You are comparing software to hardware...
The tri-ace demo is a feat of software design, not hardware capability.
Nintendo Conference
- Thread starter Nesh
- Start date
You are comparing software to hardware...
The tri-ace demo is a feat of software design, not hardware capability.
Well we have no idea what kind of power envelope the system has. While I'm doubtful of RV770 in the system RV740 makes some sense to me if clocked low.
I think for 4850 like performance, Juniper would be better since Evergreen DNA means the system will have much better multi display capabilities, and of course better tessellation. According to wikipedia, mobile MXM 5870Ms have a 50W TDP at 700 MHz GPU and 1000 for GDDR5 memory. Pulling the GPU down to 500 MHz shaves off 20W of TDP (!). Pretty much a 1080p centric system would need this kind of performance in order to have games look better than 360 and PS3 games at 720p. I don't think it means Turks or Redwood GPUs are out of the question, but if 1080p standard rendering is Nintendo's goal, then RV740 or something faster is pretty much required. The system pretty much would need 16 ROPs to perform well at 1080p.
Watch this in HD. It's a bit more telling.
Just a quick impression because I only just got round to seeing the reel and the Eurogamer preview. It is interesting, and interestingly this means at least in theory that compatibility between PS3 + Move is retained with a next-gen graphics Wii U, and if you add the 5" Vita (or even an iPad 2?), then that compatibility becomes near 100%. Certainly third party developers must pick up on this. And considering when it is released, there is plenty of time for Sony to facilitate this (in so far as they haven't already!).
What does Sony have to do with any of this?
Your wasting your time. He doesn't care. The details don't matter to him. He will only see what he desires to see.
I already did.
That's bad quality video btw.
I got my impression from this much better HD video.
http://youtu.be/Shch7LNkVXw
As I said it looks like high resolution + average polycount on background + basic texturing. I don't see much shaders going on.
The things I thought were good were the DoF effect the bird.
Last edited by a moderator:
The console isn't even finished yet.
All that is known is that IBM is making the CPU and ATI(I refuse to place AMD next to a GPU) is making the GPU.
The video I posted is more than three minutes, only the first minute was shown at the press conference. The good stuff happens in the second half of the video. Also, the techdemo is actually rendered twice at the same time, from two different camera angles. The second view is streamed to the controller. That stuff's well beyond PS360 levels.I already did.
That's bad quality video btw.
I got my impression from this much better HD video.
http://youtu.be/Shch7LNkVXw
As I said it looks like high resolution + average polycount on background + basic texturing. I don't see much shaders going on.
The things I thought were good were the DoF effect the bird.
Last edited by a moderator:
I still don't see anything that hasn't been done before. There rain drops on the lake and rain drops on the rock, that stuffs been in actual games for a long time since Gears of War I. Then there's the shadow casting on the bird...been done in games too. The snow deformation been done in VF4. BTW did you notice that the koi in the pond have really low resolution textures when they swim around? Sorry not impressed. For a Nintendo realtime techdem yeah it's better than what they've had before but compared to what PS360 is doing "ingame" it's not so impressive.
When displaying on both the TV and pad does it output 1080p on both? What's the framerate 60Hz?
When I hear it was going to be more powerful than PS360 I was expecting much more graphic-wise.
Last edited by a moderator:
But what about them is well beyond the PS360?
The textures? The filtering? The water shader? The what-I-assume-is tessellation in the sand garden? The draw distance? The lighting (is that spherical harmonics on the bird?)? Fillrate (can't see much transparency going on)? The resolution? Model complexity?
I'm not trying to be a smart ass or catch anyone out, I'm trying to find out what it is that's blowing people away and making the WiiU seem like a leap beyond the PS360. It looks nice, but I'd like to see a direct capture from the device and have someone pick through it and point out its pros and cons in none-vague terms.
There is nothing in IBMs press release that specifies CPU architecture version. I'm sure someone (not me) will dig out die shots of known IBM cores and make dubious statements based on comparisons.
5830m is just a 5870m except at 500mhz gpu with 800 ghz ddr3 and runs 24W (that's probably not max). You still have to make room for a power 7 CPU, a bluray drive, fans and other components. I just don't see nintendo being able to squeeze 2 billion transistors worth of gpu and CPU into something the size of a Mac mini without it sounding like a crotch rocket.
I'd like to turn that around. Just what would have been required from that Youtube-video to demonstrate a leap beyond the PS360? It would be awfully hard to demonstrate. How would you expect the successors of the PS360 to demonstrate such a leap?
Take a look at how performance has scaled at the same power draw the last 6 years. Assume unchanged launch power draws for MS and Sonys new consoles. (Which I doubt). Then divide the rendering power by increases in rendering resolution (Yay!) and higher framerates (Yay!) necessary to allow for stereoscopic 3D.
There's not an awful lot left, and that will probably be spent on somewhat better shadows or dicking around with DOF. Moral of the story - don't expect quantum leaps in youtube videos.
The advances that probably will be offered, more information at higher frame-rates, larger seamless environments due to higher memory capacities, while very welcome and worthwhile won't typically be visible in compressed video snippets on the internet.
On the flip side, the Wii U controller doesn't look ergonomic for traditional gaming. Pads have developed chunky arms over the years to be more comfortable to hold. You're very right about others trying to emulate though, and even if MS or Sony support Wii U ideas in portables, without that being the pack-in format for the system it'll get little use and won't offer a comparable experience.
But I see this thread has run on for lots of pages, and maybe I'm very outdated with my contribution!
The PS3 slim isn´t that big and it has an internal power supply:
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation-3-Slim-Teardown/1121/1
It may be a stretch but shouldn´t it be possible to deliver something 2-3 years after the PS3 slim with more power but not more heat?
Unless someone comes up with a statement from someone within IBM, I think it would be a good idea to be a bit careful with statements regarding the CPU. (Contrary to my previous statement, I did go and have a look at the die shots that IBM has presented. And since I can't contain myself, the logic in the Wii CPU die shot seems much too small to be Power7.)
Power7 had huge improvements over Power6 in cache latencies to L1 and L2, and of course had 32MB of on-die L3 EDRAM, and as far as I can see the presence of EDRAM is the only obvious connection to the Wii U CPU.
I'm not saying it isn't a Power7 derivative, but I am saying that if I were Nintendo, I'd like to see it modified quite heavily, to the point where the moniker may no longer fit very well.
IBM doesn't seem to be too limited in what they can say about the new CPU, so maybe we'll hear more from them, if not earlier then maybe at the Hot Chips conference.
Power7 had huge improvements over Power6 in cache latencies to L1 and L2, and of course had 32MB of on-die L3 EDRAM, and as far as I can see the presence of EDRAM is the only obvious connection to the Wii U CPU.
I'm not saying it isn't a Power7 derivative, but I am saying that if I were Nintendo, I'd like to see it modified quite heavily, to the point where the moniker may no longer fit very well.
IBM doesn't seem to be too limited in what they can say about the new CPU, so maybe we'll hear more from them, if not earlier then maybe at the Hot Chips conference.
The PS3 slim is made on the 45/40 nm node, so you would expect to have been able to move down to 32/28 nm. At the same clocks, so far that seems to have brought roughly a 30% reduction in power draw the last couple of node ticks. So, being generous, you could go for possibly another 50% in logic.
Not much to write home about. However, there may have been improvements architecturally in the intervening years, some of which improve efficiency, and of course power management is almost sure to have improved a bit. Also, you might allow higher power draw, and let that go directly to the GPU. Furthermore, if you don't have a huge die, you can trade off size vs. power draw, and simply clock a somewhat larger chip lower at lower voltages, to get more performance out of less power (at higher cost/die, but lowering costs for everything else).
So power draw and lithographic node defines a ballpark in terms of capabilities, but there is still room for a fair bit of optimization within that ballpark.
I don't think the die shot they linked to was supposed to be the chip for Wii U. It was just an example of an embedded DRAM die.
May well be.
However, it does seem to be a CPU, and what other CPUs with embedded DRAM do they have? And why would they choose to show that instead of the Wii U CPU? But you are perfectly correct that these kinds of exercises are fraught with danger, and I would much rather hear directly from IBM than from anyone making guesses on the internet (including me) what manner of beast this CPU really is.
h0munkulus
Newcomer
dreamcast 2.0 anyone?
an in-between generations console with a freaky controller concept, sounds familiar.
nintendo does have more going on than sega at the time and the existing competitors are much older so I don't want to predict nintendos end as a hardware company. But I would be hugely surprised if Wii U would repeat the success of the Wii. Frankly I think they will have a very hard time breaking 50 million units sold.
Why I think Wii U is a very risky project and could very well be seen as a failure 10 years from now:
- in-between generations console
- ms and sony will release next generations consoles 2013 the earliest and 2015 the latest. which gives the Wii U only about 1-3 years before it will be horribly outdated.
- 3rd Party Support with Ports and Releases of xbox/ps3 games not as big a plus as some think. Nintendos neglect of Core gamers let to a complete absence of a multiplayer community. Why buy Battlefield 3 on Wii U when all your friends play online with xbox live or PSN?
- Nintendo Franchises no longer the big-seller they once were. While Mario, Zelda and Metroid games still have a lot of Fans but they are no longer must have titles and the gaming world generally moved away from the genres these games fing themselves in.
- Not a natural "upgrade" for Wii owners. Wii was all about motion control. Sure it's fully compatible to Wii stuff, but someone who bought the Wii for Wii Fit or Wii Sports won't have a better experience with Wii U, why should these people upgrade?
- 1 Controller per Console. While not 100% confirmed it seems very likely that 1 Wii U can only Support 1 new controller. This would make a ton of great opportunities impossible.
But in the end the games and the price will most likely determine the success of the console. Let's see if nintendo offers an interesting enough package to win back some of the core gaming community, because Wii U will not be carried by casuals.
an in-between generations console with a freaky controller concept, sounds familiar.
nintendo does have more going on than sega at the time and the existing competitors are much older so I don't want to predict nintendos end as a hardware company. But I would be hugely surprised if Wii U would repeat the success of the Wii. Frankly I think they will have a very hard time breaking 50 million units sold.
Why I think Wii U is a very risky project and could very well be seen as a failure 10 years from now:
- in-between generations console
- ms and sony will release next generations consoles 2013 the earliest and 2015 the latest. which gives the Wii U only about 1-3 years before it will be horribly outdated.
- 3rd Party Support with Ports and Releases of xbox/ps3 games not as big a plus as some think. Nintendos neglect of Core gamers let to a complete absence of a multiplayer community. Why buy Battlefield 3 on Wii U when all your friends play online with xbox live or PSN?
- Nintendo Franchises no longer the big-seller they once were. While Mario, Zelda and Metroid games still have a lot of Fans but they are no longer must have titles and the gaming world generally moved away from the genres these games fing themselves in.
- Not a natural "upgrade" for Wii owners. Wii was all about motion control. Sure it's fully compatible to Wii stuff, but someone who bought the Wii for Wii Fit or Wii Sports won't have a better experience with Wii U, why should these people upgrade?
- 1 Controller per Console. While not 100% confirmed it seems very likely that 1 Wii U can only Support 1 new controller. This would make a ton of great opportunities impossible.
But in the end the games and the price will most likely determine the success of the console. Let's see if nintendo offers an interesting enough package to win back some of the core gaming community, because Wii U will not be carried by casuals.
