Have you not read years, maybe decades of horror stories of devs dealing with Nintendo back to the NES days (when they seemed even the worst). come now.
Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename
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Have you not read years, maybe decades of horror stories of devs dealing with Nintendo back to the NES days (when they seemed even the worst). come now.
Nintendo haven't been the same since N64.
They were painful to deal with in the NES/SNES/N64 days, post N64 they've had a hard time getting 3rd party support and they're amongst the easiest to deal with.
As I understand it Sony we're really painful to deal with in the PS2 era for much the same reason Nintendo were in the SNES era.
Here's a recent complaint that made the news http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/04/mdk2_dev_will_never_develop_for_nintendo_again
That's specifically a complaint about Wii Ware.
As I understand it today compared to publishing on PS3/360 Nintendo is relatively painless. And you should understand that in no way is anyones submission process painless.
Trust me back in the SNES days dealing with Nintendo was "special", I know of one game that was submitted over 30 times, with a required 100hrs of VHS tape with every submission. It was bounced because of none specific problems on a limited run version of the hardware that the publisher could not get a version of.
Mario Club was the worst implementation of a good idea ever. Nintendo would have 3 experts rank you game they would send you the reports together with a score. Invariably, the reviewers would disagree, and you would be docked points for the conflicting viewpoint, "Game is too hard", "Game is too easy".
The worst part of it was that the points mattered, if you exceeded the arbitrary rating the game didn't rank against the publishers limited publishing slots.
As I understand it today compared to publishing on PS3/360 Nintendo is relatively painless. And you should understand that in no way is anyones submission process painless.
Trust me back in the SNES days dealing with Nintendo was "special", I know of one game that was submitted over 30 times, with a required 100hrs of VHS tape with every submission. It was bounced because of none specific problems on a limited run version of the hardware that the publisher could not get a version of.
Mario Club was the worst implementation of a good idea ever. Nintendo would have 3 experts rank you game they would send you the reports together with a score. Invariably, the reviewers would disagree, and you would be docked points for the conflicting viewpoint, "Game is too hard", "Game is too easy".
The worst part of it was that the points mattered, if you exceeded the arbitrary rating the game didn't rank against the publishers limited publishing slots.
Christ. Who actually sat down and WATCHED 100 hours of taped video gameplay??? That's ludicrous. I start getting itchy after 15 minutes of speedrun play on youtube, and that's typically recorded by creative and entertaining people...
Surely they made that demand just to screw with 3rd party devs.
Surely they made that demand just to screw with 3rd party devs.
It used to be required that any game submission was accompanied by video tape footage of every possible path through the game.
I have no idea if it was ever watched, I know the game in question after the first couple of submissions they just copied the tapes, rather than have some tester actually record new footage.
I have no idea if it was ever watched, I know the game in question after the first couple of submissions they just copied the tapes, rather than have some tester actually record new footage.
Alleged Wii U specs leaked, looks pretty legit and a GAF mod says they are similar to what he had.
Also seems similar to some things bg has said.
Nothing much on GPU though, shaders/clock etc. Maybe people more knowledgeable can glean more about it from the specs than I can.
Also from GAF mod
1.5 GB RAM is .5 GB more than I expected. If it pans out.
Also could be from an older dev kit.
Also seems similar to some things bg has said.
Nothing much on GPU though, shaders/clock etc. Maybe people more knowledgeable can glean more about it from the specs than I can.
Also from GAF mod
1.5 GB RAM is .5 GB more than I expected. If it pans out.
Also could be from an older dev kit.
theLonely1
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Well, the rumor mentions specifically Compute shader support.
D
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"8 render targets" means 8 ROPs?
More 8 render targets
By the way BGAssassin was rigth about the weird L2 cache.
I was more than septic about its credential, was wrong.
I don't get this:
Write gatherer per core.
Locked (L1d) cache DMA per core.
What does that mean?
We miss indeed critical informations:
how many SIMD?
Clock speeds?
OoO execution?
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As in simultaneous output of Multiple Render Targets. It's been in the spec since DX10, so it's nothing mindblowing to expect. For reference, DX9 specifies 4 MRTs.
I don't know about clock speeds (CPU/GPU) but I can't say that I'm turned on by the specs.
The 32MB of EDRAM seems to have take a way to significant part of the silicon budget. Possibly the part of the budget which would have allowed the WiiU to be a more proper in between design.
By the early IBM comment one could think that the 32MB EDRAM is on the CPU. That makes a quiet big chip.
Last blue gene chip is ~360 sq.mm @45nm.
It has 32nm of cache. I would assume that WiiU pool of edram will be densier as it's not a cache (simpler, no ECC, etc.) but still.
On 32nm thing to get better still a significant investment.
I could see Nintendo like MS having 3 chips in the device. Edram in the CPU is just the 3MB of cache. It allows for great density and nice power characteristics.
Definitely don't like it. Especially for Nintendo and their intended targets, less bandwidth intensive forms of AA was good enough and would have free quiet some transistors.
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