there aren't many tablets with game controls and if there are you may have trouble finding a good game library that fits with it, besides loading it up with emulators for old consoles.

it's also consistent with other nintendo consoles. it's a DS where you hold a bigger bottom screen with better controls in your hand, and where the top screen is the living room's TV.
so I think the concept is simple enough and interesting enough.

that feels like a one-off silly peripheral from the Atari VCS 2600 or NES era :oops:

This is true, but as you'd know the exact point in the game where things happened you could narrow things down. Things like success or failure, dying, winning, watching a cutscene, turning left or turning right, which spawn wave had just been triggered, which music was playing would be known quantities (as would be if the player was away and not providing inputs!). It's just another stream of data. The more the merrier.

It would be additional data to add to current testing results. Watching people is boring, tiring, time consuming and unless you're skilled you aren't going to be able to tell a great deal. Questionnaires are a pretty low resolution way to get feedback on something that's packed with thousands or tens of thousands of potentially complex events.

There are already analytical testing tools used for things like Left for Dead and Halo, and something like Mass Effect 2 gathered player stats on choices made, completion percentages and probably lots of other stuff (attempts needed, weapons used, which character was the most boneable?) and it's all just more information for the mix.

That's a good point. WiiU is sort-of a DS with two analogue sticks and a TV for the main screen. :D

Touch screen only controls absolutely suck for lots of stuff. My fingers do not have pixel accuracy (barely have screen accuracy) and - unbelievably - aren't transparent. Virtual thumbsticks make me hate life.

A good idea for providing more input to advance the gaming medium? Sure, advancing the medium is always a good thing. However, are we really under the impression that Nintendo is providing meaningful leadership for this industry?

Seriously?

If Sony were implementing it, it would be a different story. They actually do intend to push the medium forward and have done so in the past. Same for MS (though less as a leader and more as a competitor for leadership).

Nintendo at this point are simply trying to figure out a way to survive and stay as profitable as possible.

If that means selling a clip on a finger, great. If it means selling a plastic balance board, great. If it means selling a gamecube with a wiimote (and accessory analog plastic dongle), great.

And see the full list of other plastic goodie add-ons.

But when it comes down to fundamentally improving the interactive medium, Nintendo aren't interested.

It's sad how far they've fallen since their Silicon Graphics partnership trajectory. At one point (not that long ago) Nintendo was a pioneer, not just a profiteer.

Yes, as long as Nintendo opts to bring new gamers to the industry, make great games and find new ways to play games instead of making cinematic games and pushing for bankruptcy so techies can have super powerful consoles, they are not pushing the industry forward.

Don't mistake your personal desires as the only thing that is important for this medium.

Bringing new gamers to the medium, I agree with. But those gamers are quickly finding other avenues to invest their time as a direct result of Nintendo's lack of leadership and innovation.

Nothing personal about Nintendo's customers starting to head elsewhere.

That's not only due to their poor hardware choices, but also due to their lack of innovation in software as well. This combined with 3rd party devs not having success in sales leads to a stagnant platform which is looking to be replaced with a platform of yesterday's tech and yesterday's interface.



I'm all for innovation. And if that means other aspects of the console are compromised to include those innovations that's fine. As long as it is truly innovative and meaningfully supported by 1st and 3rd party devs. Conversely, I'm not ok with it if the "innovation" is there simply as a distraction to avoid direct comparisons to the competition.

I don't think anyone here would like to see Nintendo go belly up in the chase for top tech. But that doesn't mean they should roll over with ancient tech either.

Again, I fail to see how a 120mm2 GPU would cause them to go bankrupt.

Not going with GCN is not going to be due to die size, obviously. Stop assuming they can just drop in a new architecture. That's just not how it works. If they haven't targeted said architecture for customization from the getgo, you don't just drag and drop the latest PC architecture. The teams are going to be separate.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...ostcount=13282


hm

So basically exactly what I said, Arkam was just talking about the actual amount of RAM the system can use (what lherre calls the application limit) rather than the raw amount in the dev kit. I always figured that, common sense.

People trying to discredit arkam latched onto some minor faux incongruency.

You'll notice lherre has been subtly backing arkam's controversial post up.

YESSSS

THAT'S WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT !!!!!!!!

http://gonintendo.com/?c=5


Man this news made my day!


Well that's the dev kit ram but ... that's good starters ! Hopefully the source knows that dev kits get more RAM than retail.


Also for those that still think 1 GB is enoug, just look neogaf posts, most of people hope for 1.5 GB and it'll be fine for WiiU to not be stagant in long-term, and obviously i'll be surprised if it gets above 1.5 GB that'll be great, ram is so important for games, especially IDTech5 engine requires it a lot, the new technologies won't repeat same textures as tiles, it's all unique art, that's why some are surprised by the need.

You also need to take into account that all PC recommended specs take PAGEFILE into account as enabled, this means all of those specs that show RAM are actually incorrect since they expect everyone to have that enabled, a lot more ram is needed these days than what appears.

Eh?

You do understand how megatexture works don't you?

Don't get too excited yet.

That source (from Neogaf) still needs to show something to give reliability , IMO.

I still expect 1Gb at the least and 1.5 GB at the most.

I do , the carmack way, if we're mixing terms im not to blame for it.

It's one big texture island cut into sectors or pieces, the pieces get streamed into view, with a lot of RAM those pieces stay in the buffer, on consoles with low ram, it' can't all stay in RAM obviously, that's why Rage has so many texture-pop in issues on consoles, while x360 is fine, PS3 is not quite, texture-pop in is the sole reason of slow buffers, IO speeds, hdd loading , RAM amount.


And I made this thread OP ...http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=150325 - take a look so i don't have to explain all over again. watched all carmack's interviews i could possibly find and quakecon2011 (5x times over)

I saw the negaf post now, gonintendo linked the wrong page, it's 259 not 260.

He does point out that the sources actually do take "the final retail" into account, but this is obviously good rumor than no rumor.

But again, sources aren't technical people to begin with :sad:

If you're thinking iD tech 5 needs more RAM for its unique texturing, then I'm not sure you do. Read Sebbbi's complete explanation here.

In summary, at 720p 50 MBs is enough for pixel-level texture fidelity, while <10 MBs transfer speeds are needed to keep the tiles updated in a timely fashion. The major issue is seek times when fetching new tiles, which is what you feel more RAM is needed to solve. Well, throw in some decent, cheap flash cache on the drives and RAM requirements can be kept pretty minimal when using VT. Thus even a 512 MB console from any manufacturer could have faultless textures next-gen for those games that can use megatexturing. You'd probably want more not to be limited in rendering options. Texturing certainly isn't a reason for wanting loads more RAM though thanks to new approaches.

The explanation is fine, but your opinion on RAM is valid for the crap looking game that it is, if you want that, that's subjective.

No thanks. 512 MB is not enough, not at all, resolution is terribly low.


The game is ~ 21 GB ... heavily compressed, the actual full quality build is +100 GB.

Stewox, then you have again failed to understand megatexturing.

The framebuffer footprint is very small (tens of MBs; iirc id's Mega-texturing footprint is smaller than the virtual texturing sebbbi and Red Linx lays out) for the virtual textures. A "normal" implementation where textures (and their mip levels) are all held in memory can take hundreds of MBs.

The issues with Rage's textures has NOTHING to do with RAM; the issues are primary (a) physical storage (compression), more physical storage space would allow more details and (b) streaming speed and (c) GPU performance.

I get that you are a big fan ("THAT'S WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT !!!!!!!!" --and what is up with even giving a nod to any source that says "less than 8GB" of memory -- no @$@# sherlock, that right there pretty much invalidates a source by even throwing out crazy numbers like that) but please, I encourage you, to read the links and information long time members here have before quipping back dogmatically. The flow here at B3D is information exchange and industry understanding and less rah-rah.

More RAM on the Xbox 360/PS3 would not have necessarily addressed the texture fidelity issues in RAGE. The optical drive speeds aren't necessarily killers either (RE: Hard Drive installs) but the optical storage size issues were discussed by id Software years before RAGE released. I encourage you to read up on the issue before making a false association that more RAM would have solved the problem.

PS- I am all for tons of fast memory in next gen consoles.

Stewox, I highly suggest you take the time to re-read sebbi's detail account of megatexturing and ponder it some more before continuing to post about it here. You miss the obvious takeaways.

Do you mean that the screen resolution is low or that the texture resolution is low in Rage? Virtual texture streaming BW requirements and memory requirements scale pretty much linearly with the screen pixel count. The texture density doesn't matter much (if we are talking about worst case memory and streaming requirements). 720p is 921k pixels. 1080p is 2073k pixels. If next gen console games render at 1080p, you would need 2.25x as much memory to hold the virtual texture tile cache. That's around 50 megabytes of extra memory required to hold the textures (assuming you streaming targets a high quality 1:1 screen to texel mapping). It's not impossible with the current 512 megabyte consoles, but would require compromises (unless your game is really simple otherwise).

Extra RAM to hold a bigger virtual texture cache doesn't help the worst case much, assuming that you are already HDD bandwidth bound, and cannot prefetch a larger set of tiles because of that (all prefetching mechanics increase the HDD bandwidth requirement). Larger cache allows tiles to stay in the cache for longer time. Unfortunately a larger cache doesn't help much if the player advances in the game all the time and always sees new texture surfaces instead of revisiting the old ones. Extra memory alone doesn't help the worst case performance, and worst case scenarios are basically the only occasions you see visible artifacts (texture popping). Even for scenarios where the cache will be utilized (player going backwards in level), the extra memory used doesn't offer dramatic gains after certain point. Increasing cache size way beyond working set size will in the end only give logarithmic gains (this result is generic to caches, and not even an "oracle" can manage better).

More HDD bandwidth (for example an SSD) combined with extra memory would allow the developer to prefetch more pages in advance. However prefetching is not a magic bullet, since most games are interactive, and player actions are often hard to predict in advance. We are basically guessing how the game state proceeds. Often good guesses take lots of CPU resources to calculate (need to predict/simulate future physics and AI behaviour in advance), so we use simple guesses such as extrapolating camera/character movements using their current positions and movement vectors. This produces pretty good results for near future predictions (just a few frames ahead of time). The problem is that the worst case scenarios (visible texture popping) often occur because of erratic user behaviour that is hard to predict (user does something unpredictable that reveals lots of texture surfaces at once). Extra prefetching always considerably increases the amount of memory and bandwidth that is wasted. The more prefetching, the higher percentage of loaded tiles that are never used. Assuming next gen consoles are rendering at 1080p. That alone would require 2.25x HDD bandwidth (compared to 720p) just to stream the visible textures (that are guaranteed to be used), and nothing more. I don't think we have much extra HDD bandwidth to do speculative prefetching beyond that.

SSD in a future console would change things a lot. Our development PCs have all SSDs, and we have tested virtual texturing extensively on them. Basically SSD has so fast seek times that virtual texturing requires no prefetching at all. We use the same small 50 MB cache on PC as well, and no matter what you do, you cannot see any texture popping. Physical media seek time is the most important thing for virtual texturing. Physical media bandwidth is the second most important. After those come the CPU and GPU performance, as worst case scenerios require bursts of tiles to be transcoded very quickly (the better image compression ratio, the slower algorithm). Tile cache size in memory is of course also important, to a certain point, but after reaching the treshold adding extra is just a waste of memory (and requires more CPU time for management). 50 MB -> 100 MB cache would help, but 100 MB -> 200 MB would only result in minimal gains (so the memory would be better used elsewhere).

I think that we could manage with just 2 GB in the next generation if virtual texturing becomes the norm. Without virtual texturing something like 8 GB would be pretty good, but then again I don't personally want to see increased level loading times. Most current games have way too long loading screens already. More memory = more data needs to be loaded from HDD to fill it up.

No I did not said that, seems like i did, but my meaning wasn't.

Then you go to say "nothing about ram" .. this is silly, you mentioned compression ... well, if you want to run uncompressed rage that's 100 GB , i don't think you would be able to run it with 512 MB memory.





I don't play console games except nintendo first-parties. I was playing rage on PC, so obviously i wasn't talking about screen resolution.

The only problem which bothers me with your explanation is the seemigly absolute connection between on screen pixels and defined requirement of size ... that's silly since it all depends on texture resolution as well.
If you're scaling Rage's dataset that is valid , but this seems very doubtful it would apply for any game with similar technology, plus we have no idea what IDTech5 really does since SDK is not out yet, you rely on your own
Im sure ID Software is not doing everything in the same manner but that's not an excuse, my point still with that unless you explain that.

WiiU simply needs more memory just because it's 1080p ... that alone requires 2x more memory at minimum, and if you want to actually make a next-gen console with actually non-crap looking texture-resolution then you need another 1 GB for that, you want to make virtual texturing above

Just ask your self why Rage SP is so lonely on enemies, they don't really send you more than 5 enemies at once against you ...

Still, it looks better than other games, but since im a PC guy , that's just silly say i was surprised or anticipated, i was banking on the fact they would release super HD pack for PC which turned to be ... way out of 99% chance i predicted.

Nope, you still don't get it.

What do you think they store in the "virtual texture"?

No, it doesn't. If you increase the texture resolution of your megatexture source, such as for closeups on a face, you increase the texture tilemap size and number of tiles, but the number of tiles needed in RAM doesn't go up. This is the fundamental concept behind virtual texturing - you need one texel per pixel in RAM (plus surrounding pixels in the tile of course).

You have an opportunity on B3D to hear from very knowledgable folk like Sebbbi who are happy to give up their time to educate us. I suggest you put aside your "I know best" mentality and pay attention, if your intention is to engage in discussion rather than just tell everyone how wrong they are.

Pretty simple, you want one texel per pixel, so a 1920*1080 frame only requires that amount of texels.
It's just not that easy to find the exact set of texels you need, so you have a coarse selection and you need a (relatively) big cache.
AFAIR Rage uses 8k² S3TC texture(s) as cache. (Plural because there's prolly one for albedo/colour, another for normals and maybe a third for specular+gloss)

[The obvious problem is to load the data you need quickly enough if it's not in cache, in which case a SSD is pretty much perfect.]
(If any console gets an SSD by default, it could make a massive image quality difference.)

Maybe this should be another thread (Competing Next Gen Rendering Approaches and Resource (RAM) Projections) but to throw this out: We saw this generation a swing from Forward Rendering to various Deferred Rendering approaches. I am not sure how anticipated this was and, reflecting back, how this knowledge would have changed the 2005/2006 consoles had this been better understood at the time. I mention this because while virtual texturing may address some issues now, and indicate a lower need for memory, I would deposit some skepticism. Are developers really ready to completely anchor themselves to such and stick with 2GB of memory until 2020? Especially when RAM is cheap and there are so many obvious benefits outside of just storing textures (and no one says having a lot of memory forces long load times--that is a design issue as virtual texturing is still an option) and historically memory footprint limits has been a point of tension/limitation. Don't get me wrong, I love what devs have done with virtual texturing but there do appear to be some limits it places technologically (just look at RAGE). Just throwing that out ... now if it was a toss up between 2GB RAM and a small fast SSD versus 4GB of RAM and only an optical drive (which the impression I get we could be lucky for such a scenario...) it becomes easier. Anyhow, just thought I would toss that out and see what you think. If you disagree we will just have to be men and settle it in some online Trials in the coming weeks ;)

Couldn't that be a reason to go with split memory pools despite the disadvantages?

Untill last week I only had 2gb of slow ddr2 ram in my gaming rig but I never noticed that limiting gaming performance. However gpu's love fast memory. So for non gfx related stuff you can go with relative slow memory but you need the fast stuff for the gfx. In a regulair game, how much of the total memory would generally be dedicated to non gfx related things? The cheapest 4gb ddr3 ram I could find is 15 euro's so that is way under 10 for production costs. I don't know how much gddr5 or whatever is going to be used in next gen consoles costs, but wouldn't it make sense to say lets go for 1/3 or whatever % of memory is normally used for non gfx content of fast memory and toss in a lot of slower memory?

As I see it the system memory doesn't need to be so fast.This way you don't have to worry about OS stuff running in the background eating up your valuable ram (well, not as much anyway) etc and you could use it as cache etc.

Obviously.

Not going with GCN has to due with Nintendo being short sighted and naively believing they didn't need to compete on hardware and could wing it with plastic and 4 year old tech.

Having said that, just because GCN is just hitting market now does not mean Nintendo had no clue of it's existence upon contracting AMD for their WiiU GPU.

Perfect example of this situation would be Xenos with it's UMA which didn't show up in PC cards until a year after xbox360 launched.

The only thing stopping GCN in WiiU is Nintendo's lack of foresight.

One more effort to avoid further silliness: maybe this will help you grasp the basic idea behind MegaTexture. (Read that page and the next.)

WRT the Wuu discussion, RAM amount isn't the bottleneck with MegaTexture. The bottleneck is the latency of the MT-storage-medium (CD/HD)-to-RAM transfer. SSD solves that, but whether a next-gen console will have one is a discussion for another thread (which exists).

Thanks Pete, I was too lazy to link to that but I should have as it is a B3D tech article. And as I remembered the total megatexture texture buffer is even smaller than sebbbi's virtual texturing implimentation (not that one is better/worse, just difference). I mean 13.5MB for color and another 7MB for specular and, boy oh boy, are we running out of RAM quickly :P

What tech are they going with then?

Supposedly a derivative of the 4870, which at this point is 4 years old. I really am just shaking my head.

That rumor might be wrong. The Japanese leak that appeared later talked about eyefinity support.

Fine - but IDTECH5 virtualisation is larger than just terrain textures, it's all of the textures for everything, the landscape being so diverse (no repeating pattern) that's why it takes so much storage.

Carmack said he wants to bring virtualisation to other things such as geometry.

For the RAM thing, surprisingly yes, the exe only used like 800-1600 MB on PC.

based on the architecture - but we're not sure if that's true

it will obviously get upgraded , custom designed , die shrink , and loads of other stuff on it so it won't really be out of date much

If it were that obvious, why not go with a dx11 card in their dev kits to begin with? Were 6xxx** cards really that hard for Nintendo to come by that they couldn't find enough for their developers?

I find that rather hard to believe.

Custom part? Sure.

Custom part based on the latest tech so as not to be out of date much? Not according to the 4xxx rumor.


(**which would be the closest to representing their final spec if they truly are looking to incorporate GCN)


I hope I'm wrong and Nintendo can find a way to plug a top notch GPU (or even just a competent get-along solution such as HD7770) in their box so as to not be completely irrelevant on the tech side (leaving out that whole 'deeper and wider' part of his speech) as soon as they drop.

I don't want to see Nintendo go bankrupt, or drop out of hardware, but if they keep dropping crap on the hardware side, there's not much reason to support that part of their business and at that point they need to Sega just to survive. I just hope the internal devs can keep up with the outside world and keep enough pride in their work without hardware to continue to push forward.

It seemed as soon as Sega dropped out of Hardware, their internal devs lost all inspiration and it became a shell of the company it once was. Not just due to lack of Hardware, but more importantly, on the software side.

So here's to hoping Nintendo has some level of understanding the market they're competing in and producing a competent spec which doesn't target machines which are on the verge of becoming irrelevant.

If the console is never going to need DX11 compliance and the GPU is a custom solution, why should they spend transistors and die space on something that isn't going to be used?




Are you seriously talking about the "we made more money during this generation than the other two competitors combined" Nintendo?

So you think the company that pretty much reinvented gaming controls and single-handedly brought console gaming to all audiences during this gen is suffering from "loss of inspiration".

Yeah, poor Nintendo. It's a downward spiral they can't control.

True, if their not going to use dx11 features then there's no point in producing a chip capable of them. Hence, their decision for Wii spec based on GC. They have shown no desire to keep up with technology, much less lead. And on this, I agree that is likely where they are headed.

And that's why I think they will be in serious trouble nextgen and WiiU will be their last console as we think of today.


Just because they made money ( a lot of it) with Wii doesn't mean they will with WiiU (not sure I'd call it nextgen at this point).

Kinect killed the Wii roadmap. Motion gaming is done for them.

So now they're sitting in pseudo portable land between a DS/ipad and a console with WiiU with none of the advantages of either. WiiU is essentially Afro Ninja. A ton of confidence at first, and HORRIBLE execution.



And what I was referring to on inspiration is what happens after they are knocked out of the hardware game? They are already pretty ho hum software-wise over this gen.

Supposedly a derivative of the HD4xxx in some of the dev kits, all that means for the final GPU is its very likely VLIW5 based.

Maybe because the GPU they went with fits in with the specs they're going for (number of SPU's, TU's, ROPS ect) and the custom part they're developing won't even use DX anyway? Point is this isn't going to be an off the shelf part, lets actually wait and see what it is before assuming its no more modern than a HD4xxx card.

They won't be using DirectX full stop and Wii has very little to do with any of this. Wii used a speed bumped GC chip, this will be a custom chip designed soley for WiiU.

Also the last sentence there, is, well amazing... :lol:

I'm seriously starting to think that even if WiiU would put even fastest PC's out there to shame both speed- and tech wise, TheChefO still wouldn't be happy with it, and Nintendo can't do anything right.

DirectX versions indicate a certain level hardware features. NO console game runs on top of direct x

Someone finally pointed this out.
The way console hardware can be accessed by developers doesnt have to abide to any specific API; remember that Wii didnt support DX nor OGL, afaik wiki. Its called low level access ,there are several more familiar terms that i cant recall now, but you can essentially override the API or bypass it completely, by writting the machine code ofcourse directly, and thats how you can "suck every bit of performance from the hardware".


So if the hardware supports it, you can technically have hardware tesselation even though DX version might not suport it. To put it in perspective> As long as the hardware GPU supports a feature, you can use that in games no matter what, the use of API is not enforced.

This is what Carmack is frustrated about through a lot , PC hardware just doesnt have the lower access, and its all about the drivers and api, very unoptimized.

Thats why people get surprised how much you can pull out of this gen console hardware.

So WiiU will just have support for the DX and OGL, in console world that only means a faster and easier devlopmeent, however every console game would totally suck in performance if it wasnt for a very simple thing called low level access.

For PCs, that blame goes to GPU manufacturers who wont open up their access, as well as DX monopoly.

You're pointing the fingers at the wrong place.

"If Nintendo don't do what I want them to do, they're doomed."

:lol:

which process is it on? I used to think 40nm but this gives a performance/power disavantage and thus a slower GPU in the small wiiU budget.
but maybe on 40nm it's cheap and high availability.

if it uses VLIW5 or VLIW4, why not, it's what is in current and future AMD APUs.
I expect low specs, if it's VLIW5 maybe 240SP, if it uses radeon 6970 architecture then 256 SP, both with 64bit gddr5.

it' more than good enough. for instance I've seen a sandy bridge laptop with a renamed radeon 5450 with ddr3. it's pretty good at running games at 768p, we tried far cry 2 at default settings. it's like an order magnitude better than stuff like the X300 SE we had a few years ago.
the unobtainable radeon 6450 w/ gddr5 is twice better. something a bit above compares well with PS360 I guess.

I will say that hardware tech alone isn't going to solve all their problems.

They would also need to work on dev tools and get their own internal dev teams up to snuff on cutting edge development (or even just UE3) as well in order to succeed. So yes, you are correct in that hardware alone will not be enough.

Nintendo will have to get off their pile of cash they made on Wii and reinvest it into their company (like other modern businesses do that aim for growth). And while they're at it, hire a financial adviser to help them avoid yen/dollar and yen/euro issues. It's like a comedy of errors over there. They keep effing up, but some how, still avoid the pitfalls and come out alive.



Personally, I don't care either way. I didn't buy a Wii (played others enough to see glaring and frustrating pitfalls of the tech), and didn't buy a n64. Bought a GC when it was on sale for $100 to go back and play some games I missed out on, but certainly not a hardcore N fan and from what I've seen, I won't be buying a WiiU.

Overall, I just want to see a healthy competition between Sony/MS/N.

My comments of caution for Nintendo are more out of desire to see that competition thrive with a hint of, "ooh I hope they aren't that stupid."

I enjoy the dynamics of the console biz, but I don't want to see another Sega moment.

Again, if they're aiming for 2005 hardware which is on it's way out, how long do they expect it to last and how much do they reasonably expect people to pay?

"But it's got a tablet!" Who cares? The ability of the tablet to co-display will obviously be limited as one of the design bullet points was that the TV could be freed from gaming at any given moment and toss the tv image to the tablet. Thus, the interaction needs to be able to fit into a strictly tablet use case.

So this puts the interaction of WiiU at a tablet level. Now how about price?

If it is essentially a playbox360 with a tablet, I'm guessing they can squeeze the BOM in at the end of the year somewhere near the $250 mark. If they sell it at that break even price, they might have a shot, but knowing Nintendo, they will likely try and squeeze a crazy margin out of the box day one and mark it up to $350.

Nevermind the fact it isn't focused on motion gaming anymore which was the entire lure of Wii and nevermind that the casual market is being targeted heavily by the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook, and MS (Kinect).

Nintendo is stuck between a rock and a hard place here.

They have been since the project Natal unveil. They would have been better off partnering up with a big player at that time (or licensing Kinect). As is, we have a hardware averse toy company competing in a battle from a disadvantageous position.

Their one shot at competing solo going forward was/is not with the casual crowd and a halfbreed tablet. Their one shot was with a core targeted console. A dire and slim chance, but that is really all they had here.

Otherwise, suck it up, form a strategic partnership with Apple/Google/MS/Sony and become a software developer that also happens to make portable consoles (for now).

OG Xbox and 360 games run on top of (spinoff versions of) DX. And so did a handful of games on the dreamcast.

Who then ?

I hadn't read about this, and understood that a game could require the use of both the controller and tv. Have Nintendo stated this somewhere?

Irrespective of processing power, an iPad will never have the standardised, high quality controls that the WiiU has and its games are unlikely to target dual displays. What makes the WiiU platform unique is what Nintendo are banking on for success. Comparisons to the iPad fundamentally miss what the WiiU is and what the base platform provides.

"Virtual thumsbicks" and buttons and a lack of analogue should buttons are a necessary evil when you're gaming on a device that wasn't designed for gaming. An iPad could be 1,000,000 more powerful than a real games console or a PC but I'd still have one (of each) because I want better than a view blocking touch screen interface for everything. Graphics whores aren't the only type of gamer out there, and even graphics whores can have standards elsewhere!

It's impossible to support varied, unknown hardware configurations at a low level. The DX/OGL APIs are essential to supporting upgradeable or varied hardware from multiple IHVs. DX has evolved to support lots of great features that aren't being used because the PC market doesn't have a large enough, relevant enough install base of high-end GPUs to make it worthwhile for the devs to target. They target the lowest common denominators which are DX9 integrated graphics and the like. It's worth noting in the past that the IHVs have provided access to unique capabilities of their hardware but they were never targeted by developers for sane economic reasons. "So what if this new ATi board supports hardware accelerated scrolling - hardly anyone owns it so we're not going to waste our time targeting it specifically."

As Joe Public upgrades their PC, they eventually get access to later DX features by it just being included, rather than by choice, moving the common denominator target up a level. But it's Joe Public not wanting to invest in the latest hardware, resulting in the developers not wanting to target the latest hardware, that limits what PCs are achieving. If not for DirectX, PC gaming wouldn't exist at all, so complaining about how it's holding the sector back is pretty ridiculous. And going forwards, devs are going to use middleware more and more because writing low-level code for such monster processors is very difficult and costly. All the console manufacturers are talking about ease-of-development because that's what the industry needs more than ultimate performance extraction from every transistor.

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/p...-x-to-go-away/

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/gra...l-to-directx/1

http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/0...phics-says-amd

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=59795


(he makes a small comment about it)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxFdsEtr-TY

(dicusses it at the beginning, after 3 min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hapCuhAs1nA

It was at their product unveil at e3.


You and I (and all other core gamers) would have a problem being stuck without thumbsticks, but there are many more who have no problem without them. Unfortunately for Nintendo, their demographic is of the casual kind that can (and does) do without ...

Factor in the very likely scenario of an ipad/tablet having xbox360+ graphics in the next few years and you see a certain dilemma with aiming for such a low spec. Especially when such a low target is completely unnecessary.

That's four links to the same story bro. The B3D one has an interesting discussion following it btw.

Personally, as a consumer, I don't want that. Back in the late 90's there was nothing glorious about having two graphics cards in my PC and having lots of stuff supercede them fast and not work properly (or at all) on either. The great thing about DX is that games can run on your hardware long after an IHV has stopped paying pubs to target it and long after elite developers have stopped getting excited over its new features. Undermining a (relatively) hardware agnostic API for a short term boost for a big budget publisher/developer/nVidia is not in my interests.

In general I agree, but looking at the current market, there are only two GPU manufacturers (until PowerVR shows their cards).

At the time of DX invention it was the 3D wild wild west with new cards and technology constantly on the rise.

Matrox
Intergraph
3Dfx
S3
Nvidia
Ati
3Dlabs
PowerVR
etc.

These days, with only two real venders (intel integrated graphics can cling lovingly to DX for dear life), it might make sense to abandon it. Though I think the performance hit at this point has more to do with PC architecture and OS than DX, so then again maybe not. :razz:

You're not talking about GPUs, you're talking about graphics cards for x86 systems.
During the years following Windows 8 release, pretty much everything will change, since the O.S. will support the GPUs from:

- nVidia
- AMD
- Intel
- PowerVR
- ARM (Mali)
- Vivante
- Qualcomm (Adreno)
- HTC/VIA (S3 Chrome)
- Probably some more that I'm not recalling right now

Eventually, you might also want to add whatever Huawei has in their SoC and Broadcom's follow-up to the fairly successful VideoCore IV.


So yeah, wild wild west all over again.
You still think we don't need high-level APIs for PCs?

As an avid Linux user, I'd really love it if OpenGL would become more relevant again. Well, the Khronos group was really to blame too, for kicking OGL into the mess it's now in (no updates for LONG times etc...)... but with 4.0 and now 4.2 it's taking up steam again, and since basically all handheld devices also use OpenGL too (well OGLES), it might get more traction again.

Are you actually going to debate this at any point?

This one article is saying DX has overheads. Yep. That doesn't change any of my points though. You cannot code to the metal on unknown configurations. It's possible to target specific configurations or even families such as GCN for those who have that card, but what about older cards? So supporting a market larger than just a couple of million (or whatever) top GPU owners requires hardware virtualisation. And all that is moot when faced with the cost of creating improved assets. Even with 10x the power (which the PCs do have. It's not like DX is capping them to console levels of capability), developers aren't going to throw money at creating 10x the game on the PC when they can just port over the same console assets and render them at higher IQ with a couple of niceties like PhysX particles and a better lighting engine. It doesn't make economical sense to most developers to go all out for the ultimate PC experience. A couple will give it a go, like CryTek. Very, very few devs are going to be banging their heads against DX lamenting how they have so little power to work with. Very, very many devs will be frustrated at having to test against several different hardware configurations while alienating a lot of older PCs.

At least the Wild West back then had more than 2 APIs, but yes, it's getting interesting again, especially with AMD and Nvidia having to take on the mobile market in some form.

Judging by the development of GLES, Khronos are perfectly capable of governing such standards. You can blame the 'graphics workstation' ISV/IHV fatcats for the state of desktop OGL - they had too big CAD/DCC/driver codebases and no desire to bring those up to date to a more modern OGL. Thus the gargantuan legacy creep OGL had (and still has, to some degree) to cope with for generations on.

'The fate of an open standard is not dictated by the governing committees as much as by the major users.' -- an ancient Sumerian saying.

My take on it is something like this:
Thanks to AMD, Intel are starting to take graphics semi-seriously again! And they're doing it in a none destructive way thanks to DX. DX has really allowed ATI and, now, AMD to remain competitive - I think that without it nvidia would have dominated high end graphics and mainstream PC gaming could have been stuck around Intel integrated level. DX seems to have been a focal point around which tons money has been thrown at R&D and that's now feeding out into console land and making tech available for people like Nintendo and MS that they wouldn't have been able to afford to develop independently.

I could be wrong of course, and this is all OT so I should probably leave it there. Suffice to say, I disagree with Stewox that IHVs and DX are to primarily blame for the way PC gaming hardware gets used, and think it's mainly down to customers (people like me) and I don't hate them (me) for it. DX10 has been around for a loooooooong time now; it's neither MS nor AMD/Nvidia's fault that so many games are still being made for a DX9 baseline.

Who said that?


more discuss later ...

No-one. I'm making the point that it seems premature to worry about low level access when most games haven't even moved beyond DX9 limitations. But this is all getting very off topic now.

You don't understand, it's not about feature wise, it's about performance what carmack is talking about.

The driver of the industry is just a few developers and ID Software is one of them, do you think Zynga drives the industry, who cares about those losers, we aren't talking about the mainstream developers trying to use this, obviously the most talented and actually those that CARE are the ones that want to see API go away. Not all of them even are experienced enough to wirte to the metal anyways.

And he's talking for him self, not the other companies who don't worry about this much because they're not as experienced probably.

As Carmack said, it's about the access to the hardware that's keeping PC games from not running as fast as they should, plus OS overhead , and we all know how windows is good at the buggy code that's in there compared to linux.

The overhead issue is underestimated, it makes the whole difference. But as we see, for consoles, this can't magically the memory insufficiency.


And my answer to the "premature" ... this is an subjective opinion, some of devs who know what they're doing, want that, and who's going to stop them ? I support them, because i don't see how mainstream developers should have any valid opposite input for this, they can use their APIs and they aren't forced to do metal programming.

And you miss a bit on the fact that this is not getting rid of the API as disabling it , this is about the ability to bypass and override it, obviously you're not going to write the WHOLE game using assembly.

And for the record who said DX has metal-programming features, those are a joke, ask carmack, it's just a smokescreen, the drivers are doing something else behind your back.

As a matter of fact ... why "premature" is a joke, it's because Carmack has been pushing and pressuring vendors about this for more than half a decade ... cannot trace back his words on this since it's a few years i heard him say that, maybe saw in an interview.

In the end, he implies it but he doesn't say it, with the access, Carmack wants to essentially write his own drivers, that means overriding and bypassing a lot pretty much, which is obviously the best way to get max performance, those who write drivers for AMD/Nvidia aren't game developers to begin with, and second they aren't really putting that much effort into making them as best as possible.

https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/50277047104323584
https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/50277106856370176
https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/30655938016837632


There might be as well troll developers who spit bullshit on the web just because they think they know better or they don't realize what carmack is about. Probably some noobs who work for "insert_major_publisher_here" ... imo

http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/que...ing-to-address

I don't see the advantage of low level acces in the pc space. All your going to end up with is one giant mess of games not running properly on a lot of hardware because the game is trying to do stuff written for a different gpu. My old 4870 can still play modern games. So that's the 4xxx, 5xxx, 6xxx and 7xxx series from AMD alone. Nvidia probably has 4 generations as well since than so that would mean a dev has to keep in mind atleast 8 different gpu's and that's not even keeping in mind the differences within a series.

I'd rather put of with the ''inefficiencies'' of DX and have games working properly even on older hardware than having than having to sort out the mess of is this particulair game going to run on my particulair gpu?

First of all, you failed to understand my point.

Second, it's your opinion from whoknows what you do for a living.

Third, your claims are complete

Forth, those devs that don't know how to program obviously are not forced to release broken games. Giant mess is up to them, if this happens, they're all stupid who are doing it, and a few of those games from the actual devs that know how to use this, will make awesome progress.

Fifth, the "problems" which you brought up are no problem for the developers that have the experience and tools to deal with it.

That's your opinion, and since it won't be like that it's not an issue to begin with.



It's up to you to view it from what point you want, but the fact is, the drivers of the industry don't really care about the opinion of the mainstream.

Either you are mainstreams and try to view this in the favor of the mass mainstream market, or in the best interest of the creative progress and innovation. No thanks, im for innovation and progress, those that can't keep up can go work something else if they don't like it, you can be a cook or a toilet cleaner, or whatever your ideals work for best, it's up to you.

And I will end this discussion here, it is pointless to explain to people without fundamental understanding of the word "perfection".

So whatever you guys say, im just warning you before you get surprised one day, that everything you say is irrelevant, Carmack and others will drive and influence the vendors to get lower access whether you like it or not, and if you don't like it, then there's a big chance you have no idea what you're talking about.

The Standardization that was made brought security and stability in the programming, now people are much more experienced and the standardization is in the way of innovation. Ask Carmack this and you'll get the same answer.


I do not look at this as a consumer, I do not look at it as a end result of how many games will I be playing next week, I don't play a lot of games anymore, except nintendo first parties and Starcraft 2 currently, everything shitty is filtered out, waste of time, so it's not an issue to go buy hardware for the game, rather than games for the hardware.

The fact that 4870 runs all your modern games is because of the massive RAW power that PC GUPS have over consoles, but as well as the fact that the PC games haven't gone up in visual quality much, which is a totally different thing and has nothing to do with

By the use of low level optimizations, you could have your card for like 3 more years just because you would suck out all the performance it has.

Pretty much 40-50% of the performance is wasted to thin air by the overhead.

And the thing about caring ... do you think the Creator of first person shooters even cares about how other developers would have hard time programming something on the new technology like "oh those poor EA people won't be able to do this, so i will not seek innovation for my own loss and legacy and stick my head in this old mindet for 10 more years, just because of the mainstream not experienced enough oh" get out of here.

You people consider your selfs technology conservatives, why the heck conserving something Microsoft made and then put onto their console to make profit out of 13 old children (who then get on forums and start tossing bs about tech) with the use of half broken software. ... obviously the untalented Zynga assholes want to capitalize while the big industry can't get their pay for what they DESERVE because of massive budgets but undercut results because of a single bullshiter in the company named Microsoft who are obviously ALLIED with the casual/mainstream MAX PROFIT FOR LESS WORK.

The point because the drivers of the indsustry push forward is to not get out of business, the problem is larger than what you think, the problem is not small. The new generations of kids are being fed these stupid crap casual games which makes them stupider (not as smart) as the 90' generation which was presented with the hardes games

It's the INVASION of financial interest and casual smarthats into the strong talented and creative industry that was once stellar, these pests made it steer from the original PATH, I will vigorously defend against these capitalist thieves.

The mainstream industry is breeding and exploiting a generation of inexperienced gamers in turn for the profits, the more the young people they turn at early age the more will join them because they were fed the silly games, obviously never seeing the real hardcore they will turn out to be the bullshiters as we see some of them now, untalented and wrong, they will drive the same shit on, and im not happy with this, to see communities of stupid people playing stupid games, it saddens me, and I can't more than thank Blizzard and their efforts with Starcraft 2, cannot express the gratitude and how Blizzard is able to operate on such hard conditions with Activision and still make it work in the hardcore space.




You might watch GDC 2011 Iwata Keynote - I agree with him, crappy iphone games negatively effect the industry and it's legacy, I couldn't not agree, because it's obvious.
http://gdc2011.nintendo.com/

So many words. So little said.

I don't think that you are fully comprehending the business and technological reasons why what you're suggesting is pure utter nonsense.

To remove the graphics APIs like DX, removing the layer of abstraction from the HW that allows games to be HW agnostic, would be an incredibly stupid thing to do and would kill PC gaming dead.

Even if Microsoft allowed certain developers to bypass DX and write their own software layer for the latest and greatest GPUs, the fact that such a labourious and resource intensive task would only allow you to speed up your game for a small fraction of your userbase who own a specific card means that it's not worth the time or effort for any developer.

DX makes life easier not just for the consumer who can buy a GPU and use it on any game for the next 5-7 years, it also makes life easier for the game developers as they don't have to unnecessarily waste copious millions of man-hours writing custom API layers that have already been written.

Fundamentally you're not understanding the problem, and are simply quoting Carmack's out-of-context comments as a means to support a 100% flawed perspective.

Anyway, all this talk of DX and Carmack is grossly OT.

Whatever Nintendo did with Wii worked.
They are using a tight business model that is clever. Sony and Microsoft have a solid business model also. Its just nintendo guessed right where gamecube and n64 they guessed wrong.
Nintendo can just release another bargain console slightly more powerful than Xbox360 or PS3 add decent 3d and sell it for $299. PS4/xbox720 may sell for $400+

-nm-

If only that were true.

Wii didn't introduce a new business model. It was a unique disruptive interface which the entire console was built around that was unseen by any consumer product prior to Wii.

That's the reason they were able to profit so much and why they were able to repackage a gamecube in the box and sell it for $250.

The problem with trying to apply this "business model" going forward is that it is near impossible to come up with something revolutionary every 5-6 years which doesn't involve GPU or CPU advances.

This along with the fact that Microsoft already showcased (and patented) the obvious conclusion to motion gaming killed their roadmap. So yes, it was great that Nintendo thought of this great idea of motion gaming, but they did not reinvest the massive profits back into the company for R&D to make it better and now they are left without a clear path for future growth (or even sustainability).

I said this when Project Natal was unveiled, but it seemed everyone was sure that just because Nintendo had one good disruptive idea with motion gaming that they would surely be able to do it again to compete with ps4/xb720.

So what did they do? A pseudo tablet/console which will revolutionize the way we interact by touchscreens ... er... touchscreens with controls because really who wants to touch a touchscreen ... er umm ... two screens because really looking at one screen is boring, wait scratch that we want to throw that tv image to the tablet at anytime ... and who cares about motion gaming anymore or social gatherings? Who said that's what Wii was built on? 1 player only is the way to go!

And after the unveil, nobody is truly convinced of Nintendo's repeat of success. Check their stock price for the real public consensus on how bright Nintendo's future is.

All of that MESS, just so Nintendo wouldn't have to compete on CPU/GPU tech. It's beyond sad, beyond stubborn and beyond stupid, frankly.

So I hope that Sony and MS aren't sharing this same concept of invest garbage into the hardware and people will still buy it due to accessories.

As we see with Nintendo's stock price, this "business plan" has fail written all over it.

I'm still not so sure about this - I can't find anything definitive on it. Which is not to say that Nintendo didn't say it, just that I can't find it. Any links? The golf concept and multiplayer maze chase games wouldn't be so hot without a tv.

Wuu is fully BC with Wii controllers so hopefully that's not the end of the wagglepointer - something that is in some ways still better than kinect. I guess a lot will depend on what gets packaged as standard.

How do you know their roadmap was motion gaming? As I recall, Miyamoto said in an interview many years ago his future of gaming was basically exactly like the Wii U's concept. They were pushing this concept in the past too, with the GBA link to the Gamecube. This might have been their plan from the beginning. Nintendo has always been full of ideas and concepts, some just can't come to fruition due to tech or prices hindering the way.

Just because you don't seem too keen on the idea of a touchscreen doesn't make it a bad decision or a wrong step. To you, the only right step is throwing a super powerful GPU and CPU in the console and calling it a day...

Well, I suppose my conviction of that comes from the hodge-podge thrown together nature of WiiU.

There is no clear message of what it is and what it offers and why people should buy one.

WiiU is a mess.

WiiU fail is not only obvious to me, but also to the masses that own Nintendo stock.

As for what's the best direction for Nintendo moving forward:

What they should have done was secure Kinect technology for themselves by purchasing Prime Sense years ago.

Having failed to do that, licensing Kinect would have been a decent plan B.

Having failed to do that, plan C would be a partnership with a bigger Company to provide Wii accessories for a future hardware platform. Thus allowing Nintendo to survive by pushing their software and accessories onto hardware that isn't theirs and in return, the platform holder will be receiving more customers than they would have otherwise and so some monetary compensation would be in order.

Having failed all of the above, we are left with WiiU and the likely ejection of Nintendo from the console biz in short order. If they can't lure in traditional console gamers (ie decent nextgen GPU/CPU performance) they will be in trouble as casual gamers won't be jumping in anywhere near as emphatically as with Wii's clear, simple, and revolutionary offering.

I personally think they didn't want to reveal the Wii U yet, but all those leaks forced their hand. It was pretty clear that they weren't ready at e3, and they have even acknowledged this, stating that this e3 would be a complete re-unveil. Nintendo's stock has also been rising lately.

As for your "plans," Nintendo has said themselves that they would not give up buttons or a controller, ala they would never consider using Kinect or full body control. They have also said that if they can't make their own hardware anymore, they wouldn't even be in the video game industry anymore.

Nintendo is fully capable, and the Wii U looks great. Obviously, it will most likely be a tougher sell toward casuals, simply because a lot of them may already have an iPad and could possibly see the Wii U as an unnecessary similar device. Tablets are not something as radical and different as the Wii initially was. But that's where the Nintendo magic comes in, and if they can create that must own-must play software such as a Wii Sports/Wii Fit, they're golden.

As for the hardcores, that is still up in the air. Frankly, today's recent news that UE4 will be for purely next-gen has me slightly worried as I expected it to be completely scalable. Of course, I don't know if Wii U falls in those comments or not, but if the Wii U is powerful enough to run it and can get most multiplats, even if slightly underpowered, coupled with Nintendo's own first party in glorious HD, I don't see why it wouldn't do well. Obviously, they're going to need some other infrastructure, such as good online services, but recent comments seem to suggest that's going well too. At the very least, it could be a good platform for its 1st party and other exclusives, like how Wii was.

And if NextBox and/or PS4 don't go for the typical power-route, Nintendo's position in next-gen will be greatly improved.

Could someone point me to a good article explaining Deferred Rendering?

Please and thank you.