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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Wii's horsepower explained.

HappySqurriel on 02 November 2008
Diomedes1976 said:
I wont enter too much into the technicisms ,but judging by results its clear the Wii isnt much more advanced that the Cube and Xbox.

Most of the better looking Wii games are GC games as RE4 and Zelda.Re4 had a PS2 version only slighty inferior to the Wii/Cube games.

Galaxy looks great ,but its not leagues ahead Mario Sunshine (look at side by side videos).Metroid 3 is just a little step beyond Metroid Echoes .

The Wii specs may be better that the Cube specs ,but you really need very significant leaps in power to see really different results .If you had the PS2 clocked at 400Mhz and with twice the RAM(16Mb) you would still see PS2-like games with a little more draw distance,some negligible detail more,some frames more of animation on 2-3 NPCs more on screen.. but pretty much the same limitations and same feel.Go to open worlds ,hundreds of NPCs on screen ,higher resolutions ,online managing etc and that kind of increase is irrelevant.

More so ,the investment in developing tools for that kind of hardware stopped long ago...Wii is quite maximized right now due to it being a known architecture ,anyone expecting big jumps in its games is fooling himself.

As for The Conduit ,I dont think it looks too well.Given the offerings the Wii is getting it sure looks better than most Wii games but I dont see it as drastically above HL2 or Doom on the Xbox or Black on the PS2 and Xbox .

Even if you assume that the Wii has been "maxed out" that doesn't mean you have seen the most visually impressive titles for it ...

When hardware becomes obsolete developers begin looking for ways to "cheat" an implement more advanced graphical techniques on more limited hardware. Amiga demos were full of graphical effects which weren't possible on Amiga hardware but had been simulated by doing something the Amiga was capable of doing. An example of a faked effect is that you can produce a simulation of bump mapping by producing two textures and interpolating between them depending on how they're lit ... This was the most common way that PS2 developers achieved bump mapping, and it was used by mod developers for games like Jedi Knight 2.



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Sky Render on 02 November 2008

Why does every conversation with Squilliam feel like I'm talking to a rock? -_-;

As has been explained so many times that I am honestly getting sick of having to see it explained again, game companies are NOT showing a profit these days. Largely because the cost of making a game by the standards "expected" of them with the HD consoles ends up costing them so much that they absolutely must be multi-million seller games just to break even. Which most games, of course, are not. And as numerous financial reports from just about every company that is NOT Nintendo has shown, most of the long-timers in the industry are showing negative numbers lately ranging from near break-even to "how are these people still in business?".



Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.

LordTheNightKnight on 02 November 2008
MikeB said:
LordTheNightKnight said:
MikeB said:
@ HappySquirrel

One of the main reasons so many companies have been moving towards IBM for their embedded solutions is because IBM has designed their processors in a modular way so that they can be highly customized.


That's not the case with regard to the Broadway chip. The PS3 Cell is also basically as for some other products, other than one SPE being disabled for the PS3. Of course a lot R&D went into the Cell, unlike for the Broadway chip, but it's in Sony's interest to see as much mass production of the PS3 Cell as possible (like used for servers and super computers, this to trigger production cost reductions).

If Nintendo doubled the on chip cache on the Broadway processor


64 KB L1 cache (32 KB instruction cache, 32 KB data cache) and 256 KB L2 cache.

 

Although that was because that was a lot of cache in the 6th gen. The Xbox's CPU had just 128KB of L2 cache, and the Cell has 512KB all the processor's shared. The 360 has 1MB for all the cores.

The Cell does not work like that. The PPE has 32 KB L1 instruction cache, 32 KB L1 data cache and 512 KB L2 cache, each SPE has its own little cache and 256 KB SRAM, which is as fast as cache but isn't cache as it's far more flexible, it's dedicated system memory, each SPE is like a seperate system on a chip.

 

 

Forgot the SPEs had 256KB to share. Either way, my point is that the GC itself had a third or fourth as much cache as the HD systems, so the Wii wouldn't need much more than that for what it does.



A flashy-first game is awesome when it comes out. A great-first game is awesome forever.

Plus, just for the hell of it: Kelly Brook at the 2008 BAFTAs

LordTheNightKnight on 02 November 2008
Sky Render said:
Why does every conversation with Squilliam feel like I'm talking to a rock? -_-;

As has been explained so many times that I am honestly getting sick of having to see it explained again, game companies are NOT showing a profit these days. Largely because the cost of making a game by the standards "expected" of them with the HD consoles ends up costing them so much that they absolutely must be multi-million seller games just to break even. Which most games, of course, are not. And as numerous financial reports from just about every company that is NOT Nintendo has shown, most of the long-timers in the industry are showing negative numbers lately ranging from near break-even to "how are these people still in business?".

 

Some developers are, like Capcom and Activision. Guess which system they give some of the credit to, though.



A flashy-first game is awesome when it comes out. A great-first game is awesome forever.

Plus, just for the hell of it: Kelly Brook at the 2008 BAFTAs

Sky Render on 02 November 2008

Blaming the Wii for high development costs is a bit like blaming a goose down pillow for a gaping wound in your side. In that it makes no sense at all unless you happen to somehow be the world's most inept person ever.



Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.

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Squilliam on 02 November 2008
Sky Render said:
Why does every conversation with Squilliam feel like I'm talking to a rock? -_-;

As has been explained so many times that I am honestly getting sick of having to see it explained again, game companies are NOT showing a profit these days. Largely because the cost of making a game by the standards "expected" of them with the HD consoles ends up costing them so much that they absolutely must be multi-million seller games just to break even. Which most games, of course, are not. And as numerous financial reports from just about every company that is NOT Nintendo has shown, most of the long-timers in the industry are showing negative numbers lately ranging from near break-even to "how are these people still in business?".

Well you're a rhetorical rock because I wonder if you still think of it as a valid argument technique.

Month: August 2007

Games releases

Madden 2008: 2.36M 360, 0.88M PS3

Bioshock: 1.98M 360

Two Worlds: 0.37M 360 (PC release unknown)

Blu Dragon: 0.51M

Dynasty Warrior Gundam: 0.28M 360 0.43M PS3

MOH: Airborn: 0.36M 360 0.17 PS3 *PC unknown*

Stuntman Ignition: 0.25 Xbox 360, 0.11 PS3

Tiger Woods PGA 08: 0.69M Xbox 360 0.18M PS3

Total releases 8

Average sales HD platforms: 1.07M (Total 8.57 Million)

Since then the 360 and especially PS3 have had a huge increase in software sales. I have data showing an average sales of ~.85 million between 360/PS3 over Q1 2008 (Q4 2008 financial year)

Btw, I have no idea how the hell EA is managing to lose so much money, but I also have data showing that Activisions average "Hit" sells far more than EAs though they have more million sellers, their peaks are far lower.

Also theres no proof that these companies would have made money had they gone back in time and developed on the Wii instead, perhaps you could say there are too many hands and not enough cookies in the jar.

 

 

 



Tease.

Sky Render on 02 November 2008

Look, if you don't want to admit that the incumbent industry is in a downward spiral, fine. It's the attitude that pretty much every overly invested person takes when an industry disruption or crash occurs, after all. I have more than a little suspicion that you do gain some sort of incentive for talking up the incumbent industry that extends beyond just personal satisfaction, but that's neither here nor there. I'm not going to waste my time trying to explain to you why cherry-picking with a handful of games (instead of looking at this thing we call "the big picture") is pointless, because you've made it abundantly clear that cherry picking is what you love best.

Don't bother replying to this. We cannot possibly discuss the matter further, because neither of us is going to budge on our viewpoints.



Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.

Squilliam on 02 November 2008
Sky Render said:
Look, if you don't want to admit that the incumbent industry is in a downward spiral, fine. It's the attitude that pretty much every overly invested person takes when an industry disruption or crash occurs, after all. I have more than a little suspicion that you do gain some sort of incentive for talking up the incumbent industry that extends beyond just personal satisfaction, but that's neither here nor there. I'm not going to waste my time trying to explain to you why cherry-picking with a handful of games (instead of looking at this thing we call "the big picture") is pointless, because you've made it abundantly clear that cherry picking is what you love best.

Don't bother replying to this. We cannot possibly discuss the matter further, because neither of us is going to budge on our viewpoints.

Code: I wanna poo.

Btw I gave you data from a full quarter this year. Q1 (2008/Q4 financial year) And I also gave you data from a month in august 2007.

Since I selected every game thats hardly cherry picking.

 

 



Tease.

VonShigsy on 02 November 2008

Hey, a tl;dr thread! I love those!



"You won't find Adobe here in Nairobi"


 

exit52000 on 02 November 2008

This is just typical forum bs.

Most of you are giving YOUR opinion about how powerful the Wii is compared to the last generation of consoles.

The article is from a Developer actually writing games for the console in question.

Now who might be right.

Joe Bloggs or a developer (who has to know most if not all of the capabilities of a machine).  You decide, actually dont.  If you have commented in the Thread on what you think the power of the Wii is then your not capable of deciding.