Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

[function]

Oh ok, I always thought AMD GPUs have had similar, if not better, scaling capabilities even before Xenos. Swore I read that somewhere, but don't remember where. Thanks.

I think you might be right - I'm sure I can remember ATI output scalers being better than nVidias even before the 360.

I've tended to go with Nvidia cards and the output scalers were always utter shit. I discovered this by accident on my 6800 - I accidentally enabled an unscaled output mode when I created a custom output resolution and my monitor took over. It was so much better I couldn't understand what had happened at first, then I created two custom resolutions (scaled/unscaled) and kept switching between the two in a state of disbelief. The 7900 GTX I had produced results that were just as foul. Looked like simple bilinear.

But I guess MS and Nintendo will get whatever they want. MS specifically wanted to support monitors and early HDTVs and presumably asked for and got something great. But Sony lol nVidia scaler.

I'm guessing Nintendo have reasons for specifying what they have. Will be interesting to see how native WiiU games handle output and monitor support (or not).

 

[RudeCurve]

IBut I guess MS and Nintendo will get whatever they want. MS specifically wanted to support monitors and early HDTVs and presumably asked for and got something great. But Sony lol nVidia scaler.

IIRC MS's X360 scaler was an internal design from the former WebTV division.

 

[function]

IIRC MS's X360 scaler was an internal design from the former WebTV division.

Cheers. Looks like MS really did their work on getting scaling right and deserve every single bit of the credit for a superb feature then. What you say could help explain a possible situation where Nintendo get a substandard or none existent scaler; you don't get something that good by accident, you only get it if you really want it and are prepared to pay for it.

 

[TheWretched]

I still can't believe (thinking back that is), that Sony didn't include a real scaling option into the PS3. It's not like that they should have had several options available anyways from their TV, Camcorder or Camera divisions. And they KNEW that they'd need it since HDMI and Component inputs don't accept anything besides the standard resolutions.


My question with Wii backwards compatibility is... looking at PC emulation here, if the upgrade to WiiU is significant enough, a "software" emulation should be done pretty easily. I mean, you don't need FAT pcs for that either. And that's with software done without the real hardware engineers behind it. I mean, CELL easily emulates EE, and given that WiiU should be a at least comparably powerful as the PS3, CPU emulation, or even native execution, should be a possibility. GPU wise, I don't know exactly how Flipper evolved, but I highly doubt it was ever as quirky and strange as GS.

 

[SedentaryJourney]

I still can't believe (thinking back that is), that Sony didn't include a real scaling option into the PS3. It's not like that they should have had several options available anyways from their TV, Camcorder or Camera divisions. And they KNEW that they'd need it since HDMI and Component inputs don't accept anything besides the standard resolutions.

I thought the RSX had a real scaler but it was buggy. Pretty much everything wrong with the PS3 has to do with RSX, so not a good look for Nvidia really.

 

[bomlat]

GPU wise, I don't know exactly how Flipper evolved, but I highly doubt it was ever as quirky and strange as GS.

The GS is less complicated (and strange) than the flipper.

 

[lilbroK]

The GS is less complicated (and strange) than the flipper.

I've been wondering. The console is likely to have around 1gb of ram but will the gpu also have a large RAM cache like a PC GPU? Exactly how would having/not having ram on the GPU affect the cost and power consumption of it?

 

[AlNom]

I thought the RSX had a real scaler but it was buggy. Pretty much everything wrong with the PS3 has to do with RSX, so not a good look for Nvidia really.

Well, the scaler in RSX is a leftover design from the NV architecture, so you might say it's something Sony didn't focus on getting done properly nor specifically.

IIRC MS's X360 scaler was an internal design from the former WebTV division.

We might need clarification on this. It was my understanding that framebuffer scaling is handled internally by AVIVO in the ATI GPU proper. ANA/HANA handles the video output after that.

 

[swaaye]

Anyone know if that RSX scaler is the same thing you get when you enable GPU scaling on a G7x PC part?

 

[function]

I think I've read here on the fine pages of B3D that RSX can only do a bilinear scale horizontally on its output. 6800/7900 scaling looked to be bilinear, so I would guess that RSX would have been the same thing as in the PC parts if it had worked properly...

 

[brain_stew]

Chatter about a significant amount of eDRAM is spot on. Final hardware will have enough for either 720p w/ MSAA or 1080p rendering in a single pass. I don't think anyone will really be disappointed with the memory/cache setup once more specific details leak.

 

[lwill]

Chatter about a significant amount of eDRAM is spot on. Final hardware will have enough for either 720p w/ MSAA or 1080p rendering in a single pass. I don't think anyone will really be disappointed with the memory/cache setup once more specific details leak.

Wow, that is interesting. Are you able to provide a source to that statement?

 

[brain_stew]

Wow, that is interesting. Are you able to provide a source to that statement?

This is second hand information but I have no reason to doubt the legitimacy of the source (quite the opposite). I'm not going to reveal any identity or go into specifics for obvious reasons, I'll just confirm what others are saying, there's a decent chunk of eDRAM in the system.

 

[Rangers]

Chatter about a significant amount of eDRAM is spot on. Final hardware will have enough for either 720p w/ MSAA or 1080p rendering in a single pass. I don't think anyone will really be disappointed with the memory/cache setup once more specific details leak.

So how much would that require B3D gurus?

Xbox 360 can do 720P no AA right? So would 1080P no AA take twice as much ? (2X pixels). So, ~20 MB?

We have another guy in here (espresso) claiming it's less than a third of 16MB of EDRAM, so I guess who knows at this point. Many conflicting rumors. I think I'm growing less clear on what I think is in Wii U lately, not more.

 

[rpg.314]

Chatter about a significant amount of eDRAM is spot on. Final hardware will have enough for either 720p w/ MSAA or 1080p rendering in a single pass. I don't think anyone will really be disappointed with the memory/cache setup once more specific details leak.

@1080p, FP16 is close to 16MB. With depth, that is 24MB. You'll need 48MB if you don't want to stall the GPU by putting a fb memcpy between every render call, or use an upscaler.

I guess, if all of it is on die, then it is not too bad.

OT: What are the chances of on die fb (in 6-10MB range) in smartphones in the 20nm timeframe?

 

[rpg.314]

So how much would that require B3D gurus?

Xbox 360 can do 720P no AA right? So would 1080P no AA take twice as much ? (2X pixels). So, ~20 MB?

We have another guy in here (espresso) claiming it's less than a third of 16MB of EDRAM, so I guess who knows at this point. Many conflicting rumors. I think I'm growing less clear on what I think is in Wii U lately, not more.

It will take a lot of gall to claim a lot of edram with 5MB.

May be Xilinx's Si interposer will help.

 

[Teasy]

So how much would that require B3D gurus?

Xbox 360 can do 720P no AA right? So would 1080P no AA take twice as much ? (2X pixels). So, ~20 MB?

We have another guy in here (espresso) claiming it's less than a third of 16MB of EDRAM, so I guess who knows at this point. Many conflicting rumors. I think I'm growing less clear on what I think is in Wii U lately, not more.

He was talking about the memory in the CPU not the GPU. Unless I've missed a post he made later?

 

[RudeCurve]

So how much would that require B3D gurus?

Xbox 360 can do 720P no AA right? So would 1080P no AA take twice as much ? (2X pixels). So, ~20 MB?

We have another guy in here (espresso) claiming it's less than a third of 16MB of EDRAM, so I guess who knows at this point. Many conflicting rumors. I think I'm growing less clear on what I think is in Wii U lately, not more.

Actually Xbox could do 720P@30fps with 4XMSAA for non-heavy scenes. 1080P requires 2.25 times the framebuffer size of eDRAM.

 

[homerdog]

Actually Xbox could do 720P@30fps with 4XMSAA.

He was talking about how much it could do without tiling I think.

 

[RudeCurve]

He was talking about how much it could do without tiling I think.

I thought RE5 doesn't use tiling?