Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

[eastmen]

10W just for the APU is just way too much. An iPad is like...4-5W tops, for the whole unit, including BT/wifi radios, LCD screen, backlight and so on. You'd need a giant battery and fairly serious fan cooling to handle that. Would be expensive and heavy.

Your right when I threw out 10w I was thinking of my surface pro but I guess you can't put a 44wh battery in it.


So the question is can a 16nm amd apu run wii u games at under 5w.

I really like the damn controller , been playing child of light like crazy !


I think that could be a cool thing.

Make a smaller console than even the wii/ wii u and put in a 25w or 35w amd apu . Then have each controller have its own 5watt apu. That way you can still do the streaming like you can with the wii u. You will get pretty good battery life for the controller.

But then you should be able to have multiple people run a game on 4 controllers or so. So in Mario kart you have the main console running a server and 4 controllers each running the game .

ithink that would be a good feature for the next Nintendo.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Ipad 3 hit 10W during some games and it is much slimmer than the WiiU pad. 10W APU in that form factor should be doable imo.

 

[creaks]

So Aunoma says Zelda is not just in engine, but gameplay footage?

Thats some impressive AA, looks very, very clean. A marked improvement over other wii u titles. I suppose dropping from 720p/60 to 720p/30 will help a lot in that regaurd.

 

[Goodtwin]

So Aunoma says Zelda is not just in engine, but gameplay footage?

Thats some impressive AA, looks very, very clean. A marked improvement over other wii u titles. I suppose dropping from 720p/60 to 720p/30 will help a lot in that regaurd.

I haven't seen enough yet to really judge. I was more impressed by the scope of the world. Hopefully Nintendo goes all out in creating a full living breathing world. I was expecting Zelda to be playable, so I was disappointed, but from the details they did reveil, this could be Nintendo's most ambitious project ever.

Overall I do like the art style so far. Its sort of a cross between Wind Waker and Skyward Sword. Should be very clean.

 

[AlNom]

It's certainly a lot of grass.

 

[Exophase]

Ipad 3 hit 10W during some games and it is much slimmer than the WiiU pad. 10W APU in that form factor should be doable imo.

There's a huge difference between 10W for an entire tablet and 10W just for an SoC, much less just for an APU. And while the Wii U controller is a lot thicker than iPad, a lot of that thickness is in bulges that do very little to improve heat dissipation. One of the other dimensions is smaller, and it has a much smaller screen meaning that its power signature is more centralized than on an iPad.

 

[Goodtwin]

It's certainly a lot of grass.

Its kind of interesting since Nintendo has used flat textures for the ground in the majority of its games. Would be interesting to know how my polygons they are pushing in this game. Its hard to judge if they are using any fancy shaders at this point, but it does seem like polygons are not used sparingly. Nintendo does have a tendency to create visuals that look nice, but aren't overly demanding on the hardware, such as Skyward Swords paintery graphics. Not saying they have much performance to spare when they are done, but that they aren't stressed overly trying to implement some of the latest shader techniques.

 

[shredenvain]

Yes the game looks amazing if that is actual gameplay. The painting/cell shading style of graphics seem to help performance since they arent shooting for realism. Now the lack of jaggies could be from supersampling since it was for an E3 demo. It will probably still look pretty clean when released just not flawless.

 

[Rodéric]

Yes the game looks amazing if that is actual gameplay. The painting/cell shading style of graphics seem to help performance since they arent shooting for realism. Now the lack of jaggies could be from supersampling since it was for an E3 demo. It will probably still look pretty clean when released just not flawless.

It was confirmed by Eiji Aonuma to be gameplay on the Wii U.

 

[Grall]

Gameplay captured to a computer and given a spitshine work-over, most likely.

After all, they had to capture the video to edit and encode it for the webcast, so a li'l offline edge detect AA filtering added to the mix wouldn't be all that unexpected methinks.

 

[AlNom]

Wait for a HQ feed I guess.

 

[creaks]

Yes the game looks amazing if that is actual gameplay. The painting/cell shading style of graphics seem to help performance since they arent shooting for realism. Now the lack of jaggies could be from supersampling since it was for an E3 demo. It will probably still look pretty clean when released just not flawless.

This is a pretty irritating myth that keeps getting perpetuated.

A shader is a shader, you can easily make a non realistic styled shader that is more performance demanding than a realistic styled one.

The difference here is a human perception one, not a hardware performance one. Realistic graphics can be directly compared to reality, artistically stylized ones can not (in the same way). Thus, you can make asthetically pleasing imagery, with even the most modest hardware. Whilst realistic graphics, and their immediate comparisons to the reality visible at all times, will always be in need of more power for improvements. In general, stylized graphical depictions suffer less from diminishing returns, (I dont want to start an erroenous diminishing returns argument, so I just want to remind people that diminishing returns =/ graphics not getting better, or hardware not getting more powerful, just that human beings begin to see less and less of an improvement with the same amount or more, power/effort than what used for previous generations that looked like a large improvement to them) even on a power even playing field, because human beings dont live in and constantly experience those visuals as reality. Which is likely why Nintendo is so fond of using stylistic art styles. Not because it is easier on performance than a realistic art style.

I know its nitpicky, and subjectively it seems like the end state can mushily bleed through both takes... BUT, objectively a stylized/cartoon shader that uses the exact same amount of resources as a realistic styled shader, requires the same... well, amount of resources and would have the same performance hit.


Besides, that doesnt really seem to apply much here beyond the character models, particularly Link, in this Zelda.

The environments themselves are not nearly as removed froma realistic presentation as the character/horse model.

(Sorry for the image quality, just this shot of the bridge is one of the few close enough to show what Im talking about.)

Seems to me, the textures themselves are going for a detailed representation of their realworld materials, while its the geometry that has been slightly stylized and exaggerated, not quite being a deliberate reflection of how things in reality are... Formed? Built? Depicted? Depicted.

For me me it makes an interesting juxtaposition between link and his horse, and the world behind/around him.

 

[Grall]

This Zelda looks a lot like a classic cel-animated movie. The backgrounds are more detailed, shaded and painted overall look, while moving objects are simpler in style and coloring. Not saying Link, or his horse, or even the monster he fights are simple per se; it's just a separation of style, deliberately so.

I find it interesting.

Since Doom 3, many games have had a unified lighting graphics engine, where backgrounds, objects and characters (monsters, whatever) are lit and shaded the same way. Doom 3 cheated a little here and there, but basically it holds true. This game consciously goes the opposite way. Z:WW for example was consistently cartoonish, while Z:TTP had a hand-drawn, again consistent look about it. I never played skyward sword, so I can't say anything about that one.

I'm looking forward to seeing more about this game in...oh, about a years' time, at next E3.

 

[creaks]

This Zelda looks a lot like a classic cel-animated movie. The backgrounds are more detailed, shaded and painted overall look, while moving objects are simpler in style and coloring. Not saying Link, or his horse, or even the monster he fights are simple per se; it's just a separation of style, deliberately so.

I find it interesting.

Since Doom 3, many games have had a unified lighting graphics engine, where backgrounds, objects and characters (monsters, whatever) are lit and shaded the same way. Doom 3 cheated a little here and there, but basically it holds true. This game consciously goes the opposite way. Z:WW for example was consistently cartoonish, while Z:TTP had a hand-drawn, again consistent look about it. I never played skyward sword, so I can't say anything about that one.

I'm looking forward to seeing more about this game in...oh, about a years' time, at next E3.

THis really seems to be the first one where theyve deliberately had so much contrast between characters and background style asthetics.

Skyward sword had a consistant painted impressionist style, that had a shader filter (Probably some manner of embm distortion layers) 'paintify' distant objects instead of the typical dof blur. It was nice, but even for Nintendo's wii games with all their fantastic art direction, it was becoming obvious they were reaching outside the realm of the wii's capabilities.

Brilliant work with interactive tesselation/procedural asset augmentationt hough, ESPECIALLY for doing it on wii.

Nintendo had their own little scaled down version of DMM running on the wii for materials the user could interact with. Since the player could swing in any direction from anyplace, Nintendo decided to let them cut certain materials (Signs, enemies wooden sheilds, thin trees, bamboo, etc) from any direction from any place, by procedurally generating new art assets to represent the freshly cut peices.

Could literally turn a sign into a pile of uniquely shaped splinters. The cutting is literally a motion controlled revengenence system scaled down to wii. Also allowed real time interaction with the magical leafblower and large sand filled rooms, could even seperate into piles and write your initials in the stuff. SHould have had a puzzle where you carved a path in the sand and then rolled a bomb down the user created path.

I wonder just how much they are going to expand on that with how much more power the wii u has over the wii.

 

[Billy Idol]

This is a pretty irritating myth that keeps getting perpetuated.

A shader is a shader, you can easily make a non realistic styled shader that is more performance demanding than a realistic styled one.

The difference here is a human perception one, not a hardware performance one. Realistic graphics can be directly compared to reality, artistically stylized ones can not (in the same way). Thus, you can make asthetically pleasing imagery, with even the most modest hardware. Whilst realistic graphics, and their immediate comparisons to the reality visible at all times, will always be in need of more power for improvements. In general, stylized graphical depictions suffer less from diminishing returns, (I dont want to start an erroenous diminishing returns argument, so I just want to remind people that diminishing returns =/ graphics not getting better, or hardware not getting more powerful, just that human beings begin to see less and less of an improvement with the same amount or more, power/effort than what used for previous generations that looked like a large improvement to them) even on a power even playing field, because human beings dont live in and constantly experience those visuals as reality. Which is likely why Nintendo is so fond of using stylistic art styles. Not because it is easier on performance than a realistic art style.

I know its nitpicky, and subjectively it seems like the end state can mushily bleed through both takes... BUT, objectively a stylized/cartoon shader that uses the exact same amount of resources as a realistic styled shader, requires the same... well, amount of resources and would have the same performance hit.

Besides, that doesnt really seem to apply much here beyond the character models, particularly Link, in this Zelda.

The environments themselves are not nearly as removed froma realistic presentation as the character/horse model.

(Sorry for the image quality, just this shot of the bridge is one of the few close enough to show what Im talking about.)

Seems to me, the textures themselves are going for a detailed representation of their realworld materials, while its the geometry that has been slightly stylized and exaggerated, not quite being a deliberate reflection of how things in reality are... Formed? Built? Depicted? Depicted.

For me me it makes an interesting juxtaposition between link and his horse, and the world behind/around him.

It reminds me about the Last Guardian footage we saw...the character was cellshaded tonn-ish, while the world and the bird-thing were quite realistic...the contrast even helped imo to make the bird more realistic looking.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This is a pretty irritating myth that keeps getting perpetuated.

A shader is a shader, you can easily make a non realistic styled shader that is more performance demanding than a realistic styled one.

Technically yes, but in reality, at least with the current applications of NRR in games, NRR is less demanding. You don't need anything like as many texture and surface layers as a photorealistic car, and you don't need subsurface scattering and super-detailed facial textures. In fact painterly textures can get away with being lower resolution. Conceptually, a game could render photorealistically and then apply a transmogrification filter to make it look like a painting for maximal demands on the hardware, but that's not likely to happen, making non-photorealistic rendering a 'cheaper' rendering approach (you can still saturate hardware with).

Which is likely why Nintendo is so fond of using stylistic art styles. Not because it is easier on performance than a realistic art style.

I think it has nothing to do with either of those points, and is simply the aesthetic they are going for, whether it stands the test of time or not. But certainly this game in photorealism would be more taxing and beyond Wii U's capabilities.

...objectively a stylized/cartoon shader that uses the exact same amount of resources as a realistic styled shader, requires the same... well, amount of resources and would have the same performance hit.

Right up until you model the surface characteristics. Then you have loads of factors to calculate for realistic materials, while cel shaded gets away with a couple of a textures and a light-probe.

Besides, that doesnt really seem to apply much here beyond the character models, particularly Link, in this Zelda.

Yeah, the texture detail looks good. Nintendo haven't cheaped out on the assets.

 

[creaks]

Technically yes, but in reality, at least with the current applications of NRR in games, NRR is less demanding. You don't need anything like as many texture and surface layers as a photorealistic car, and you don't need subsurface scattering and super-detailed facial textures. In fact painterly textures can get away with being lower resolution. Conceptually, a game could render photorealistically and then apply a transmogrification filter to make it look like a painting for maximal demands on the hardware, but that's not likely to happen, making non-photorealistic rendering a 'cheaper' rendering approach (you can still saturate hardware with).

I think it has nothing to do with either of those points, and is simply the aesthetic they are going for, whether it stands the test of time or not. But certainly this game in photorealism would be more taxing and beyond Wii U's capabilities.

Right up until you model the surface characteristics. Then you have loads of factors to calculate for realistic materials, while cel shaded gets away with a couple of a textures and a light-probe.

Yeah, the texture detail looks good. Nintendo haven't cheaped out on the assets.

Eh, that doesnt make them less demanding, you are just doing less, because, as I stated, they arent directly comparable to reality and you can get away with it.... Which is the reason the myth exists. Im not trying to argue in favor of how the status quo is currently done. I dont think I will ever do that, Im also not arguing that you cant get away with having a much better looking game asthetically with much less demand on performance, just that the reason that is, is because you are literally doing less, and human beings cant tell because its not a direct comparison to reality, not because the style magically makes it easier on performance in a 1:1 situation.

Making this scene take a photo realistic style wouldnt be beyond the wii u, because again, I am talking about an equal resource overhead. The game just wouldnt be anywhere near as asthetically pleasing because of the direct comparisons to reality, and all the approximations/shortcomings humans would now be able to recognize.

You could easily make a non realistic looking game that IS just as, if not more, far far more demanding than a current well done realistic game because, well, you arent restricted by what happens in reality. Even upon modeling the surface characteristics. All you would have to do, is keep going. Instead of stopping at a flat cartoon look, go all the way. paint actually has texture, different textures AND properties when wet or dry. on top of that the act of painting itself leaves a texture on the painted surface dependant upon the object that was used to paint. You can just keep going.

Once we gain visual parity, as in hardware has become so powerful that it just doesnt matter anymore. Humans cant tell the difference. Non realistic styles will continue to get more and more demanding, while realistic visuals wont. Because non realistic visuals are not restricted by emulating reality, whilst the realistic visuals have no point in continuing to advance.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Eh, that doesnt make them less demanding, you are just doing less

Doing less isn't less demanding?

not because the style magically makes it easier on performance in a 1:1 situation.

The style is achieved with having to do less work, talking about a conventional painted/cel shaded game as typically employed in current games.

Making this scene take a photo realistic style wouldnt be beyond the wii u

It sure would in realtime! PS4 can't handle photorealism in many cases. Wii U would not be able to pull off a convincing photorealistic scene with dynamic, physically based HDR, translucency, secondary illumination, skin shaders with SSS, etc. Photorealism in this game is beyond the console's capabilities. Going with an approximate realism would probably just be jarring because of the reasons you describe, so a non-realistic renderer allows aesthetically pleasing results within the performance limitations of the platform. I guess what you're saying is that Nintendo could have gone with a realistic style but it wouldn't have been as comfortable due to the technical limitations in reaching photorealism, so Nintendo spent exactly the same amount of effort not on rendering a crude approximation of realism but in rendering an artistic abstraction.

You could easily make a non realistic looking game that IS just as, if not more, far far more demanding than a current well done realistic game because, well, you arent restricted by what happens in reality.

Yes, I agreed with that, but we're talking about this specific implementation.

Non realistic visuals will continue to get more and more demanding, while realistic visuals wont. Its because non realistic visuals are not restricted by emulating reality, whilst the realistic visuals have no point in continuing to advance.

Potentially that's true, but it's a long ways off. Realistic people en masse in realtime with realistic animation in globally illuminated worlds with convincing physical materials is only just happening in the earliest phases of this gen on the next-gen hardware, not Wii U. Wii U can't handle them and couldn't handle Zelda in photorealism. When we get to a point where we can render games with photographic quality, it'll take some pretty bizarre abstract styles to produce a style even more demanding. As you say, the human sensitivity to reality means it requires more effort to pull off, so of course needs more invested in it performance wise.

 

[creaks]

Doing less isn't less demanding?

The style is achieved with having to do less work, talking about a conventional painted/cel shaded game as typically employed in current games.

It sure would in realtime! PS4 can't handle photorealism in many cases. Wii U would not be able to pull off a convincing photorealistic scene with dynamic, physically based HDR, translucency, secondary illumination, skin shaders with SSS, etc. Photorealism in this game is beyond the console's capabilities. Going with an approximate realism would probably just be jarring because of the reasons you describe, so a non-realistic renderer allows aesthetically pleasing results within the performance limitations of the platform. I guess what you're saying is that Nintendo could have gone with a realistic style but it wouldn't have been as comfortable due to the technical limitations in reaching photorealism, so Nintendo spent exactly the same amount of effort not on rendering a crude approximation of realism but in rendering an artistic abstraction.

Yes, I agreed with that, but we're talking about this specific implementation.

Potentially that's true, but it's a long ways off. Realistic people en masse in realtime with realistic animation in globally illuminated worlds with convincing physical materials is only just happening in the earliest phases of this gen on the next-gen hardware, not Wii U. Wii U can't handle them and couldn't handle Zelda in photorealism. When we get to a point where we can render games with photographic quality, it'll take some pretty bizarre abstract styles to produce a style even more demanding. As you say, the human sensitivity to reality means it requires more effort to pull off, so of course needs more invested in it performance wise.

Oh yeah, its a very, very long ways off.


For Zelda u, I specifically stated the same resource overhead would remain. I also specifically stated it would be less convincing. However, being less convincing is not the same thing as not being able to have a realistic art style be possible at all. Weve been doing it for decades on far less powerful hardware.... And our high end hardware we can pull approximations from are far more capable than what we had to work with back then as well.

Im not arguing that doing less is not less demanding, i am simply bringing up the point that the reason status quo examples are easier on performance is because they are, in fact doing less, when you could very easily be doing just as much, and more so much more (appearence of animated textures that are constantly being painted with brush strokes, to include the texture of the bristles in the paint, and using this to respond to changes in lighting, including all the way down to the subtle surface characteristics and differences in height of the effect of bristles being drawn across a surface), in which case the demand on performance would be the same or more. I know you keep agreeing with this, but its my main argument, the other things I say are just circumstantially attached to it, Im not trying to support the current status quo of non realistic art styles, Im kind of calling them out for being complacent (on platforms with the power to do more.)

In that case I was not talking about this specific implementation, but the belief in general that is being widely perpetuated, particularly by media outlets, and then regurgitated en masse, that realistic assets, shaders, etc are 1:1 inherently more demanding.


Its not the end state I have a problem with, (non realistic games can look as good or better than realistic games while doing less) but the logic used to get there (The reason is not because they are doing less, and that they could do more, but because its 1:1 not as demanding). Its like someone trying to explain that the sky is blue, because its made of cotton candy. Yes, the sky is blue... No, thats not really the reason why.

A recent result of this, for example, being the incredibly irritating rash of erroneous media articles about all the (Non existant) 1080p 60fps wii u games, and how they are only 1080p 60fps because of the non realistic style, and how you now, in fact, should not want 1080p 60fps games on ps4/xbone because of this... When, this was simply just a massive kneejerk reaction to a mistake made in eurogamers review, who accidentally called mario kart 8 1080p.

To that end, I will posit, that Zelda U is a far more demanding game than say, Assassins creed 4 on wii u. Despite Zelda U being a less realistically styled game.

 

[Grall]

Your claim regarding Zelda vs. Assassin's Creed is of course completely unfounded. You have no credible way of knowing you're actually correct or not.

One might assume you're right, considering Zelda is still deep under development whereas AC4 has already been released months ago (and Nintendo being Nintendo having better understanding of their own system, and 3rd party devs have long cursed the poor documentation and development kit for the system so it's likely they weren't able to take full advantage of the wuu), but fundamentally you're still just assuming.

We should perhaps be a bit wary of making unfounded, unprovable claims in the technical forum?

That said, is there a list somewhere of confirmed 1080P games, as well as 1080P/60 wuu games?