High Voltage Software's Quantum3 Engine for Wii

[Color me Dan]

fearsomepirate, I should probably have said "About Doom 3 on the Xbox I think that port suffered from a lot of things not >just< tied to the hardware but rather to how it was done >too<."

I just mentioned Doom 3 as a general example to build on Tchocks comment on it and my idea and understanding of ports. looking at a few xbox screens right now it looks better then I remember actually. My point was along the line that with ports you always have to make concessions and weight things against each other. I wonder if they can port Doom3 to the Wii actually... more memory would solve the "low res textures" issue for Tchock, wouldn't it? It'd be a lot of work though since Wii doesn't use "shaders" in the PC or Xbox sense.

fearsomepirate, you work in the games industry right don't you? (or did I misstake you for someone else?). What would you from your perspective see as the biggest hurdle in the way for graphically "intense" games on the Wii and the lack thereof up until now? Not enough good tools? not enough understanding of the hardware etc? The guys who are making Conduit have figured it out somehow and there must be a reason for there being few other developers doing it. My personal guess goes to different publisher priorities and pressures considering revenue.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I wonder if they can port Doom3 to the Wii actually

Wii lacks programmable vertex units, and its CPU lacks a vector unit, which means the stencil shadows you saw everywhere are probably not possible. So the answer is most likely "no."

fearsomepirate, you work in the games industry right don't you?

Aerospace industry. I'm just a game console enthusiast.

What would you from your perspective see as the biggest hurdle in the way for graphically "intense" games on the Wii and the lack thereof up until now?

Supply and demand. Publishers do not perceive a demand for games that push the limits of the Wii hardware, so they don't invest the time or money to do so. If they thought that relatively graphically intense games would result in bigger profits, they'd probably invest in them. But since the average Wii owner probably already does not care very much about graphics, why bother? The basic mentality is that if a gamer is interested at all in graphics, he'll be playing on a 360 or PS3.

 

[Flux]

Wii lacks programmable vertex units, and its CPU lacks a vector unit, which means the stencil shadows you saw everywhere are probably not possible. So the answer is most likely "no."



Aerospace industry. I'm just a game console enthusiast.



Supply and demand. Publishers do not perceive a demand for games that push the limits of the Wii hardware, so they don't invest the time or money to do so. If they thought that relatively graphically intense games would result in bigger profits, they'd probably invest in them. But since the average Wii owner probably already does not care very much about graphics, why bother? The basic mentality is that if a gamer is interested at all in graphics, he'll be playing on a 360 or PS3.

Why did that aproach won the current console sales race?

 

[Color me Dan]

Aerospace industry. I'm just a game console enthusiast.

I mistook you for another guy, I'm sorry. You're still more knowledgeable then me so it really doesn't matter . I'm very (very) bad with names, so it's nothing personal. I didn't know the Wii lacked the vector unit, or forgot about it. With regards to different ways of rendering shadows there must be more ways then stencil shadows available for the Wii that give a similar result which does not depend on said and lacking features? I'm not talking Doom 3, just inquiring on the tech.

I think if you read fearsomepirates post he gave you the answer Flux, unless I'm missing something in your question.

 

[Nesh]

Why did that aproach won the current console sales race?

Good marketing emphasizing on the different experience, simplicity and affordable price that fits perfectly the casual market segment which happens to be very large

 

[fearsomepirate]

With regards to different ways of rendering shadows there must be more ways then stencil shadows available for the Wii that give a similar result which does not depend on said and lacking features? I'm not talking Doom 3, just inquiring on the tech.

Anything I say comes with the caveat that anyone here who actually develops games may come in and correct me, so take what I say with a grain of salt. Anyway, the problem with the Gamecube (and therefore Wii) is that it's not really very flexible when it comes to how much and what kind of math it can do. Its CPU is pretty slim (even for the time), and its graphics chip has a fairly inflexible range of operations it can perform, mainly because it takes shortcuts to avoid needing general-purpose computational hardware, which always takes more transistors.

When it comes to shadows, you really need that mathematical flexibility. Think about it abstractly--there's no way to draw shadows in real time without somehow projecting the geometry onto the surface you want to draw the shadow on. That requires a lot of generalized 3D computations, which is exactly what vector units are designed to do. So the Doom 3-style shadows are the exact sort of thing you really can't take a big shortcut around.

Of course, the Cube architecture has some math ability--it's a computer, after all--so you can do some of that. So you do see some real-time, projected shadows in Cube games, like in Wind Waker and Soul Calibur II. You don't see very many, though, because of the aforementioned lack of dedicated vector units, so I don't think there's any way to replicate the Doom 3 look. Heck, even the Xbox with its two vertex units really chugged when too much of that was going on in Doom 3 or Riddick.

 

[Color me Dan]

Anything I say comes with the caveat that anyone here who actually develops games may come in and correct me, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Isn't that what's so good about this place tho?

Too bad that Nintendo didn't ask IBM for a vector unit or two, knowing how versetile they are for computing. Perhaps next generation one might hope? This discussion is straying further and further away from Conduit and I hope the mods will excuse me for it. There has been very litle new info on Conduit to talk about.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Is Broadway devoid of VMX? A quick Google points back to this board and a linked article saying Gekko had a VMX-type unit. Thus Broadway does have vector units. I think the limiting factor is applying truly programmable 'shaders' on CPU is just processing power and data throughput. There's probably only enough potential to render normal maps on a few surfaces, for example, if calculating on CPU. This isn't even back-of-the-envelope calculations, mind! This is just me guessing at likely degrees of available processing grunt, without even considering numbers! But still, the reason GPUs manage all these fancy effects isn't just the presence of vector units, but lots of 'em, and with lots of data bandwidth. PS2 got so far with them because it has crazy bandwidth for the time. A CPU vector unit on a CPU bus is going to be pretty limited.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Broadway has the same FPU Gekko had, 64 bits FPU which can also work on 2x32 bits fields in parallel... 2-way SIMD and 64 bits vector registers.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There we go then - Wii's vector processing options when it comes to graphics work are the same as GC * clock-speed increase but without the RAM bandwidth limits.

 

[thundermonkey]

There we go then - Wii's vector processing options when it comes to graphics work are the same as GC * clock-speed increase but without the RAM bandwidth limits.

Awesome.

I knew there was a reason I joined this site many years ago.

 

[Color me Dan]

Fore those in the know, is this vector power sufficient for the types of tasks discussed? Like the Doom 3 shadows etc.? It's akin to telling me that a car has 800 horsepower but I can only understand if you say "it's super-fast". Which is basically on the level I'm at.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Fore those in the know, is this vector power sufficient for the types of tasks discussed? Like the Doom 3 shadows etc.? It's akin to telling me that a car has 800 horsepower but I can only understand if you say "it's super-fast". Which is basically on the level I'm at.

Yeah, same here. I would like to know as well.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Is Broadway devoid of VMX? A quick Google points back to this board and a linked article saying Gekko had a VMX-type unit. Thus Broadway does have vector units.

It doesn't have a dedicated vector unit, which is why I didn't bring it up. Using its very, very limited ability to process SIMD instructions means tying up the FPU, and since it can't handle 3-D vectors, it's not really what anyone thinks of when they say "vector unit." It's hardly AltiVec (VMX is the instruction set for AltiVec, not the vector unit), which you can read about here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltiVec

Full vector units such as AltiVec are much more powerful than Gekko's split FPU, especially as they can typically operate on four floats at a time rather than two. It also doesn't replace the FPU.

this vector power sufficient for the types of tasks discussed? Like the Doom 3 shadows etc.

No. The Xbox had two vertex units on the CPU for that kind of stuff, which combined are a lot more powerful than the lone FPU on the Wii. Remember that in addition to the vertex units, the Xbox CPU also had its own FPU and an SSE unit. It's really not even close, and remember, the Xbox did not exactly run Doom 3, Chronicles of Riddick, Thief III, Splinter Cell, etc at a constant 30 fps.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Full vector units such as AltiVec are much more powerful than Gekko's split FPU, especially as they can typically operate on four floats at a time rather than two. It also doesn't replace the FPU.

Okay, I didn't know the Gekko/Broadway had such lowly 'vector' units. I'm perplexed even why they included them, if they can't handle four-float vectors. How many activities are there where you want to work with two floats at a time?

This does put Wii at a significant disadvantage in the graphics processing flexibility, not having a flexible GPU, and not having some CPU grunt to provide higher graphics support.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Okay, I didn't know the Gekko/Broadway had such lowly 'vector' units. I'm perplexed even why they included them, if they can't handle four-float vectors. How many activities are there where you want to work with two floats at a time?

OK, in real life, it means you could add two 4-D vectors in two operations instead of four, two components at a time. A real vector unit would add the vector in one operation. So it's better than a kick in the pants.

 

[Entropy]

Okay, I didn't know the Gekko/Broadway had such lowly 'vector' units. I'm perplexed even why they included them, if they can't handle four-float vectors. How many activities are there where you want to work with two floats at a time?

I think that's the wrong way of looking at it - rather, it is a way to make more efficient use of the transistors spent on the 64-bit FPU, modifying it to be capable of dual 32-bit operations.
There is no vector unit at all, and thus no waste. If you want to operate on 4x32-bit operands, you just do it in two steps, so when applicable, you could get pretty much double throughput from your FPU. Pretty neat, or butt ugly, depending on whether you regard it as an efficient FPU utilization trick, or a god-awful SIMD implementation.

This does put Wii at a significant disadvantage in the graphics processing flexibility, not having a flexible GPU, and not having some CPU grunt to provide higher graphics support.

Well, as you mentioned in your own post, that depends on where the bottleneck lies. If it is in the floating point ALUs, the little Wii CPU is at a huge disadvantage. If the bottleneck lies in shuffling operands and results to and from memory, and to the GPU, the ALU weakness becomes a non-issue.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There is no vector unit at all, and thus no waste. If you want to operate on 4x32-bit operands, you just do it in two steps, so when applicable, you could get pretty much double throughput from your FPU. Pretty neat, or butt ugly, depending on whether you regard it as an efficient FPU utilization trick, or a god-awful SIMD implementation.

Yeah, clearly vectorised FPU is too old-school for me. I've been SIMD-vectorised!

 

[Color me Dan]

... Aaand you lost me. Sounds very interesting however. So where does this stand? Good enough to be useful or too little bandwidth to make a big difference?

Without a doubt we will see more and more graphically intense games on the Wii, I'm sort of hoping it will be delivered in small doses like it was during the PS2s lifespan as developers learned to squeeze X amounts of performance from over here and X amounts from over there by doing and learning different things.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It depends on the title. A little extra graphical flair would be possible, but if you're running a busy physics engine like Boom Blox, you wouldn't have CPU to spare. I'm in no position to guess at amounts and frequencies of graphical-CPU tricks. Could be highly uncommon, or, given the sorts of games coming out on Wii at the moment, the CPU might find itself helping with graphics quite often.