released before 2003 was in the first 14 or 15 months.

Super Smash Bros. Melee 2001

Super Mario Sunshine 2002

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker 2002

Luigi's Mansion 2001

Metroid Prime 2002

Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II   2001

Star Fox Adventures 2002

Pikmin 2001

Resident Evil 2002

Resident Evil Zero 2002

Wave Race: Blue Storm 2001



zippy on 11 January 2014
burninmylight said:
I don't care what anyone has to say about the Wii U, I love it like a parent loves his imperfect child.

I give you a like for this post, i feel exactly the same.



curl-6 on 11 January 2014
chris_wing said:
curl-6 said:

Wii U's been out for all of 14 months. You never see the best that new hardware can do within 14 months. Look at the best PS3/360 games; they all launched 3 years or more into the system's life.

And the vast majority of ports are quick and nasty from a technical perspective. The fact that they don't feature higher resolution textures and assets depsite having twice as much RAM exposes them as such.

GameCube released Sept 2001, so any game released before 2003 was in the first 14 or 15 months.

Super Smash Bros. Melee 2001

Super Mario Sunshine 2002

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker 2002

Luigi's Mansion 2001

Metroid Prime 2002

Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II   2001

Star Fox Adventures 2002

Pikmin 2001

Resident Evil 2002

Resident Evil Zero 2002

Wave Race: Blue Storm 2001

None of those games were the best the hardware could do. Later games like Rogue Squadron III and Resident Evil 4 surpass them all.