Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

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Earendil said:
Probably the same way anonymous dev quotes saying the Wii U is weak seem to be the gold standard versus actual developers saying positive things about it.
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I don't think I have seen anyone say that the Wii U is weak , but I have seen people say that the CPU isn't so strong but the GPU is.
 
sebbbi said:
Tessellation doesn't help much if you have objects with lots of high frequency (sharp) details or discontinuities. You have to include all these sharp details and discontinuities in the pre-tessellated mesh (bloating it's size considerably), or there will be lots of visible surface crawling (continuous tessellation moves verticies along surfaces). Pixel shader techniques (parallax occlusion mapping, quadtree displacement mapping, etc) can be used on surfaces with high frequency details (such as cobblestone roads and shipping container sides) without any crawling issues. This is of course true for vertex based tessellation/displacement techniques as well, as long as triangles are always tessellated down to one pixel size. But pixel sized triangles are not efficient to render with current quad based rasterizers, and current hardware tessellation doesn't support that fine grained tessellation (64 splits is the maximum).

Mesh that is going to be used with pixel shader based displacement techniques tends to require much less extra polygons than a mesh that's going to be used with vertex based tessellation/displacement. Of cource if we compare the mesh with tessellation to a high polygon (baked) mesh, tessellation of course saves memory (but the exact amount highly depends on object shape and surface).
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I understand your points, but want to comment on one. I think 64 levels of tessellation is plenty outside of implementing Reyes. Most games are seriously lacking in geometry density and 64 levels of tessellation is enough to generate 8192 triangles from a quad patch. 64 quad patches screen aligned and fully tessellated covers a 1920x1080 screen with 4 pixel triangles. You'd have to be zoomed in pretty darn close to an object for triangle edges to be visible with that much tessellation.
 
steviep said:
It can output to more than 2.
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What was special about Eyefinity was simply having many more output connections than a GPUs normally had, coupled with the ability multiplex a single frame-buffer across those 3+ connections. Depending on how the WiiU streaming tech works they don't necessarily require more digital transmitters or DACs than a R700 would have.
 
Kb-Smoker said:
Wonder if this is why they had to cut the frame in half to add that other tablet. Have they even shown this working yet?
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Maybe because of the wireless transfer speed?

Btw, can 2 pad display different stuff? It doesn't need to display fancy stuff (although the tv and each pad displaying different complex scene like basically playing local multiplayer fps would be cool), but more like inventory menu or strategic/tactics menu.
Since Nintendo so sure that the frame rate would be halved, I assume the 2 pad stuff is limited by the transfer speed, but that doesn't mean that devs can't make a game which basically drive 3 different screen, although the hit would be relatively big.
How much potent the hw in the Pad? Can it draw a simple 2d stuff by itself or the main console must always feeds the whole display?
 
Rurouni said:
Maybe because of the wireless transfer speed?

Btw, can 2 pad display different stuff? It doesn't need to display fancy stuff (although the tv and each pad displaying different complex scene like basically playing local multiplayer fps would be cool), but more like inventory menu or strategic/tactics menu.
Since Nintendo so sure that the frame rate would be halved, I assume the 2 pad stuff is limited by the transfer speed, but that doesn't mean that devs can't make a game which basically drive 3 different screen, although the hit would be relatively big.
How much potent the hw in the Pad? Can it draw a simple 2d stuff by itself or the main console must always feeds the whole display?
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I think the console must always feeds the pad, there is no "computing" power in them.
 
There's virtually zero chance with that much hardware in the pad there isn't a microcontroller of some sort in it. Since the pad can function as a TV remote without the console running it does have some sort of graphics rendering functionality. Maybe not 3D capable though, but since there's so much incredibly cheap ARM SoC junk floating around on the market with at least some sort of GPU it would be a small miracle if there's not a rudimentary capability of that as well nevertheless.
 
It's not been confirmed anywhere, but it's a reasonable assumption. Two separate 60fps video streams would require twice the wireless bandwidth, and twice the transciever hardware in the console. Also, twice the rendering power dedicated for the separate streams of course...

Interlacing separate frames in one stream for two pads seem a reasonable compromise between price and performance for the (relatively) low-cost, low-powered Wuu.
 
Grall said:
It's not been confirmed anywhere, but it's a reasonable assumption. Two separate 60fps video streams would require twice the wireless bandwidth, and twice the transciever hardware in the console. Also, twice the rendering power dedicated for the separate streams of course...

Interlacing separate frames in one stream for two pads seem a reasonable compromise between price and performance for the (relatively) low-cost, low-powered Wuu.
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I have to say I don't agree.
If nintendo went for the special feature/ compromised processing route...you have to make sure the special features work well...in this case the ability to use 4 of the feature pads at 30fps and 2 at 60fps would have been acceptable.
 
french toast said:
I have to say I don't agree.
If nintendo went for the special feature/ compromised processing route...you have to make sure the special features work well...in this case the ability to use 4 of the feature pads at 30fps and 2 at 60fps would have been acceptable.
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Nintendo doesn't want to have games that require people to buy 4 of those controlers, because they know it is an insanely costly proposition. They are pushing this asymmetric gameplay so much, cause they wanna make sure third parties and players feel ok with the idea of only one person having the tablet controler and the others having just wii motes or the 360's controler clone they've shown.
They didn't even know if they were actually going to support the two tablets set-up when they first anounced the console, and the way they envision this is "well, if your friend also has a wiiU, and he happens do bring his controller to your house to play some games, then here is this 2 tablets option" but nintendo definetly doesn't want to be the company that asks people to buy 4 tablets to play their games, thats because of how they positioning.
They position themselves as the affordable company, not the high-end I-am-hardcore-and-want-the-ultimate-experience-no-matter-how-much-it-costs company, that kind of is what sony represents, and MS is in somewhat in-between with options that serve both types of players.
 
milk said:
Nintendo doesn't want to have games that require people to buy 4 of those controlers, because they know it is an insanely costly proposition. They are pushing this asymmetric gameplay so much, cause they wanna make sure third parties and players feel ok with the idea of only one person having the tablet controler and the others having just wii motes or the 360's controler clone they've shown.
They didn't even know if they were actually going to support the two tablets set-up when they first anounced the console, and the way they envision this is "well, if your friend also has a wiiU, and he happens do bring his controller to your house to play some games, then here is this 2 tablets option" but nintendo definetly doesn't want to be the company that asks people to buy 4 tablets to play their games, thats because of how they positioning.
They position themselves as the affordable company, not the high-end I-am-hardcore-and-want-the-ultimate-experience-no-matter-how-much-it-costs company, that kind of is what sony represents, and MS is in somewhat in-between with options that serve both types of players.
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Fair enough....let's hope this is reflected in the wuus retail price... what is the ps360 selling for now?
 
ninzel said:
Not sure if this has been posted.
"WiiU definitely more powerful than PS360"

http://www.videogamer.com/wiiu/scri...erful_than_360_and_ps3_scribblenauts_dev.html
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It also says the following:

Developers can't seem to agree on how powerful Nintendo's upcoming console is.

A report published yesterday quoted Tekken series producer Katsuhiro Harada as saying "the [Wii U's] clock is kinda low," and that the console's CPU was "a little bit" slower than 360 and PS3's.

Harada is currently porting arcade fighter Tekken Tag Tournament 2 to Nintendo's hardware.
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"It's not up to the same level as the PS3 or the 360," said one developer speaking to GamesIndustry.biz. "It doesn't produce graphics as well as the PS3 or the 360. There aren't as many shaders, it's not as capable," said another.
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