Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2012/01/24/xbox-720-will-be-six-times-as-powerful-as-current-gen


IGN says X720 will have the equivalent of a HD6670, which is 20% faster than the Wii U.
If X720 has the equivalent of a Turks (Northern Islands 480sp, 24 TMU, 8 ROP), then the Wii U could have something along the lines of a Redwood (Evergreen 400sp, 20 TMU, 8ROP).


They also claim this HD6670 translates into 6x the graphics capabilities of Xenos. I honestly don't know how a 718M transistor chip at 750MHz can be considered be 6x faster than a ~350M one at 500MHz. Even with the generational gap considered, there's an overhead related to DX11 compliance.
Plus, this 6x performance advantage doesn't make any sense while looking at the fillrate and flops from each GPU.



Of course, this is IGN talking about GPUs, which is about the same as a monkey talking about quantum physics... so there's this chance that although their sources are right, this guy might've heard "sixty-eight hundred" and at the time of righting thought "was it sixty-eight or sixty-six? bleh I don't care, it's probably the same thing".


For example, a Barts-based GPU (Northern Islands, 960/1120 sp, 48/56 TMU, 32 ROP) would fit that performance description quite nicely, with the Wii U getting something along the lines of a Juniper (Evergreen 800 sp, 40 TMUs, 16 ROP).



Wrapping things up, either the "6x" claim is false or the "HD6670 performance" is false, or both are false.

 

Develop is reporting that Wii U is twice as powerful as Xbox 360

more here: http://www.develop-online.net/news/39593/Wii-U-twice-as-powerful-as-Xbox-360

 

I get the feeling that MS want to keep thermal specs similar to 360. Putting something with power usage similar to Cayman into a set top box might be problematic, especially considering how they had engineering problems with 360 already.

 

6x is definately a stretch. 4-5x isn't unreasonable if you're looking at pure shader performance though. Its 3.3x faster on paper but efficienct gains between R500 and R9xx would add a lot of performance too. Just look at how much faster the 3870 was compared to the 2900. And the 2900 itself should be more efficient than Xenos.

Sounds about right but only if running pretty slow, say 500Mhz.

 

It's only a tech demo but it looks very promising!

http://youtu.be/I9bhS_mMjPU?hd=1

 

that's ancient

 

But it still looks amazing, The first 10-15 seconds of the video shows perhaps some of the most natural looking lighting I've ever seen.

 

I mentioned it was ancient because been linked and discussed on this forum already.

And I think our definitions of amazing are quite different.

 

They must be as I game a monster PC and that demo impressed the hell out of me in places.

 

Still looks pretty good to this day. Not cutting-edge or anything, but good.

 

Off screen footage does that.

 

It does look amazing but it's hard to tell if that's simply the off screen effect.

 

While it does add something, we do know it looks far better than the official footage we saw, and there's no direct feed available of the build on the show floor

 

Yeah, for whatever reason, the direct feed release doesn't have as many effects as the full thing shown on the show floor. One of the most noticeable difference is the self shadowing that we don't see in the direct feed.

 

Don't know if it has been posted before but it seems Nintendo hired Mat Atkinson, ex Crytek Director of Technology, as a consultant software engineer. A new Zelda running on the Cryengine 3 would be sweet .

www.linkedin.com/in/markatkinson99

 

Self shadowing is old technology...

 

Nobody said self shadowing is new technology..

 

Considering the math and basics of programming self shadows and most now real time capable effects have has been around since the 1970s, I'd say it's old technology It's quite amazing what people at the University of Utah were doing back then.