Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

Things are a bit different here though, as they're talking about loading rather than streaming. For a start a Wuu game could be using 30 or 40 times the texture data of a GC game and several tens of times the geometry. And the optical drive probably isn't even 10 times as fast so decompression of assets could be far more processor intensive than it used to be. And the Wuu processor - if 3 overclocked Broadways - would only have about 15 times the raw power. So just going by these numbers (admittedly we don't actually know that much about the CPWuu) I could easily see a situation arising where you were in a more CPU limited situation for loadtime decompression and transcoding of assets than you were with the Gamecube.

Of course, this may have nothing to do with what the guy was talking about on Twitter.

On a slightly different note, I think the 360 can actually transcode on the CPU and then feed the GPU out of its L2 cache, for either textures or geometry. Maybe the Wuu could do this too, but unless it has the same vector processing throughput it wouldn't seem as well placed to handle it as the 360 (edit: without additional custom hardware I mean).

 

Just Googled a bit on .png and found this which shows a 1024x768 png taking ~200 ms to decompress on an iPad 2. If we loosely call that 2 MBs of texture, 10 MBs would add one second, and 100 MBs ten seconds. On an iPad 2, of course, but they're higher values than I ever appreciated. If there's such a thing as hardware .png decompression then quite some time could be saved on loading a monolithic file and decompressing. If streaming assets, the seek and load times should mask any decompression times I think.

 

Maybe have it done on the GPU to speed it up? Pretty sure the iPad 2 does it on the CPU

 

I'd be careful generalizing form one benchmark.
IME memory bandwidth is as big an issue as anything else with most simple lossless decompressors.
All you're really doing for the most part is copying out of a dictionary.

 

Coming from PS3 and Wii development, Two Tribes may have been unfamiliar with 3Dc normal map compression, which the Wii U ought to support, but those platforms did not. The X360 and PC GPU's have featured it for years, but I'm not sure if NV is still using emulation, as they were on hardware from the era of 3Dc's introduction.

 

That was my guess as well, but that would sound like the normal maps were absolutely huge in this game.

 

It's a 2.5D game using 2D assets AFAICS. There's certainly nothing to suggest normal maps; the lighting is flat shaded (from video clips that assume that engine hasn't been overhauled since).

 

That's kinda what I was thinking - I thought PNG and GIF decompression were pretty much transparent on loads as it's so quick (or so I believed). These iPad2 results were an eye opener as they show I'm mistaken in my belief the decompression work is minimal. Still, if the issue is RAM speed, what particular hardware feature of Wii U could help with that and be discovered by a dev, and hence not be something obvious? Or what else besides texture compression could free up RAM and reduce load times?

 

[strike]Maybe it has normal maps on the animal characters? They are very detailed.[/strike] Aww, they are sprites! I'm now persuaded they are, the game looks a great deal sprite-based.

The backgrounds are fantastic, but they appear to be tricking us with parallax scrolling of 2D layers.
I'm not used to seeing HD sprites with a crazy amount of frames. Water is possibly the only polygonal things around.

This is a modern Donkey Kong Country, it's like Yoshi's Island too, that one was a 2D platformer augmented with effects.
Incidentally the donkey kong cartridge included a decompression chip, 17 years ago.

Wii U is now the best console for 2D, it has the most ram. And it's small and low power.
Dunno where I read things like "Wii U is not a real tablet" as some kind of arguing why it sucks and people will buy tablets and other consoles instead.. a Toki Tori video ends with showing off a level editor on the Wii pad.

 

They might use something like Crunch.
http://code.google.com/p/crunch/

Which apparently does things similar to this presentation.
GDC 2012: DXT is NOT ENOUGH! Advanced texture compression for games
http://mainroach.appspot.com/docs/DUEX_CLM_GDC2012.pdf

 

Didn't said Nintendo in Iwata asks that they use special hardware for the compression of the Gamestream that goes from Wii U to the Gamepad.

Perhaps this special hardware can be used by games too? So texture could be compressed and decompressed on the fly without utilising GPU&CPU much.

 

If it's good quality, that would be really good for virtual texturing.

 

Got an e-mail from Best Buy:

"The Wii U gaming console will be available on 11/18/12. But you can play it today in select Best Buy® stores."

fwiw

 

An extensive interview with Shin'en at notenoughshaders.com
http://www.notenoughshaders.com/2012/11/03/shinen-mega-interview-harnessing-the-wii-u-power/

There's some talk regarding both the CPU, GPU and the DSP

 

I haven't really been following this thread closely.... Just to be clear, the WiiU launches in two weeks and there are no official specs known?

EDIT: I just checked the official site and looked at the games.... WTF??? Super Mario U is something I would expect to see on a handheld....

 

Nopes!

Well, no specs that go into any detail anyway.

 

Better yet, there is no solid information about any part of their online gaming system. I'll be surprised if it's even on par with what Sony/MS had back in 2006.

 

Nothing of it is in-depth, it's all very positive (which is good), and totally reads like carefully worded Nintendo PR (which is...not so good.)

Still, I'm fairly pumped for this launch. I'm hoping wuu will be a nice little box that will perform well for its size. I'm especially hoping it will be virtually silent during operation, that'd be real sweet.

 

Updated

 

Then do it.