Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

[bgassassin]

If the problem with the GPU is that it is clocked really low...is this resolvable before launch??? Could a larger heasink, more powerful fan, etc solve this issue? Is it also probable that they aren't working with the die shrink they will have at launch and as such are under clocked on the current dev kits?

Actually things in the last six months or so leading up to E3 pointed to the CPU.

 

[pc999]

I agree in the single touch, that is bad, very bad, lot of gameplay option with multi touch that wont be possible.

Actually things in the last six months or so leading up to E3 pointed to the CPU.

Any details that you can share?

 

[liolio]

I think kids can learn anything in matter of hours(!) if they enjoy what they are doing. Mouse, gamepad, tablet, whatever.... doesn't really matter to them.. I'm more concerned about how durable that screen really is, because kids tend to drop things lot.

I do agree to that. I remember seeing a vid of a kid kicking butts on SF IV using the "hit box" thingy after barely a quarter of an hour of use.
But what I meant is that for kids (and some adults) the lack of traditional control may have gone unnoticed.
I believe that multitouch would have more than made up for it.

 

[babybumb]

If the problem with the GPU is that it is clocked really low...is this resolvable before launch???

If Nintendo does not allow to use any sort of HDD cache texture loading will be an issue. It is a common issue in UE3 based games. Disc seek times are too slow.

Even cache will not be enough in some cases like BF3 which require install on consoles

 

[Ika]

I do agree to that. I remember seeing a vid of a kid kicking butts on SF IV using the "hit box" thingy after barely a quarter of an hour of use.

Yes indeed. It took about 20 mins for the kid here to get used to Metroid on the DS, and I also tried to play with him some duel with World of Padman on the PC (which is basically the kid version of quake), and he was quite accurate with the mouse just after 2-3 games, in fact using WASD was much harder for him and that took about 4-5 games until he was comfortable with it. I was surprised and felt truly amazed tbh;-]

I believe that multitouch would have more than made up for it.

I can't agree more, if you do a touchpad today and you make it the most important part of your product, you make it multitouch..

 

[Love_In_Rio]

I do agree to that. I remember seeing a vid of a kid kicking butts on SF IV using the "hit box" thingy after barely a quarter of an hour of use.
But what I meant is that for kids (and some adults) the lack of traditional control may have gone unnoticed.
I believe that multitouch would have more than made up for it.

But if it had used a multitouch tablet wouldnt it be like MS's smartglass?.

 

[liolio]

But if it had used a multitouch tablet wouldnt it be like MS's smartglass?.

To some extend yes but it's unclear how relevant MS want your own touch device to be relevant to gameplay.
Have we heard of touch only games coming to the 360? It's a bit early but no.
Can they ensure the experience is good across the board? No clearly the area offered by various smartphone screens varies. I would say that anything below a galaxy notes is constrained by screen size.
Does any smartphones or tablets offer proper side buttons which the touchscreen can't emulate and are imho pretty critical? No

 

[bgassassin]

Any details that you can share?

First was a poster by the name of Arkam of GAF. He was giving us what boiled down to be second-hand info from people in his company that were working directly with the kits. The things he was saying pointed to the CPU side. Wsippel posted one or two things (maybe more) that indicated poor optimization in the CPU's usage. Then this from one of the infamous "anonymous devs".

http://www.computerandvideogames.co...-as-good-as-ps3-but-its-still-not-as-capable/

A second source working on a big name franchise said GPU and RAM power "won't be a problem" on the new console but, again, claimed Wii U struggles to match PS3 and 360 in processing power.

"We're still working on dev machines but there have definitely been some issues [in porting PS3/360 games]," our source said. "It's not actually a problem getting things up and running because the architecture is pretty conventional, but there are constraints with stuff like physics and AI processing because the hardware isn't quite as capable."


The same source concluded, bluntly: "I suppose you don't need sophisticated physics to make a Mario game."

When looking at what some named devs have said vs some of the unnamed, to me it points to an optimization issue and the CPU is getting "bogged down" by some. And in turn some are blaming the hardware for it. It's can't be the hardware's fault if others are saying otherwise about the system's abilities. Arkham City looks worse than the PS360 versions, but Wii U version Aliens: CM has been claimed by Gearbox to be "the best looking version"? The claims are too inconsistent to blame the hardware.


It's possible that both the audio DSP and ARM I/O are not being used by some of the ones having issues and it's all being placed on the CPU to handle what they would have. And knowing Nintendo they probably didn't design the CPU to have that kind of burden put on it since they added the two other components to begin with.

 

[AlNom]

And knowing Nintendo they probably didn't design the CPU to have that kind of burden put on it since they added the two other components to begin with.

It's hard to conceive of it being less capable than Xenon/Waternoose. :|

 

[Brad Grenz]

Xenon at least had those phat Altivec units. If WiiU's CPU is significantly lower clocked, or lacks good vector capabilities, it would be at a severe disadvantage.

 

[AlNom]

Yikes.

edit: Well... I suppose... maybe... Power7's VSM only sports 64 registers...

 

[Ruskie]

I guess only way for it to be slower than Xenon is to be severely under-clocked. Actually, looking at Wii U games I would guess, in comparison to PS360, GPU is also under clocked.

Which wouldn't be big news since that box is the size of small purse, and there is that thing with its own display. I wouldn't get to excited about capabilities of Wii U, its obvious they have been gunning for this gen performance, not next and not something in the middle.

The thing that is more interesting to me is how will Nintendo studios adapt to HD development? Suddenly dealing with multicore CPU and more advanced physics without being prepared on technology and tool-set side proved to be very hard for alot of studios, especially from Japan.

@BG

I wouldn't put to much thoughts on what Gearbox CEO says. He has something good to say about Wii U at least once a week, thats most likely PR. Alot of developers, especially people not on developing side, say alot of those things. I guess with more RAM it could have higher resolution textures so that quote wouldn't exactly be a lie, but it could also run at lower frame rate and have no AA.

 

[Mobius1aic]

Xenon at least had those phat Altivec units. If WiiU's CPU is significantly lower clocked, or lacks good vector capabilities, it would be at a severe disadvantage.

Maybe Ninty went with some dual core Power7 derived CPU? Xenon would have an advantage of that in vector performance, though the general processing performance should be amazing.

 

[Nightz]

If Nintendo does not allow to use any sort of HDD cache texture loading will be an issue. It is a common issue in UE3 based games. Disc seek times are too slow.

Even cache will not be enough in some cases like BF3 which require install on consoles

The Wii U has 4 USB 2.0 ports. Would using a solid state HDD via the USB ports alleviate caching issues.

 

[Brad Grenz]

USB 2.0 ports aren't fast enough to keep up with a mechanical hard drive. An SSD would be pretty pointless when your top speed is like ~30MBps.

 

[bgassassin]

It's hard to conceive of it being less capable than Xenon/Waternoose. :|

Considering Nintendo's love of "balanced hardware", I have a hard time seeing the CPU being capable to the point where it wouldn't need the I/O and DSP from the get go. I don't know if that necessarily make it less capable as we don't know the exact architecture, but it definitely doesn't blow Xenon away.

I guess only way for it to be slower than Xenon is to be severely under-clocked. Actually, looking at Wii U games I would guess, in comparison to PS360, GPU is also under clocked.

Which wouldn't be big news since that box is the size of small purse, and there is that thing with its own display. I wouldn't get to excited about capabilities of Wii U, its obvious they have been gunning for this gen performance, not next and not something in the middle.

The thing that is more interesting to me is how will Nintendo studios adapt to HD development? Suddenly dealing with multicore CPU and more advanced physics without being prepared on technology and tool-set side proved to be very hard for alot of studios, especially from Japan.

@BG

I wouldn't put to much thoughts on what Gearbox CEO says. He has something good to say about Wii U at least once a week, thats most likely PR. Alot of developers, especially people not on developing side, say alot of those things. I guess with more RAM it could have higher resolution textures so that quote wouldn't exactly be a lie, but it could also run at lower frame rate and have no AA.

Well let's be fair first. It's unfair to judge a console's power based on launch games. Even still the undeclocked GPU in the early kits supposedly had over 2x the GFLOPs of Xenos.

And of course it's PR. But he also complimented the processor as well. Though that doesn't say if he meant CPU or GPU. But that said I would say spec-wise using your context it's close to middle than current.

USB 2.0 ports aren't fast enough to keep up with a mechanical hard drive. An SSD would be pretty pointless when your top speed is like ~30MBps.

I agree. Which is why I was adamant about having 3.0 since they are relying on external storage.

 

[Brad Grenz]

They probably figure as long as USB 2.0 is faster than their optical drive that's good enough to store their games digitally.

 

[bgassassin]

They probably figure as long as USB 2.0 is faster than their optical drive that's good enough to store their games digitally.

That or 3.0 is "too new" for them to use.

 

[liolio]

I find it a bit disheartening that the CPU might be a bottleneck.
I wonder what kind of CPU Nintendo selected.

BgAssassin did your hear anything more specific wrt to the CPU?
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Having gone with IBM and wanting lower operation ( my assumption) they should have shamelessly reuse the SPUs.
I haven't read a presentations on the matter for a long while but how SPU time does it take to the Cell to keep up Xenon if you put aside lot of the graphic loads that would be handle by the GPU in a WiUU?
Clock for clock I would say that 2 is more than enough.
I don't know if it would be doable to have the SPU running at 3.2GHz with the CPU running significantly slower. Either way they may have gone with 4 SPUs within a CPU running slower.
Basically a new Cell. I believe it would have keep up not only with Xenon but also with PC parts for a while.
The Cell is like this @45nm. It's a gross estimate but Imeasure a power7 core (with its L2) ~29sq.mm.
4 SPUs measure pretty much the same size (a bit below).
Within the Cell die size you substitute 4 SPus for of power7 core and fill what was the L2 + PPE with L3 you would fit quiet an amount of cache (gross paint estimate ~4MB).

Either way it's just to give idea a single CPU achieving nicer performances per cycle than a PPU and 3/4 SPUs might have been doable within +/-100 sq.mm of silicon.

I don't know Wiiu CPU size but I'm confident they could have trade two of their cores with at least 2 SPUs. SPUs are that tiny. Even embedded processors with 512KB of cache can't be as tiny (@45nm that's it).
Spus are 6.5 sq.mm with their local store

Still SPUs are very un-Nintendo but it was an obvious solution to meet the requirement of this gen CPU and a bit forward actually.

 

[Ika]

A "weaker" CPU can slow down development, because devs will need to spend more time with optimization, but I can't see that as something terrible.
It's a triple core CPU after all, and the power7 architecture has lots of advantages like out of order execution, so can't be that bad i guess.