48x Vec4 + Scalar, not 48x Vec4
And they're unififed shaders just like on modern cards.
Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename
- Thread starter AlNom
- Start date
- Status
48x Vec4 + Scalar, not 48x Vec4
And they're unififed shaders just like on modern cards.
It would be imo such a shame if Nintendo made the dirty compromise it made for the sake of BC.
Damn it, some emulators provide "forward compatibility". Nintendo could simply have bought a really good one and rework it.
It doesn't take that much of a set-up to run those emulators and end up with neat improvement versus what the GC and the Wii offer...
-----------
To Shifty, as we say in France " a good of night of sleep is a good adviser", I discarded yesterday claims from IBM.
I would say that it's a bit more that word smithing, closer to lying in my opinion.
The reason I did is that basically even if by miracle they could get the CPU to consume 20 Watts, that IBM sells for cheap pretty high bin parts to Nintendo for cheap as they may have lot of extra capacity, looking at the PSU it doesn't let much room for the rest of the system.
I'm back to my old rant...
why only three enhanced broadway or custom ppc470s...
I mean I suspect that they beat bobcat on almost every metric for example, still FP performance as to be really low vs what Xenon and the Cell achieve. Not too mention that I've read many time that theere are workload that scale pretty with clock speed, and they should fall short here too.
Why as much as 32MB of EDRAM...
Right.
There must be some sort of software layer involved. I'd have thought the CPU would be easier to deal with anyway, but it's odd they don't even render at higher resolution for Wii titles.
The problem with emulation is it's difficult to get the lat 5% of games to work flawlessly, console games far more than they should be can often be very dependent on exact timing. More often than not these issues are bugs in the original code that just don't manifest in test.
Which brings us to why "enhanced broadway" makes sense.
I'd also suggest that the Nintendo special sauce in the GPU is GC GPU emulation.
FWIW I don't give much credence to this latest set of specs.
Could it be that Nintendo went further and that the justification for the 32MB of EDRAM is to indeed emulate the multiple embedded memory bank in the Wii?Thanks for that.
Actual T&L HW? lolol "special HW for lighting" *cough*
TEVs/register combiners? XD
hm... Texture/buffer formats? I know the D3D API doesn't support RGBA6, but that's probably not limited by HW. RGB8 is fine.
(With possible implications on how it's accessed (I think of latencies, bandwidth, and I think in a negative term a bit like MS hindered their last revision for the sake of compatibility (not that I think it didn't make sense but that's the result from hardware pov, the chip would have been better than previous revision)).
Combining the 1MB TC, 2MB FB, and the 24MB pool? The thought has been around for awhile (at least as one excuse for no MSAA*), but yeah it certainly seems like a good fit if the 32MB were indeed much more flexible/general purpose
General Purpose GPGPU!
Sounds lovely, though that sort of ability will naturally have some particular design drawbacks with respect to latency & bandwidth/speed etc.
*shrug*
*it's also quite possible Nintendo API is/was too poopy with MSAA render targets or how existing engines handle MSAA, but I digress.
Blazkowicz
Legend
Maybe IBM has added the specific broadway instructions. someone pointed at basic "2D SIMD", similar to 3Dnow!.
Relying on cycles for timing was an old school things and hopefully Wii games aren't depending on it barring a bug or outlier. Even emulators aren't really accurate except when they make a point (see BSNES, perfect at the cost of being extremely CPU intensive)
Not running Wii titles is easily explained, it's a least path of effort and an incentive to buy Wii U titles or remakes instead.
Relying on cycles for timing was an old school things and hopefully Wii games aren't depending on it barring a bug or outlier. Even emulators aren't really accurate except when they make a point (see BSNES, perfect at the cost of being extremely CPU intensive)
Not running Wii titles is easily explained, it's a least path of effort and an incentive to buy Wii U titles or remakes instead.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
The Wii U is not based on the R300. Going by what the article says, it's based on an embedded technology that is much more recent.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
Thats actually a very interesting point. Can anyone here shed any light on earlier Wii games which may have been reliant on particular hardware attributes of the Wii (which may not be present in the WiiU when its in "Wii mode")??
Did they single out earlier games? It's more commonly games that use funky exploits that don't emulate well, which tend to come later in the console's life-cycle as devs get to learn its secrets.
They said the same thing for the 3DS. It's most likely just for liability reasons.
Anyway, I believe the CPU to be Broadway/ppc7XX based. For easier BC and because "enhanced Broadway cores" are the info they gave to developers. I see no reason they would use the term "Broadway" for cores that are very different from Wii's Broadway CPU. I mean those word are for devs, not PR word play for the public.
On 2nd read, they didnt mention earlier games - that was juts my assumption. Apologies!
Care to elaborate on 'funky exploits'? I dont quite understand the process. This may shed some light on whether we're looking at BC hardware or software emulation, no?
For this exact reason, I dont beleive that particular leak has come from where the source claims. I'm not saying its fake, but that its maybe just someones opinion/educated guesswork based on using that partcular dev kit. The source claimed the info came directly from warioworld (nintendo developer portal) but I highly doubt Nintendo would use such terminology in officla documentation. It holds no value to developers and provides them with little to no info about the CPU. They are likely receiving much more detailed information (such as the first leak VGleaks had, where some details about the CPU cache etc was included)
First games are about getting something out the door, so you tend to go by the book using whatever libraries are provided. As you learn the system, opportunities present themselves, such as using a piece of hardware to do something it wasn't really intended to do (like GPGPU say) or using an exploit in a memory operation to perform some extra function, or sticking a bit of data in a system buffer where it shouldn't really go but it gets a good performance advantage when you do that. There are amazing things developers have found to do with hardware beyond it's design. One of my all-time favourites was a hardware hack on the Amiga computer. It had a clock port on the mobo designed just for a RAM and timing part that was never released, which enterprising individuals and companies used as a general expansion port to add sound cards and USB controllers and all sorts. The problem with code that targets sspecifics of the metal, even if just relying on the time it takes to perform an instruction to synchronise events, is that hardware changes stop them working. We've even seen that in supposedly identical hardware such as some PS2 revisions being incompatible with some games. The official line is that is you use the system libraries, your program will work on alternative hardware. But using system libraries introduces an inefficiency, so devs wanting more from the system will try to avoid them sometimes.
It's bound to be a bit of both. Unless they put in Wii hardware as is, there'll be some software translation involved, I'm sure. The CPU could be anything from a perfect carbon copy of Broadway to a custom part with support for Broadway instructions to a non-related PPC part that's running an emulator to catch and translate the unsupported instructions.
Well, i hadn't be following the rumors lately, but before VGleaks, there were two guys that mentioned Broadway.
One was Arkam from gaf, he said the term "enhanced broadway" came from Nintendo themselves. Another guy on this thread, username espresso, said:
If those guys were really devs or had connection, the term "enhanced broadway" were probably not speculation but terms directly from Nintendo. I also don't believe those came from a document/manual, but no said it was. I think it's just a brief description of WiiU on the warioworld page.
What the term "enhanced Broadway" means to Nintendo is, of course, still open to interpretation. The fact remains, however, that if the WiiU CPU really is based directly on the Power7 architecture, they will have had to cut so much out of the design to fit it inside that box and TDP that the relation becomes rather meaningless. "Well, it was a Power7 until we removed everything that made the Power7 remarkable."
- Status
