Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

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I think thats what Nintendo was banking on from the start. Whether it happens or not is still unclear.

The main problem with this approach is a huge chunk of gamers will be swayed by the mere fact that a console is, on paper, more powerful than the WiiU. "It has higher numbers of 'x' or more of 'y'! Must be better and more value for my money!!" And once that frame of mind is set in, its very hard to change.

I've just been flicking through the latest GamesMaster (dont judge me.... its the issue with the first NSMBU and NintendoLand reviews!) and they have quite a large peice on all things WiiU. They're quite open about saying things like "Its 99% certain that the next PS/XBox will humiliate the WiiU". To be fair they follow this up by saying "does it matter?" but I'm betting that first part of the sentence is all most of their readership will absorb.

Therein lies the WiiUs problem: Its going to be a hard sell. Even if what you're saying is right MDX and the extra power of other 'next gen' console doesn't actually matter that much in reality; the perception will be there that it does and it will be difficult for Nintendo to fend off those claims.

Depends to whom they are selling it. There's approximately around 85 million Wiis in the world, mine being one of them. I still like quite few Wii games and play them occasionally, especially as party games like Rayman Raving Rabbits it's great choice. Wii U gives me possibility to update the Wii to powerful enough to get XB360 and PS3 level games later on, without need of giving up Wii compability and filling up our full stacked TV platform with another console. I do like the idea and I think I am not alone. Besides, you can get the Wii U from the shops end of this month (here.) and MS / Sony is nowehere near to seen, Nintendo can easily sell quite few of these before the competition ramps up for next generation.

Not that many of Wii owners are console-literate enough to wait at least half a year to see competition. They have not been interested about anything console-related before finding Wii and so it's obvious choice to them buy newer console that can run their old games as well.

Wii sold a lot to target audiences who never thought buying consoles, even less they are interested polygons or if the output is p-something. They just want to have a good time sometimes. So there's a lot fresh new ground to build up selling another generation.
 
I saw the Nintendo Direct from japan a few minutes ago. The Nintendo Online System make XBLA and PSN look outdated.

Here is a version of the Nintendo Direct with english subtitles.

http://www.nintendo.co.uk/Misc-/Nintendo-Direct/Nintendo-Direct/Nintendo-Direct-638747.html

Oh sorry, this is only a short version. They don't show some of the best stuff there from the ND Japan.

I don't see anything that backs up your blind faith in Nintendo. Their Nintendo Network ID if its anything but a user selected name then that is a failure.

Nintendo Direct said:
"When register a Wii U user as a friend, the Nintendo Network ID acts just like a friend code."

"Also, we plan to work together on various other network services with different software developers via Nintendo Network."
 
Depends to whom they are selling it. There's approximately around 85 million Wiis in the world, mine being one of them. I still like quite few Wii games and play them occasionally, especially as party games like Rayman Raving Rabbits it's great choice. Wii U gives me possibility to update the Wii to powerful enough to get XB360 and PS3 level games later on, without need of giving up Wii compability and filling up our full stacked TV platform with another console. I do like the idea and I think I am not alone. Besides, you can get the Wii U from the shops end of this month (here.) and MS / Sony is nowehere near to seen, Nintendo can easily sell quite few of these before the competition ramps up for next generation.

Not that many of Wii owners are console-literate enough to wait at least half a year to see competition. They have not been interested about anything console-related before finding Wii and so it's obvious choice to them buy newer console that can run their old games as well.

Wii sold a lot to target audiences who never thought buying consoles, even less they are interested polygons or if the output is p-something. They just want to have a good time sometimes. So there's a lot fresh new ground to build up selling another generation.


Well think I was more referring to their self-professed new target audience: the "hardcore" gamer. And publications like GamesMaster pander to that demographic and it just has me worried that they're already so fast and lose with saying things like "WiiU will be humiliated by the competion". Whatever that is supposed to mean (Specs? On Paper? 3rd Party Support? Actual Real World Graphical effects?) is comes accross as a problem for the WiiU. My point was, a large chunk of WiiUs target demographic will be put off by that one impression. When perhaps its not as straight forward as "Specs x 2 = Graphical performance x 2"
 
So what is the best stuff?


For me, the best stuff is: The social aspect (basically a gaming-dedicated twitter feed), the dynamic 'storefront' it creates (popular games or promoted games will bubble to the top and onto your homescreen), sharing screenshots, video chat, the fact it'll be available accross platforms (PC, Mobile/Smart phones etc) and how the whole thing integrates into games without 3rd party developers needing to lift a finger.

Of course, its debatable that any of that alone is an improvement on PSN or Live. But I'm struggling to think of anything Live/PSN can do which NintendoNetwork/Miiverse cannot? Therefore I'd say its at least on par with them....the rest is down to personal taste.
 
Of course, its debatable that any of that alone is an improvement on PSN or Live. But I'm struggling to think of anything Live/PSN can do which NintendoNetwork/Miiverse cannot? Therefore I'd say its at least on par with them....the rest is down to personal taste.
Sure, but it hardly makes Live and PSN look dated. Just different. The core experience is potentially the same. More importantly, as a gamer the thing I want to see is system-wide partying up. I should be able to form a group of friends from my list and enter a game all together, or separately but maintain chat, leave together, and start another game together. That's the next step IMO, instead of the fractured system of PSN. And I believe that's what Live does already. I'm not sure there's anything that can be done by Nintendo to make Live look dated.
 
Sure, but it hardly makes Live and PSN look dated. Just different. The core experience is potentially the same. More importantly, as a gamer the thing I want to see is system-wide partying up. I should be able to form a group of friends from my list and enter a game all together, or separately but maintain chat, leave together, and start another game together. That's the next step IMO, instead of the fractured system of PSN. And I believe that's what Live does already. I'm not sure there's anything that can be done by Nintendo to make Live look dated.

To confirm, that's a step already taken years ago from an XBox Live perspective.
 
Sure, but it hardly makes Live and PSN look dated. Just different. The core experience is potentially the same. More importantly, as a gamer the thing I want to see is system-wide partying up. I should be able to form a group of friends from my list and enter a game all together, or separately but maintain chat, leave together, and start another game together. That's the next step IMO, instead of the fractured system of PSN. And I believe that's what Live does already. I'm not sure there's anything that can be done by Nintendo to make Live look dated.


Nope, and as my 2nd paragraph stated:

TheLump said:
Of course, its debatable that any of that alone is an improvement on PSN or Live. But I'm struggling to think of anything Live/PSN can do which NintendoNetwork/Miiverse cannot? Therefore I'd say its at least on par with them....the rest is down to personal taste.

I was merely pointing out which bits are best. You could of course argue that the social aspect is what makes the competition look outdated; seeing as "social" is the in thing right now and didnt really exist when Live/PSN were conceived. But of course that won't be everyones cup of tea so its hardly an accross the board win. IMO Miiverse/NN is looking like its going to be a clear step up from PSN in terms of flexibility and features. As i said though - personal tastes. Some love PSN of course and i dont mind it, it just lags behind Live/Steam considerabley and always feels a bit fragmented to me.

I'm not overly experienced with Live but from what I have used (and read) there doesnt seem to be anything major missing from NN/Miiverse. So the neat social aspects of Miiverse are just a little icing on the cake.

I agree, though. 'Partying up' would be great. Nice that there are communities though for particular games. Thats a cool feature. i think they've aimed at Steam more than anything else - which is always a good way to go ;)
 
The main problem with this approach is a huge chunk of gamers will be swayed by the mere fact that a console is, on paper, more powerful than the WiiU. "It has higher numbers of 'x' or more of 'y'! Must be better and more value for my money!!" And once that frame of mind is set in, its very hard to change.
Graphics improvements are one way to impress (maybe the easiest way), but Wii showed that it's hardly the only way. Also unless one machine is vastly ahead of the others the differences don't end up mattering anyway. Unless PS4 and Xbox 3 have like GK104 or Pitcairn/Tahiti inside, I don't expect the differences to be that significant honestly.
 
Graphics improvements are one way to impress (maybe the easiest way), but Wii showed that it's hardly the only way. Also unless one machine is vastly ahead of the others the differences don't end up mattering anyway. Unless PS4 and Xbox 3 have like GK104 or Pitcairn/Tahiti inside, I don't expect the differences to be that significant honestly.

Yet everybody is swooning over the 15% Halo 4 looks better than the average current gen title :p
 
Thats kinda what he's saying I think. On paper, 2TFLOP sounds awesome and is oviously going to give developers more to play with (alot more) but it actually isn't that simple or straightforward. You can get 1TFLOP GPUs which outperform 2TFLOP GPUs in real worlds use etc etc so its not like FLOP counts are a direct indication of graphical capability. I'm not implying the WiiU GPU (GPU7) will be anywhere close to the Durango GPU. It won't. Just that the difference on paper will fare outweigh the actual real world difference, whatever that may be.


And thats all that will matter to a large amount of consumers/commentators.


Yes, exactly.

Nintendo knows by now that certain gamers will not buy their console.
But they dont need those gamers to run a healthy business.
They need their core fans, first adopters, and new markets that they have been going after.

If MS and Sony plan to launch in 2013, I simply don't believe they will be coming with monster consoles. Probably more of a stop-gap product. WiiU made its appearance a year ago. Nintendo has had the time to attract 3rd party developers, drip info to the public, work on their games to provide a decent launch.

What is MS and Sony going to do? Reveal their console in two or three months (worse 6) and try to launch them with compelling software in 8 months? And hope that they will have games that will upstage the WiiU, and their own consoles, at affordable prices?
I would prefer they wait, put nice tech in their consoles, but make it affordable, and launch them with decent software that will show off the tech in like 2014-2015.
 
If MS and Sony plan to launch in 2013, I simply don't believe they will be coming with monster consoles. Probably more of a stop-gap product. WiiU made its appearance a year ago. Nintendo has had the time to attract 3rd party developers, drip info to the public, work on their games to provide a decent launch.

What is MS and Sony going to do? Reveal their console in two or three months (worse 6) and try to launch them with compelling software in 8 months? And hope that they will have games that will upstage the WiiU, and their own consoles, at affordable prices?
I would prefer they wait, put nice tech in their consoles, but make it affordable, and launch them with decent software that will show off the tech in like 2014-2015.

No matter what they contain, any system that launches 7+ years after its predessesor can hardly be typified at "stop-gap". Last E3's showing of Watch Dogs, Star Wars 1313 and Agni's Philosophy publically demonstrate pretty concretely 3rd parties are already deep into next gen development. Both MS and Sony have a number of large teams working on unannounced, next gen projects, and they have for a while. We should have multiple 3+ year projects from major devs like Media Molecule, Naughty Dog, Sucker Punch, Bungie, Ubisoft Montreal, LucasArts and a couple massive, nameless new internal MS studios.

Whatever hardware they put in a console next year, it won't be hard to outshine a system that is struggling to differentiate itself from 7 year old systems today.
 
Yeah ok the Wii-U will probably be blown away. Just considering how small it is and the limits on what they can put in there. But still it is better off than Wii's ~2001 hardware vs. 2005 hardware. The hardware advancement was much more obvious back then. It's more akin to Wii having a Radeon X1600 instead of that pathetic DirectX 7-ish Hollywood. This is assuming Wii actually has something akin to the 4670/5650/E6700 and not Ultra Hollywood or somesuch.
 
Whatever hardware they put in a console next year, it won't be hard to outshine a system that is struggling to differentiate itself from 7 year old systems today.

Exactly, I see these guys on youtube talking bout "next box and PS4 wont be much better than Wii U". I'm like, how can you say that when Wii U has not even proven itself better than PS3 and 360 yet?

I mean, do you expect Microsoft and Sony to come out with new consoles that are no better than their predecessors?
 
I mean, do you expect Microsoft and Sony to come out with consoles that are no better than their predecessors?
I have seen rumors around that they aren't going to go as nuts as usual. But who knows. Maybe they will build 300W consoles this time lol.

But indeed we know zero about what's actually in Wii-U aside from more crazy rumors. It's little and has a wee fan. It would be nice if the demo kiosks actually had playable 3D games instead of a 2D side scroller.
 
After seeing the Wii U demo unit for the first time I have to say it's damn small. This thing is smaller than the new PS3, uses less power than the PS3, and is manufactured on the same process as the PS3.

Makes me wonder if Wii U will end up wearing the DF face-off crown or not.
 
Exactly, I see these guys on youtube talking bout "next box and PS4 wont be much better than Wii U". I'm like, how can you say that when Wii U has not even proven itself better than PS3 and 360 yet?

I mean, do you expect Microsoft and Sony to come out with new consoles that are no better than their predecessors?

Yeah, I'm actually amazed by the wholesale Kool-aid drinking, in fact the Nintendo fanboys are worse than the SDF and their beloved PS3.

At least the latter have an on paper advantage and exotic hardware to point to - as someone else said in the thread, the expectations of Nintendo fans are continually let down by Nintendo and their relentless penny pinching (or what, in many cases, certainly seems like incompetence) and yet they remain as loyal and optimistic as ever (contrast this with the vitriolic response to the recent news hinting that the PS4 might only have an APU).

I have no idea how MDX and others think that an 8 core x86 CPU, with 8GB RAM and at least a 2TF Sea Islands based GPU is going to be only 'slightly better' than a 0.5 TF HD6670 (or similar), with 2GB of RAM and a three overclocked Broadway cores.

There's will definitely be a significant visual difference between games produced for the two.

Sure, it won't be as big a gap as last gen to this gen, but (from the BF4 leak) it'll at least be the difference between Battlefield 3 running at 1080p,60fps on Ultra with 64 players and the current versions of BF3 on consoles, running at 720p, 30 fps, with the PC equivalent of low settings.
 
The Wii U CPU is a lot better than Broadway, in fact (per wikipedia) the Power PC 7xx line doesn't support SMP so you can't put three Broadway cores together. The first CPUs in that line even came out in 1997 (w/o on die L2, introduced in 2000, and w/o SIMD which is only found on Gecko and Broadway).

Wii U CPU, whose name I forgot if we even knew it, is a 1.6GHz CPU competitive with the 3.2GHz Xenon, rumors or developer accounts said it's faster than Xenon, but with lower peak gigaflops so it's slower than Xenon too (I have no trouble telling this with a straight face :p )
 
Exactly, I see these guys on youtube talking bout "next box and PS4 wont be much better than Wii U". I'm like, how can you say that when Wii U has not even proven itself better than PS3 and 360 yet?

I mean, do you expect Microsoft and Sony to come out with new consoles that are no better than their predecessors?


The issue with many of you guys here is that you dont listen to what the industry is telling you. You prefer to place your bets on rumors and not actual info. Thats fine, you might make the right call in the end. But at least I'm not setting myself up for disappointment when I hear Sony talking about making an affordable console (WiiU price range) or when I hear developers focusing on, for example, 720p regardless how powerful a console is next gen. Thats what they are telling us. You can ignore all that at your own peril.

Same like Wii owners thinking Capcom was going to support the Wii after all those "test" games early in its lifespan. I warned people, look at Capcom's 2006 business plan, that stated clearly that Wii would not get the same type of games they had planned for the HD twins. They wanted to create a market for putting family games on one console(Wii), and mature games(PS360) on the others. But many Nintendo fans wanted to "keep hope alive" and got burned.

People need to understand that the key to winning the living room next gen is services.
Why do you think they are reserving so much ram for the OS? If people cant afford the console to access the services and games, then that business model is a disaster in the making.
 
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I have no idea how MDX and others think that an 8 core x86 CPU, with 8GB RAM and at least a 2TF Sea Islands based GPU is going to be only 'slightly better' than a 0.5 TF HD6670 (or similar), with 2GB of RAM and a three overclocked Broadway cores.

Because they probably don't believe that's what the hardware in those systems will be. If it were, then yeah it would be much more powerful.
But I don't see any of the next gen consoles with an 8-core x86 CPU (I'm betting on a 6-core something or other) or 8GB's of RAM, considering that playing most PC games on high right now don't use up more than 1-2GB's RAM. 4GB would be much more likely.
 
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