bonzobanana said:
Despite all the fanboy nonsense on this site the wii u clearly is weaker than 360 and PS3 in many important parts of its specification, we know that for a fact beyond question with regard the cpu and memory bandwidth and you only have to look at the games to confirm this.
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You are right, the Wii U does loose miserably in the memory bandwidth department.
But it also doesn't need the bandwidth as badly either. Curious?
It comes down to culling and compression. Because the WiiU has more modern hardware it supports more modern standards and techniques thank to it's Terascale derived graphics hardware.
Basically it can more efficiently remove stuff that simply doesn't need to be rendered, reducing the workload.
It also supports more modern compression techniques which covers a larger variety of datasets, which means less bandwidth is going to be needed.
As an example... Lets take the Radeon 285... Despite the fact it only has 176Gb/s of bandwidth compared to the Radeon 280 240Gb's of memory bandwidth... The Radeon 285 can make better use of it's more limited resources.... Essentially despite the chips having similar technical hardware, with the exception of bandwidth, the 285 isn't as slow as one would assume, in some cases actually faster.
See here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8460/amd-radeon-r9-285-review/7
Brute force, aka. "Numbers written on a spreadsheet" isn't the only way to achieve performance.
Another example is... From the Radeon x1900 series (Which the Xbox 360's GPU is essentially derived from...) to the Radeon x2xxx series (Which the Xbox 360 adopted SOME features of...) AMD boosted Z/stencil compression from an 8:1 ratio to 16:1 and then implemented Re-Z which allowed pixels that are updated and ended up out of view to be thrown out rather than sending them to the render back ends for evaluation, costing bandwidth and rendering power.
As for the CPU. Well. The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3's CPU's were to be blunt... Utter trash. They are in-order designs, similar to that of the Intel Atom architecture, which can carry a rather large performance penalty if things don't go the CPU's way. - The benefit though is a cheaper CPU design that potentially uses less power.
Intel tried to mitigate that problem with the original Atom processor with Hyper Threading, which Microsoft also used for the Xbox 360's CPU.
Sony went the other way and threw more "dumb" cores at the problem.
Both mitigate the problem, rather than solve it.
The Wii U's CPU is an out-of-order design, it's more efficient. You just can't compare them clock to clock with the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 unfortunatly... And I am not aware of any benchmarks either.
With that said, no console ever released has had good CPU performance, even the Playstation 3's Cell CPU, despite it "looking" impressive on paper, was actually a massive let down thanks to it's poor performance in anything but iterative refinement floating point.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2493/7
The current gen with the 8-core 1.6ghz Jaguars are laughable in almost all aspects.
Nintendo does have options though that wasn't available to Microsoft or Sony thanks to progress... Which is Carizzo. Significantly more performance than Jaguar, whilst using less power and using less transisters... We still aren't talking Desktop-class though.
On the GPU side, things have been stagnant, at-least in the mid range, AMD has been lazy and re-badged everything since the Radeon 7000 series released 4 years ago with only minor changes. (And newer high-end offerings.)
The Wii U although on paper... Doesn't look like an impressive leap over the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3... It is, by a small degree.
Even if the WiiU had less "Gflop" and "Bandwidth" and "Rams" than the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, it would still be faster by a small degree.
It's more efficient, it can do more work with less resources than the older boxes. With that said, I would still only peg it's hardware to be around 2x as capable but with a massive edge in geometry performance.
The big problem for the WiiU is support. Most developers don't see a financial incentive to push the box, most game engines are "ported" rather than "built" for the machine which will also impact it's potential. (I'm looking at you Unreal Engine that almost every developer uses at one point or another.)
It's still not enough to close the gap between the Xbox One and Playstation 4 though, they unfortunatly have another leap in graphics capability not only on a technical level, but in sheer database numbers too.
