bonzobanana said:
curl-6 said:
Wii's 64MB of memory is not just buffer/cache. On Gamecube it was, cos it was slow DRAM, but on Wii this was upgraded to GDDR3. Also, motion controls in the Wii version of TP don't really require any more processing than analogue stick input in the Gamecube version, and has pretty much zero impact on performance.
|
It still has the same function as a large buffer because its data bus to the main cpu and gpu is slow compared to the other memory . The gamecube discs were quite small at about 1.2GB but wii has 8GB dvd discs with a dual layer on some discs and the absense of a hard drive means caching the optical drive is very important. I'm pretty sure when I read articles about development on wii it was exactly the same use just upgraded due to a optical disc 7 times larger but much slower seek times. Nintendo seemed obsessed with making the gamecube discs almost seem as fast as loading from cartridges and pretty much did the same again with wii. It is noticably faster and less pauses than ps2 and dreamcast games only beaten by the xbox thanks to its built in hard drive. However even the xbox is slower if its a new game that hasn't been stored in one of 3 700mb caches set aside for the last 3 games played.
With regards additional processing of the wii remote I believe it causes additional input lag above that of the wireless input lag and requires tracking of motion to respond to games. I.e. if your playing a tennis game for example it takes additional measurements regarding the swing of your arm and presents a sequence of values to the program to be calculated. It tracks your motion in 3 dimensional space and Nintendo even went beyond this to increase the sampling rate and accuracy of movement with the wii remote plus to improve the feature. It's pretty much the same as kinect except it uses electrical data from sensors rather than processed video data but it still has to be processed and so additional cpu work is required. Of course how much additional processing is debatable but I don't think there is any debate that additional processing is required.
|
Devs like High Voltage talked about how Wii's larger RAM allowed them to render more elements per scene compared to Gamecube. It was not just a buffer. Let's be realistic here; no console is going to reserve over 70% of its memory for caching, that's absurd. And totally unnecessary; with the amount of data Wii games have, a DVD drive and no HDD is just fine. Feeding 88MB of RAM is quick and easy. It's once you get up to PS3/360/Wii U levels of RAM that optical drive speed becomes a bottleneck.
And you're overestimating the complexity of the Wiimote. Its beauty was in its simplicity. It did not actually track movements in 3D space it all, it used simple gyros and accelerometers to register angle and movement, which give feedback no more complex than an analogue stick.
