Some years ago I feard for that to happen to nintendo. Now, I wish for it just like you. Just hope it can happen without ruining the quality of their studios as well.
1 Million Tears or Why the Wii U is Weak *SPAWN*
- Thread starter artstyledev
- Start date
Some years ago I feard for that to happen to nintendo. Now, I wish for it just like you. Just hope it can happen without ruining the quality of their studios as well.
I wonder how Nintendo titles would sell if made available for other platforms. They'd hit a wider market and you'd expect the fans to still buy them, although there'd be a disappointing number of people who refuse to buy Nintendo games that aren't on a Nintendo console.
I guess the real hitch is that Nintendo wouldn't get to design games around special new peripherals anymore.
Not that I think it'll ever happen. Nintendo has practically verbally guaranteed that they'd never do it. The biggest obstacle may well be their pride.
I guess the real hitch is that Nintendo wouldn't get to design games around special new peripherals anymore.
Not that I think it'll ever happen. Nintendo has practically verbally guaranteed that they'd never do it. The biggest obstacle may well be their pride.
(((interference)))
Veteran
I'm sure SEGA also felt the same way at one point.
That's hard to call. I don't think Sonic has sold anything like as much cross-platform as it did on SEGA machines, but then it's a pretty old idea. could just be the franchise had burnt itself out. Regards Mario, would Nintendo gamers stop playing console games if there was no Nintendo console? I can see an argument for Nintendo and Sony to team up. PS would do very well with the Nintendo IP, and overall it's massively strengthen the Japanese gaming position methinks. PS HW sales would be equivalent to PS+Nintendo, give or take. We'd have seen PS3 launch with Move and PS/Mario Sports, sold 150 million by now, and command developer attention. That's also bring more 3rd parties on board with whatever control ideas Nintendo introduce. Of course, such a partnership would probably be the opposite of the ideal, with both parties getting in each others way rather than both bringing their strongest elements together.
It's not a matter of pride. It's just smart - their businessmodel lives by designing a 'toy', and Nintendo's realisation that the attraction comes from a combination of hardware and software. This is what they are good at, and what gives them a unique and solid corner of the market. And by targeting a young audience, they can reuse their content every few years with not too many changes, while trying to expand the market and keep up with competition with innovations, and at the same time design hardware that also looks like it is suitable for all ages (designed to look like a toy).
Not saying any of these things are set in stone, but look at the success of the 3DS - it's success is clearly a matter of building on their own platform and keeping to the sensibilities of their target audience, combined with having their own exclusive software that everyone has grown up with (this is also why they are weaker in Europe - they entered our market later, and didn't do as good a job here as some other companies did.
Persistantthug
Newcomer
This won't happen....or rather, this won't happen anytime soon.
Why?
Because while I have been predicting the Wii U to be a failure, and one that will eventually push Nintendo out of home console hardware manufacturing, it shouldn't be forgotten that Nintendo still has handhelds. And to be honest, Nintendo putting all/most of it's artsy-cartoon'ish franchises on a "lower powered" future handheld device is actually right up their alley. Overall it would probably be better for Nintendo if it does go down like that, with less cost expenditures for both hardware, and for software design. And since many people/analysts are predicting the eventual demise of home consoles anyways......in a strange turn of events, this could turn into Nintendo being further along, insight-wise, than it's competitors Sony and Microsoft.
It's not a matter of pride if Nintendo continues with a successful business model. It is a matter of pride if they say they will never do this regardless of how their consoles are doing. It sounded like they would sooner accept bankruptcy than even consider this option.
Sigfried1977
Legend
I think Sega's own software offerings simply lost their appeal when the last century came to a close. Even though their arcade games continued to be just as good if not better than they always were, people simply stopped giving a shit about arcades in general. During the PSone and DC era, a console that could play quality ports of arcade games was a huge deal to a great many people. Not anymore. Sonic's fate was similar. He's your typical 90s era mascot platformer with a 'tude. This worked well way back when, but today it's just cringe-worthy. As a matter of fact the entire company carried that image: Sega branded itself as the Nintendo alternative for the cool kids.
Nintendo's stuff is simply a lot more timeless.
freezamite
Banned
Now that the WiiU has been confirmed as one of the most catastrophic launches this industry has ever had, and a complete failure on every measurable level (sales and software library), it's time to put things into perspective hardware-wise.
In terms of CPU power, we have ALL the information we need to analyse it thanks to the clocks and the official document that has been filtrated to the public.
It basically is a CPU made of three Gekko cores (yes, same technology as GameCube era, which already was an archaic architecture even when it launched back in 2001) at 1.24Ghz.
Looking at Gekko specs, we know it's maximum floating point capability is only of 1.9GFlops.
Doing simple maths, we also know that WiiUs CPU is only at 14.25 GFlops... MAXIMUM. We are not talking of real world performance (even if it was, those are some shameful numbers even by 2005 standards), we are talking of maximum theoretical performance.
In comparison, Xbox 360 maximum theoretical performance is at 115.2 GFlops... but as we all know, this is not an apples to apples comparison.
As I said, WiiUs processor is a PowerPC G3 (1997 tech) which of course, is really far from achieving those absolutely inflated 14.25GFlops of maximum peak performance, while on the other hand, Xenon on the Xbox 360 was blatant new for 2005 standards. Of course, that doesn't mean that those 115.2 GFlops are achieved on in-game scenarios, but because of the 10 years leap in technology between those processors, results are obviously far better on Microsoft's console.
Those 14.25GFlops will translate, at the very best, into a real achievable performance of 5GFlops, while performances of over 75% have been achieved on may games on the Xbox360.
Man, we are looking at a difference of between 10-20 times of more capacity on the Xbox360 processor. That's absolutely huge no matter how you look at it.
The other thing we know for sure is the absolutely poor bandwidth of the main RAM. It's simply DDR3 memory (not even GDDR3, but the obsolete and high latency DDR3) with a 64-bit bus (Xbox 360 has a 128-bit bus) at only 800Mhz. Half the bandwidth of 360, even less if we consider that while Xbox 360 could simultaneously read and write on it (11.2GB/s for each) in case of necessity, WiiU can only read, or write.
If on top of that, we add the amazingly HUGE latencies of this memory (by far the cheapest on sale) we have a really weird scenario, of a console that will perform, at the very best, between the first Xbox and the Xbox 360.
Yes, there will be no Halo 4 or Gears of War 3 on the WiiU, and nothing that will compare to those games from a technical perspective. That's a fact, and sorry if someone doesn't like how it sounds, but that's how it is.
The only piece of hardware that it's still a mystery is the GPU. But even with all the secrecy Nintendo has had around that, we still have some official information about it.
Firstly, it's an amazingly small piece of hardware. A tablet-sized GPU of less than 160mm^2 (157mm^2 in fact)... fabricated at a 45nm process technology (confirmed by IBM itself on the CPU, and GPU it's obviously the same to maintain manufacture costs below minimum).
Compared to the 22nm most mobile phones use nowadays, or the Orbis/Durango will be using in less than a year, it would translate into a 39,5mm^2 chip. Yes, as you see, absolutely shameful. But we also have to deduce several mm^2 of logic that are used on other things besides the GPU, because as you surely know, the GPU chip on the WiiU has the GPU, some eDram, a multi-core ARM chip, the DSP and some additional logic to transfer the video to the PAD.
So those 157mm^2 of "GPU" at the very best will be something in the ballpark of 70-80mm^2 of real GPU, being the other logic spent on meaningless things like video decoders to stream video to the pad (and who the hell exactly wants to stream video on a gamepad, when we can play in a 52" 1080p TV) or eDram to compensate for the non-existent bandwidth between main memory and the MCM.
For comparison, Xenos was a 190 mm^2 chip without counting the daughter die, which not only included 10MB of eDram (I don't think WiiU will have anything compared to that) but also some other logic which performed the most expensive (in terms of bandwidth) operations, so this logic has to be considered as part of the main chip. Total Xenos size was of 260mm^2 more or less, of which at least 220mm^2 were logic dedicated to the GPU.
But this was on a 90nm process, and to be fair, we have to compare it to an equivalent of 45nm process to make the comparison an apples to apples one.
If we consider that in real world, process reduction NEVER works at mathematically perfect numbers, we would be at the 120-130mm^2 range. Yes, that's DOUBLE what the WiiU has, and nearly at the same speed.
Iwata also told us something more. The ancient Wii technology found on the GC and Wii GPUs is also integrated on the WiiU GPU. This means that in order to assure backwards compatibility, WiiU's GPU performance per mm^2 is at Wii levels instead of being at least at Xbox 360 levels or more.
Yes, things have to be done "a la wii" on the WiiU, specially regarding its prehistoric pixel-shaders (also called TEV), with the limits this technology imposes to programers. The fixed T&L unit can be emulated through normal vertex shader code, so I don't think this is any impediment in terms of technology used.
We also know it's clock: 549Mhz. Same speed than PS3's RSX (550Mhz) and a bit higher than Xeno's 500Mhz.
With all that in mind, it's nothing surprising that most third parties doesn't even bother to port their games. I mean, even UbiSoft, which have been the best supporters of the system and have put their best studios at re-engineering their graphic engines to work at more than optimal conditions, have been incapable of running perfect ports of their games, and even their biggest AAA on the system, an exclusively designed from the ground-up game taking advantage of the most intricate and advanced software tricks known to date to squeeze the maximum performance of the system, isn't even average in terms of graphical showcase in comparison to 360 or PS3.
Disappointing must be the only word capable of describing my feeling towards this system, and looking at the disastrous sales it had around the world (even in Japan an almost-death system like the Vita has seen a 300% increase in sales compared to previous week, while WiiU has seen it's already low sales DECREASED), I'm not the only one who thinks this way.
In terms of CPU power, we have ALL the information we need to analyse it thanks to the clocks and the official document that has been filtrated to the public.
It basically is a CPU made of three Gekko cores (yes, same technology as GameCube era, which already was an archaic architecture even when it launched back in 2001) at 1.24Ghz.
Looking at Gekko specs, we know it's maximum floating point capability is only of 1.9GFlops.
Doing simple maths, we also know that WiiUs CPU is only at 14.25 GFlops... MAXIMUM. We are not talking of real world performance (even if it was, those are some shameful numbers even by 2005 standards), we are talking of maximum theoretical performance.
In comparison, Xbox 360 maximum theoretical performance is at 115.2 GFlops... but as we all know, this is not an apples to apples comparison.
As I said, WiiUs processor is a PowerPC G3 (1997 tech) which of course, is really far from achieving those absolutely inflated 14.25GFlops of maximum peak performance, while on the other hand, Xenon on the Xbox 360 was blatant new for 2005 standards. Of course, that doesn't mean that those 115.2 GFlops are achieved on in-game scenarios, but because of the 10 years leap in technology between those processors, results are obviously far better on Microsoft's console.
Those 14.25GFlops will translate, at the very best, into a real achievable performance of 5GFlops, while performances of over 75% have been achieved on may games on the Xbox360.
Man, we are looking at a difference of between 10-20 times of more capacity on the Xbox360 processor. That's absolutely huge no matter how you look at it.
The other thing we know for sure is the absolutely poor bandwidth of the main RAM. It's simply DDR3 memory (not even GDDR3, but the obsolete and high latency DDR3) with a 64-bit bus (Xbox 360 has a 128-bit bus) at only 800Mhz. Half the bandwidth of 360, even less if we consider that while Xbox 360 could simultaneously read and write on it (11.2GB/s for each) in case of necessity, WiiU can only read, or write.
If on top of that, we add the amazingly HUGE latencies of this memory (by far the cheapest on sale) we have a really weird scenario, of a console that will perform, at the very best, between the first Xbox and the Xbox 360.
Yes, there will be no Halo 4 or Gears of War 3 on the WiiU, and nothing that will compare to those games from a technical perspective. That's a fact, and sorry if someone doesn't like how it sounds, but that's how it is.
The only piece of hardware that it's still a mystery is the GPU. But even with all the secrecy Nintendo has had around that, we still have some official information about it.
Firstly, it's an amazingly small piece of hardware. A tablet-sized GPU of less than 160mm^2 (157mm^2 in fact)... fabricated at a 45nm process technology (confirmed by IBM itself on the CPU, and GPU it's obviously the same to maintain manufacture costs below minimum).
Compared to the 22nm most mobile phones use nowadays, or the Orbis/Durango will be using in less than a year, it would translate into a 39,5mm^2 chip. Yes, as you see, absolutely shameful. But we also have to deduce several mm^2 of logic that are used on other things besides the GPU, because as you surely know, the GPU chip on the WiiU has the GPU, some eDram, a multi-core ARM chip, the DSP and some additional logic to transfer the video to the PAD.
So those 157mm^2 of "GPU" at the very best will be something in the ballpark of 70-80mm^2 of real GPU, being the other logic spent on meaningless things like video decoders to stream video to the pad (and who the hell exactly wants to stream video on a gamepad, when we can play in a 52" 1080p TV) or eDram to compensate for the non-existent bandwidth between main memory and the MCM.
For comparison, Xenos was a 190 mm^2 chip without counting the daughter die, which not only included 10MB of eDram (I don't think WiiU will have anything compared to that) but also some other logic which performed the most expensive (in terms of bandwidth) operations, so this logic has to be considered as part of the main chip. Total Xenos size was of 260mm^2 more or less, of which at least 220mm^2 were logic dedicated to the GPU.
But this was on a 90nm process, and to be fair, we have to compare it to an equivalent of 45nm process to make the comparison an apples to apples one.
If we consider that in real world, process reduction NEVER works at mathematically perfect numbers, we would be at the 120-130mm^2 range. Yes, that's DOUBLE what the WiiU has, and nearly at the same speed.
Iwata also told us something more. The ancient Wii technology found on the GC and Wii GPUs is also integrated on the WiiU GPU. This means that in order to assure backwards compatibility, WiiU's GPU performance per mm^2 is at Wii levels instead of being at least at Xbox 360 levels or more.
Yes, things have to be done "a la wii" on the WiiU, specially regarding its prehistoric pixel-shaders (also called TEV), with the limits this technology imposes to programers. The fixed T&L unit can be emulated through normal vertex shader code, so I don't think this is any impediment in terms of technology used.
We also know it's clock: 549Mhz. Same speed than PS3's RSX (550Mhz) and a bit higher than Xeno's 500Mhz.
With all that in mind, it's nothing surprising that most third parties doesn't even bother to port their games. I mean, even UbiSoft, which have been the best supporters of the system and have put their best studios at re-engineering their graphic engines to work at more than optimal conditions, have been incapable of running perfect ports of their games, and even their biggest AAA on the system, an exclusively designed from the ground-up game taking advantage of the most intricate and advanced software tricks known to date to squeeze the maximum performance of the system, isn't even average in terms of graphical showcase in comparison to 360 or PS3.
Disappointing must be the only word capable of describing my feeling towards this system, and looking at the disastrous sales it had around the world (even in Japan an almost-death system like the Vita has seen a 300% increase in sales compared to previous week, while WiiU has seen it's already low sales DECREASED), I'm not the only one who thinks this way.
I thought RSX was known to be 500MHz since the PS3's launch.
You've made too many assumptions freezamite. Manufacturing process of GPU is unknown. eDRAM speed is unknown, as is eDRAM architecture. You're halving of the GPU's die size based on arbitrary ancillary costs is no good for real understanding of the hardware. I don't know of any confirmation ofthe CPU architecture.
If you look at the sum of your conclusions, Wii U should be a fraction of an XB360. You reckon it has half the graphical silicon and a less powerful CPU, and it has less bandwidth. You even claim its hardware architecture is limited to Wii (GC) levels for BC. How can it render the same games to a similar standard if it's that inferior?
You're as far in the negative direction as others are in believing there's hidden power. For all Wii U's faults, it isn't as poorly engineered as you suggest as evidenced in its visual output.
If you look at the sum of your conclusions, Wii U should be a fraction of an XB360. You reckon it has half the graphical silicon and a less powerful CPU, and it has less bandwidth. You even claim its hardware architecture is limited to Wii (GC) levels for BC. How can it render the same games to a similar standard if it's that inferior?
You're as far in the negative direction as others are in believing there's hidden power. For all Wii U's faults, it isn't as poorly engineered as you suggest as evidenced in its visual output.
Could you tell me more about this leaked official document?
According to my calculations, you are about 2.5 times angrier than I am. The WiiU doesn't look THAT bad.
Undoubtedly IMO.
freezamite
Banned
Well, regarding the CPU, the document I was referring to was the one that gave us those numbers:
Hardware Features
Main Application Processor
PowerPC architecture.
Three cores (fully coherent).
3MB aggregate L2 Cache size.
core 0: 512 KB
core 1: 2048 KB
core 2: 512 KB
Write gatherer per core.
Locked (L1d) cache DMA per core.
Main Memory
Up to 3GB of main memory (CAT-DEVs only). Note: retail machine will have half devkit memory
Please note that the quantity of memory available from the Cafe SDK and Operating System may vary.
Graphics and Video
Modern unified shader architecture.
32MB high-bandwidth eDRAM, supports 720p 4x MSAA or 1080p rendering in a single pass.
HDMI and component video outputs.
Features
Unified shader architecture executes vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
Read from multi-sample surfaces in the shader
128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
Indexed cube map arrays
8 render targets
Independent blend modes per render target
Pixel coverage sample masking
Hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
Early Z test and Fast Z Clear
Lossless Z & stencil compression
2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes
sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
Tessellation unit
Stream out support
Compute shader support
GX2 is a 3D graphics API for the Nintendo Wii U system (also known as Cafe). The API is designed to be as efficient as GX(1) from the Nintendo GameCube and Wii systems. Current features are modeled after OpenGL and the AMD r7xx series of graphics processors. Wii U’s graphics processor is referred to as GPU7.
Sound and Audio
Dedicated 120MHz audio DSP.
Support for 6 channel discrete uncompressed audio (via HDMI).
2 channel audio for the Cafe DRC controller.
Monaural audio for the Cafe Remote controller.
Networking
802.11 b/g/n Wifi.
Peripherals
2 x USB 2.0 host controllers x 2 ports each.
SDCard Slot.
Built-in Storage
512MB SLC NAND for System.
8GB MLC NAND for Applications.
Host PC Bridge
Dedicated Cafe-to-host PC bridge hardware.
Allows File System emulation by host PC.
Provides interface for debugger and logging to host PC.
Then one insider in neogaf said CPU was 3 Broadways (which in fact, are overclocked Gekkos) with more caché and running at a speed much more close to Wii CPU than Xbox 360 CPU.
The leaked 1.24Ghz and the small size of the CPU confirmed those rumours.
Then about the GPU, well, it's true that I may have done too much assumptions, but it's also true that thos 158 mm^2 include 32MB of eDram, DSP, ARM and maybe some other processors. I don't think the DSP takes more than 1 or 2 mm^2 of area, but 32MB of RAM and the logic behind it should take at least 50-60 mm^2. Add 3 or 4 mm^2 for each core of the ARM chip and you have more or less the numbers I posted.
Then we also know that backwards compatibility is integrated on the chip in a way that it can perform Wii's operations the way it did. That means that it can't be that much modern of a chip, because Wii had an obsolete architecture even by the time it was released.
Regards!
Hardware Features
Main Application Processor
PowerPC architecture.
Three cores (fully coherent).
3MB aggregate L2 Cache size.
core 0: 512 KB
core 1: 2048 KB
core 2: 512 KB
Write gatherer per core.
Locked (L1d) cache DMA per core.
Main Memory
Up to 3GB of main memory (CAT-DEVs only). Note: retail machine will have half devkit memory
Please note that the quantity of memory available from the Cafe SDK and Operating System may vary.
Graphics and Video
Modern unified shader architecture.
32MB high-bandwidth eDRAM, supports 720p 4x MSAA or 1080p rendering in a single pass.
HDMI and component video outputs.
Features
Unified shader architecture executes vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
Read from multi-sample surfaces in the shader
128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
Indexed cube map arrays
8 render targets
Independent blend modes per render target
Pixel coverage sample masking
Hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
Early Z test and Fast Z Clear
Lossless Z & stencil compression
2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes
sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
Tessellation unit
Stream out support
Compute shader support
GX2 is a 3D graphics API for the Nintendo Wii U system (also known as Cafe). The API is designed to be as efficient as GX(1) from the Nintendo GameCube and Wii systems. Current features are modeled after OpenGL and the AMD r7xx series of graphics processors. Wii U’s graphics processor is referred to as GPU7.
Sound and Audio
Dedicated 120MHz audio DSP.
Support for 6 channel discrete uncompressed audio (via HDMI).
2 channel audio for the Cafe DRC controller.
Monaural audio for the Cafe Remote controller.
Networking
802.11 b/g/n Wifi.
Peripherals
2 x USB 2.0 host controllers x 2 ports each.
SDCard Slot.
Built-in Storage
512MB SLC NAND for System.
8GB MLC NAND for Applications.
Host PC Bridge
Dedicated Cafe-to-host PC bridge hardware.
Allows File System emulation by host PC.
Provides interface for debugger and logging to host PC.
Then one insider in neogaf said CPU was 3 Broadways (which in fact, are overclocked Gekkos) with more caché and running at a speed much more close to Wii CPU than Xbox 360 CPU.
The leaked 1.24Ghz and the small size of the CPU confirmed those rumours.
Then about the GPU, well, it's true that I may have done too much assumptions, but it's also true that thos 158 mm^2 include 32MB of eDram, DSP, ARM and maybe some other processors. I don't think the DSP takes more than 1 or 2 mm^2 of area, but 32MB of RAM and the logic behind it should take at least 50-60 mm^2. Add 3 or 4 mm^2 for each core of the ARM chip and you have more or less the numbers I posted.
Then we also know that backwards compatibility is integrated on the chip in a way that it can perform Wii's operations the way it did. That means that it can't be that much modern of a chip, because Wii had an obsolete architecture even by the time it was released.
Regards!