Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

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Sonic said:
There's nothing new here. It's just PR crap that tries to play up the advantages of extra memory...
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Actually I think that does provide a fair bit of insight, at least for those holding out for some obscure power behind the machine. If Nintendo are willing to trumpet their RAM as the most any console has ever had, why not the same for the most CPU and/or GPU power any console has ever had if the machine has that? Clearly it doesn't. The performance is unclear but something in the ballpark of the current machines rather than a noteworthy increase that they could shout about.

The explanation of the 1 GB OS RAM effectively says it's there for the browser and whatever might come. The rest should use much if its efficiently written. And unless you're browsing multiple complex tabs, using up a gig on that seems overkill. So I think we're really looking at "RAM is cheap. Let's throw in a gig for OS and decide what to do with it later. If we can't find any uses ourselves, we can free it up for the devs to use."
 
No matter what the split of the day is, you can triviailly use that memory for disc caching. So if you regularly alternate between the Orc's town and crawling dungeons, the town may load fast when you get back. Why not, developers could be able to flag some assets so they are cached in priority.
 
Not sure how reliable StevieP is, but on GAF he just said that the Wii U GPU is <600FLOPS.

I'm starting to believe that 398GFLOPS rumor, a GPU like that would fit well into the 40Watts we've heard.
 
LXFBN said:
Not sure how reliable StevieP is, but on GAF he just said that the Wii U GPU is <600FLOPS.

I'm starting to believe that 398GFLOPS rumor, a GPU like that would fit well into the 40Watts we've heard.
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Well he's bg's lil buddy, so bg should be able to come in here and spill the beans :p

Maybe's he's referring only to BG's info that one of the older Wii U dev kits GPU was supposedly rated at 576 gflops (exactly the rating of the e6760 which is one reason I think BG was big on that).

it's hard to parse.
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Yes, there may be typos involved too. Did he mean "know" instead of "low"? Or was he trying to express something else?

I'm pointing that if the "placeholder" was a RV770 if you can't use it at 100 % is useless to know the model or the theorical power/flops on it. You need a stable machine so maybe you need to low the specs/clocks, etc to have it.

(All of this is speculation of course)
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Edit: actually it reasonably reads to me like they had to manually lower the dev kit specs just in order for it to be stable?

Or it could be related to power usage, the PSU not being enough to feed a RV770 in a stable manner anyway?
 
This is the statement by StevieP.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=42357725&postcount=4405

Some clarifications to stop the circles, from someone who "knows nothing" (me)

1) It's not a 600gf GPU. It's less. But not current gen less.
2) The GPU7 architecture is firmly based on VLIW R700, but the final result is not a stock R700 as has been trumpeted over and over.
3) The power supply has been confirmed by eyewitnesses to have a 75w max output, and as all power supplies in the console space will not be running at a constant 100%.

Bonus note: "enhanced broadway" also doesn't mean "let's take our previous CPU, duct tape a few of them together, and call it a day" either. The CPUs are customized creatures as well, so "enhanced broadway" is about as accurate as "R700".
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To be fair he says "not current gen less", but I think a 400GFLOPS GPU fits into that.
 
It may provide insight for those holding out the machine will actually be a powerhouse, but those people have been ignoring rumors and dev comments from the get go. The machine is clearly not as capable as it should be, given the price they wish to launch at. The tablet could sure be interesting, but it would be a lot more interesting to play on the tablet if the machine was mopping the floor with PS360. This generation is already long in the tooth, why Nintendo wants to lengthen it is beyond me. And yes, if I were Nintendo and had a capable CPU and GPU I would be flaunting the shit out of it. The fact that they are not only solidifies even more the machine is lacking in terms of power. Nintendo hasn't always been this cheap of a company, maybe they figure they just need to sell on their own merits because they're afraid to compete directly with Sony and MS. They sure lucked out with the Wii, I hope it is the opposite for them with the Wii U.

We have a machine we still know too little about, but what we do know isn't inspiring. A tri core CPU that has 3 MB of cache, 2 megs for one core and 512k each for the other two. Does this tell us that one of the cores is a master core and the other two are slave cores? Are the cores all the same type or are they indeed asymmetric with one beefy main core and two smaller cores that are enhanced "Broadways"? Give us more information on the processor and at least our needs will be satiated and we can move on from this.

We have a Radeon based GPU that isn't even DX11. As someone else mentioned it could be a sign that the machine is going to be a SoC. It could also be a sign that Nintendo is extremely cheap. If the GPU is 3 - 4 times the capability of PS360 while the CPU is about the same then I'm fine with that as it would allow a decent upgrades in visuals, especially over the life of the system. 32 MB of edram is great news in my book, but my fear is that Nintendo will not be utilizing it to the fullest advantage by sticking it on a weak GPU. And even the need for this early for Nintendo to state that they are using GPGPU to assist the CPU is troubling, especially if that means it is using GPU resources with the other 1 GB of memory reserved for OS and other applications.

I seriously worry for Nintendo's future in the hardware business. I think Wii U will see shit tons this holiday season, but next one will be a tough sell especially if Sony and MS can get the hype machine rolling that has consumers salivating the their mouths. Each new console race starts fresh as we've been able to see. There's not much telling what will happen. Wii U could end up selling Wii numbers all throughout its life, or it could fizzle out just like Dreamcast did. Of course Nintendo has more cash reserves and wouldn't let that happen, immediately, for Wii U so that's a positive. But they haven't done much to entice me into buying their system. And they've failed not only in making me want to buy their machine not just because of similar level of power compared to current generation, but also because a lack of games that I want to buy. Why not just show Mario, Zelda, whatever else kick ass franchises they want to use in all their glorious HD and be done with it. At least allow me the knowledge that I will be getting these games in the future to entice me into buying the system. They haven't even done that, and obviously not their target demographic. But with so many others I talk to, locally, they wonder the same thing. Long winded rant....my apologies
 
LOL nice thread tags

Wii U 400 gflops

Maybe somebody hinting again? :p

But anyways yeah, if stevieP knows something new, and it certainly sounds like a load of fresh details, it'll spread quick. I practically consider bg and stevie joined at the hip lol (in fact I assume all the latters info comes from the former).
 
The gulf in graphics features and performance between Wii U and the next Xbox and PlayStation will not prevent me from buying Nintendo's first HD console. The fact that the Wii U sets aside 1 gig of RAM for the OS has me intrigued. The games we are waiting for, they will come. With that said, I do fear for Nintendo because the message about the Wii U has been extremely confusing and convoluted, so far.

Sorry, off-topic.
 
I think it's pretty nice enough, the most we can complain about is the CPU. A bit of physics and miscellaneous tasks could be carefully run on the GPU, tasks that would automatically go to threads or SPE on the current consoles just because you would lack parallel jobs to put load on their CPUs elsewise (I thought I've made up this word but it exists)
 
Blazkowicz said:
I think it's pretty nice enough, the most we can complain about is the CPU. A bit of physics and miscellaneous tasks could be carefully run on the GPU, tasks that would automatically go to threads or SPE on the current consoles just because you would lack parallel jobs to put load on their CPUs elsewise (I thought I've made up this word but it exists)
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That pretty encouraging.
 
McHuj said:
I doubt it, that's probably typical power consumption, imo. The power supply is rated a 75W and, imo it will probably be only 80% efficient or so, that will be probably around ~60W max at the WiiU. The WiiU has to be able to handle a degenerate case of the flash memory being accessed, all four USB ports being fully active, wifi and wireless controller link actives, disc drive spinning full speed, and CPU/GPU going all out, with probably some head room. That is unlikely, but possible. You can't have the Wii fail and potentially damage the unit in that case.
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Just to clarify, that 75% is the OUTPUT to the Wii U, not what it's drawing from the wall.


IdeaMan on NeoGaf has recently said that his sources, who are developing an exclusive IP and a multi platform one, have seen close to a 2x framerate increase over a few dev kit revisions. On the slower kit they were still getting playable framerates (25-30 by his words) and were using the GamePad in intricate (Again his words) ways.

So I have a question. If people are thinking 4-500GFLOPS for Wii U, then would that translate to a 60FPS version of a 30FPS current HD title. Is it as simple as that?
 
AzaK said:
So I have a question. If people are thinking 4-500GFLOPS for Wii U, then would that translate to a 60FPS version of a 30FPS current HD title. Is it as simple as that?
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There are other possible bottlenecks like raw fillrate (pixel/texel/zixel) or CPU-tasks.

edit: also raw geometry throughput, but ports from 360/PS3 are probably not going to be so triangle bound (relatively speaking).
 
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