Anyone still think Wii U will "win" "next gen"?
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rockaman
Regular
No idea. I'm still wondering how WiiU and prospective WiiU owners are looking at these games.I don't sense a lot of excitement for either game browsing around. I feel more people know about Lego City right now in Western counties and EU maybe?
Dragon Quest might move more systems in Japan though. The series is really popular there. Maybe they will like the MMO through WiiU? Rather than PC how I assume most people play. I think it has to compete with PSO2 also though, but I wouldn't know how that changes anything.
Dragon Quest might move more systems in Japan though. The series is really popular there. Maybe they will like the MMO through WiiU? Rather than PC how I assume most people play. I think it has to compete with PSO2 also though, but I wouldn't know how that changes anything.
D
Deleted member 13524
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How come you quoted the first part and not the following sentences where I explained that power saving features make loads of difference even when playing games?
Ooh let's assume that it's impossible to implement power-saving functionalities into existing architectures.
I'm sorry but I think you're very confused about what happens beyond the power plug.
The power brick outputs just a single DC voltage, and so do the batteries. The "power regulators needed to convert the battery voltage to various rails on the board" need to be there if you have a power brick or a battery.
But before you get to those power MOSFETs, the power bricks have to convert an AC signal to a DC one with an efficiency of ~80%. This is a physical limit of how a rectifier circuit works, because there's always a loss occurring in the diodes and smoothing capacitor(s).
Lithium Polymer batteries output a DC signal directly. There's no AC->DC conversion, there's electro-chemical potential turned to electric potential with an estimated efficiency of 99%.
So yes, using batteries instead of a power brick would consume substantially less power than whatever is being measured at the wall with a Wii U.
Designed for battery rails??!?? What are you talking about?! The Wii U is designed for DC voltages like pretty much every electronics circuit in the planet.
Whatever comes before the voltage regulators only has an impact if you're coming from an AC signal because of the 50Hz/60Hz noise. Using a battery would only make the circuit work better.
The difference in aspect ratios would give the 3DS XL the edge in screen area. 16:10 (top 3DS XL) and 4:3 (bottom 3DS XL) has a larger area than two 16:9 screens with the same diagonal.
And the 3DS XL has to compensate in brightness for a parallax barrier, so you can't really assume that one would consume more than the other.
Let's agree to disagree.
If there's a 45% power consumption improvement in a single node transition, how much would there be in two? Your numbers present an even more optimistic situation than mine.
The GPU is 156mm^2 large. At 20nm, it would be about 40-45mm^2, working at 550MHz. I bet the Adreno 330 is larger than that at 28nm.
Again, I just disagree. sub-5W using a single 20nm SoC, plus a ~35Wh battery and 5+4" screens would be feasible IMO, using the same form factor as a 3DS XL.
The 3DS XL is about the same form factor as the Project Shield, which has batteries with the same capacity as a 10.1" tablet, along with a SoC that actually needs active cooling. And its supposed battery life is quite good for gaming too.
Not as a handheld but as a handheld+home console hybrid.
It seems you failed to read the part where I said that the console would have to be bundled with a wireless HDMI (mirroring the top screen)+ wireless sensor bar. That way it would keep all the original functionality.
The only difference is that the games would be running in the handheld instead of a separate box, retaining full software compatibility.
2014 will probably be crawling with >256GB SD cards, so physical media shouldn't be a problem.
A powerful handheld with 2 screens and an appealing software lineup with Nintendo exclusives? Count me in!
Yes, that's the one thing I'd put aside for a more realistic option.
Again: I don't think Nintendo will do this. They won't. They're too arrogant to change their path, even if it leads them to becoming irrelevant and/or bankrupt.
The problem is also that the hardware isn't as appealing as the original Wii and the hardware performance isn't going to make up for it.
We don't know what exact specs the WiiU has, but it can't have more than the current generation consoles.
In that sense I see it struggling in the future with ports.
There aren't enough programmers in the world to make any demanding game run good on that little box.
I addressed what you said even if I didn't quote it. You're assuming that the load power consumption will go down but you have no empirical data to back it up. High end PCs have a much broader dynamic range for power consumption because their CPUs can work a lot harder than is necessary for most games, and their GPUs also have huge peak FLOP capabilities that are difficult to fully extract in real world software. We don't know exactly what the GPU's capabilities are but I doubt it has extremes anything like high end discrete cards.
You think that the 33W Wii U is its Furmark scenario and it'd use a lot less if better regulated. But what does this actually mean? That there's a significant percentage of the GPU blocks that should be clock gated or even power gated, but aren't? That it can still achieve the same performance while running at a lower clock speed and voltage? This is all baseless.
Even if power consumption under real world heavy load scenarios is much higher than it could be with the same fundamental architecture, which is some serious wishful thinking, it raises the serious question of why Nintendo didn't have it done this way in the first place. It's not hard to see why they'd neglect performance during the menu, because they don't expect the user to be sitting in the menu that long and the impact to their power bill isn't that great anyway. What they do care about, and what they stressed repeatedly, is the cooling requirements for the system, determined by load conditions, which would absolutely be the limiter for a handheld version. They at least say the cooling on Wii U was a design challenge for them (probably due to inexperience, but that doesn't change anything), so wouldn't they have taken reasonable steps to make the power requirements as low as they could?
It could just be that they couldn't do any better, but then how are they going to be able to for a handheld?
First of all, a quick look at efficiency ratings for 75W AC/DC convertors shows that it's easy to get ones that are > 90% (down to 12V DC). I don't know how good Wii U's is but unless you have an actual rating or measurement you can't just assume it's 80%.
The other major issue is you're acting like DC is DC when it comes to efficiency loss, when the voltage it's converted to by the AC to DC regulator vs whatever the main PMIC or other regulator circuits on a handheld are probably not going to be the same. Without knowing what these circuits go to we can't really do a comparison at all. But I do know a handheld has more diverse voltage requirements because of the LCD backlighting, unless the disc drive needs comparably high voltage rails (and we're talking about ditching optical media on the handheld)
This is what I mean by you acting like "DC" vs "AC" is all there is to it. There's a huge difference between regulating a 3.7V or 7.2V battery to 5V, 3.3V, 1.5V, 1V, etc..
As already mentioned, you can convert 120V AC to 12V DC at about 90% efficiency. A switching regulator over a > 50% voltage drop can easily take you down to low 90s for DC to DC conversion, and AFAIK a boost regulator is worse (if, for instance, you have to go up to 12V, which your handheld battery will probably not supply). So it's not like AC to DC is a huge cost in efficiency vs DC to DC being a negligible one. Without knowing what voltages are actually needed by the system we can't do a great analysis.
"They're not really smaller" means they're about the same, I'm not splitting hairs over this like you want to.
Trying to find some figures for how much turning 3D off saves battery life but I'm struggling..
Suffice it to say many would agree 3DS's battery life is too damn low, but that hasn't stopped it from selling :/
You said yourself 1W for the screens. What are you even disagreeing with when I said "at least 1W"?
... you said a THREE TIMES improvement. It'd be about a 2.1x improvement. Not everything is up for a shrink so that wouldn't apply to the entire power budget. Nonetheless, the figure I gave of 15W is already less than half what it consumes.
Have you ever looked at actual scaling numbers? I've never seen anything shrink that much between two nodes. Realistic expectations are for it to be around half the size.
And I think you're wrong about Adreno 330.
So a 6.6x reduction in power consumption from savings in power regulation which aren't nearly as high as you think, node shrinks which will give you ~2x optimistically (power savings have been going down with shrinks save for major technology changes, you'd probably get something from HKMG here though), dropping the disk drive, and improvements in power efficiency which you're hand-waving by looking at what it doesn't save under idle loads and comparing it with FurMark (which you give 50% reduction). Even if the latter really is a comparable datapoint there's no way that's going to bring you down to sub 5W. There's no way I can see this as anything more than a flight of fancy.
And a 35Wh in 3DS XL form factor is also pretty outrageous. This isn't sporting the form factor of Project Shield. I can't think of a single device that crams such a huge battery into such a small form factor. Open Pandora has a much larger battery than its contemporary devices and it isn't even half the capacity you spec despite being about the same size and form factor you want, but significantly thicker (in no small part due to the battery)
And Nintendo is king of undersized batteries, this is just nuts..
Not true at all, Project Shield is much, much, much thicker than 3DS XL (and a fairly different shape). Or is thickness immaterial to what you refer to as form factor?
Not as a handheld but as a handheld+home console hybrid.
You're right, I did fail to read that
Is wireless HDMI something a lot of TVs support, or do you need a receiver for it? How much power does that take? That's a pretty high bandwidth signal to pump out over the wire, I can't believe the power cost is negligible..
Nonetheless, if this needs to be used as a home console to hit its main selling points then is turning it into a handheld hybrid really the thing that would make it market viable?
They're $400 now. There will probably be more of them available in 2014 but they're not going to be cheap enough to render media "not a problem." I don't have any graphs of SD card pricing but I don't see any realistic chance of 256GB SD cards dropping below $100 at any point in 2014. For an SD card to enter territory of cheap enough to be moot for a storage it's going to have to be under $50, I would say.
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No. I think WiiU sales will remain flat.
Billy Idol
Legend
Lol, I told you so, girls are the new focus:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/money/4871224/PlayStation-4-to-appeal-to-women-too.html
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
Colonial Marines cancelled for the Wii U:
http://kotaku.com/sega-cancels-aliens-colonial-marines-on-wii-u-470877248
This comes after gearbox's claims that the Wii U's version would look better than the PS360 because of "more modern tech".
One could think they could take advantage of this second opportunity to redeem themselves and offer a superior product that could clean gearbox's name somewhat and bring some life into the Wii U.
Guess what? The Wii U has become that much irrelevant.
http://kotaku.com/sega-cancels-aliens-colonial-marines-on-wii-u-470877248
This comes after gearbox's claims that the Wii U's version would look better than the PS360 because of "more modern tech".
One could think they could take advantage of this second opportunity to redeem themselves and offer a superior product that could clean gearbox's name somewhat and bring some life into the Wii U.
Guess what? The Wii U has become that much irrelevant.
So a company cancels a port for Wii U but makes sure to say they have a bunch of other good stuff in the pipeline for the platform.. :/
If they can't stand behind a port which they've surely already put money towards then how do they justify future Wii U projects? Do they have other stuff to port that they think will sell a lot more? I heard this game is pretty bad (and metacritic gives the same impression), is that the real problem? Maybe their sales prospects were much higher prior to the gaming press having buried it.
If they can't stand behind a port which they've surely already put money towards then how do they justify future Wii U projects? Do they have other stuff to port that they think will sell a lot more? I heard this game is pretty bad (and metacritic gives the same impression), is that the real problem? Maybe their sales prospects were much higher prior to the gaming press having buried it.
Ninjaprime
Regular
Yeah, I'm sure the new "worst game of all time" would totally add to Wii U's relevance.
Sunk money is spent, and should have no bearing on whether you move forwards with a release.
You have to decide if the projected sales are worth the additional investment in development sales and marketing etc. to release, clearly in this case they didn't think they were.
Yeah, I guess I got caught up in the old sunken cost fallacy, good thing corporations are more rational than I am
Although there are probably some good examples where they weren't..Still, there's got to be some outside merit in not cancelling projects, you'd think that hurts morale (unless the people working on it weren't very happy about it to begin with). Maybe not so much with a port.
Anyway, I think I could have probably phrased that differently to make a less invalid point - the cost to bring a partially developed port to market will usually be less than the cost to bring one with no development. So the latter would be a larger investment that they'd have to decide on making at a later point. I guess they really could stand to make a much better seller than Aliens: Colonial Marines.
Aliens has been universally panned. Sales must have been pretty poor, I expect. Forecasts for a terrible game on a platform with a small install base are likely a bit pants. Better to invest the money in games that'll sell well on the platform. If it were me, I'd be trying to guess what the Wii U owners want and cater to that niche, rather than hoping they'll buy ports of PS360 games. (Okay, if it really was me making the decisions, I wouldn't be backing Wii U with a single cent.
)Everything Nesh said is 100% true. Wii U is what the Wii would have been if it had been a direct successor to the Gamecube. It's basically everything the hardcore gamers claimed they wanted Revolution to be (but still wouldn't have bought) five years too late. Let's add another thing:
Q: What game was used to sell the Wii?
A: A simple sports game with friendly, yet age- and gender-neutral graphics. There was no Mario branding no chibi aesthetic, nothing like that. Everyone knows what tennis and bowling are. How fun!
Q: What game did Nintendo try to sell the Wii U with?
A: A game based on a Nintendo nostalgia theme park. Nintendo mascots and branding were shoved in your face, nobody had any idea what the hell the game really was, and it had an aesthetic somewhere between "Santa's workshop" and "a nursery."
They're hoping Wind Waker and Pikmin will lift the sales out of the doldrums. I remember the last console where Wind Waker and Pikmin were the flagship titles.
Q: What game was used to sell the Wii?
A: A simple sports game with friendly, yet age- and gender-neutral graphics. There was no Mario branding no chibi aesthetic, nothing like that. Everyone knows what tennis and bowling are. How fun!
Q: What game did Nintendo try to sell the Wii U with?
A: A game based on a Nintendo nostalgia theme park. Nintendo mascots and branding were shoved in your face, nobody had any idea what the hell the game really was, and it had an aesthetic somewhere between "Santa's workshop" and "a nursery."
They're hoping Wind Waker and Pikmin will lift the sales out of the doldrums. I remember the last console where Wind Waker and Pikmin were the flagship titles.
Now that we heard the ps4 and 360 specs (or what they could be) as well as what the cost of such hardware could (+400$ seems a given for the ps4 and wee heard possibly 500$ for durango, at would think that price will be matched with the lowest possible price for both system being 449$), I can't help but being even more baffled by Nintendo choices for the WiiU, they had a one year head start, putting together a potent but affordable system was doable, they had a good shot at reclaiming budget core gamers. I don't think with the price of wafer and new lithography being higher and higher that MSFT or Sony will have a shot to lower significantly the price of their (new) hardware anytime soon. Nintendo could have secure for it self what could be a significant niche in the ~250$ price range.
I think Pachter makes a lot of sense about Nintendo in those two videos:
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/...ardware-business-makes-no-sense-for-nintendo-
and
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/k6keit/pach-attack--why-pay-ahead-of-time-
(third part of the vid).
I think Pachter makes a lot of sense about Nintendo in those two videos:
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/...ardware-business-makes-no-sense-for-nintendo-
and
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/k6keit/pach-attack--why-pay-ahead-of-time-
(third part of the vid).
The $500 durango rumor is from some off comment Paul Thurrott said. Good lord, there's a reason why you shouldn't believe everything you read on the Internet.
It is no matter a matter of believing, I also said that 449$ /+400$ sounds right for both systems.
Instead of personal attack how much do you think the system could cost without a subscription?
We speak of I think a 350-400mm^2 chip on a expansive process (TSMC 28nm HP process), a significant cooling solution (I would put the tdp for the SOc alone in the 80/90Watts), 8 GB of pretty fast DDR3, a mobo +southbridge +wifi+ethernet, etc. , the psu, Kinect 2, a 500 GB HDD, a controller, and BRD, may some flash for low power operation.
Sorry, I didn't meant to make a personal attack, I just think the Internet accepts things too readily.
As for the price without subscription, it'll be $399. While the actual cost of the hardware will play some role, because consoles have almost always fealty with $50 increments at the start, the options for the base SKU are simple: $299, $349, $399, $449, and $499. Right away, the $299 and $349 SKUs make little sense, we know even Nintendo is struggling to profit at those price points with far weaker hardware. $449 and $499 for a base SKU is ludicrous, no one wants to pull a PS3 again. $399 really is the sweet spot. Compared to the price of an updated 361 that will continue to be sold at $249 with hard drive, it's a good distance away to indicate a difference in value while not leaving any money on the table (some people will indeed continue to buy 360 consoles). However much the lose at that price doesn't matter to the end customer.
The actual interesting question isn't "what will the price unsubsidized be" but how what is the business model to sell them subsidized? Bundling the console with Xbox Live like the 360 had is uninteresting to most people, but stick in TV, movie and music content? Quite a revelation. And if Microsoft actually arranges everything correctly, their install base will only be limited by their production lines, much like the Wii during late-2006 through 2007.
I'm dubious about MSFT having multiple SKU this time around, some leaks makes clear that at least at some point Durango was to be "disk free" I mean the game got installed and then the disk is no longer needed during gameplay. Games are to be on BRD and the size is too big for flash to be an option, if there are SKU they all going to have a healthy HDD.
Then there the leak about Kinect being part of every SKU.
Overall without new information I don't see on which aspect of the design could make cut to have different SKU in a significantly different price brackets as they did with the 360.
I do agree that 399$ is a sexy price tag but 449$ for example is not that much more.
The problem I see is that this neither Sony or MSFT should benefit from rapid decrease in BOM through shrink/hardware revision.
That is why I was wondering elsewhere if they could redesign the 360 (more than a shrink) to have a compliant low end SKU ( I think they definitely can, software/BC is the real issue here).
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