Wii U 'Has A Horrible, Slow CPU' Says Metro Last Light Dev

Status
Not open for further replies.
A

Alucardx23

Regular
This is incredible and unacceptable on Nintendo's part :/. How is it possible that a 2012 console has problems matching what a 7 year old console can do?

“[The] Wii U has a horrible, slow CPU,” explained Shishkovtsov. “We had an early look at it, we thought we could probably do it, but in terms of the impact we would make on the overall quality of the game – potentially to its detriment – we just figured it wasn’t worth pursuing at this time. It’s something we might return to. I really couldn’t make any promises, though.”

http://www.nowgamer.com/news/1687689/wii_u_has_a_horrible_slow_cpu_says_metro_last_light_dev.html
 
Are Nintendo sacrificing system and gaming performance just to benefit the power consumption of the Wii-U. Is this a result of that minuscule per watt usage?

How is it that other games that have launched on Wii-U/ ie. ports of Xbox 360/PS3 games (Batman, COD: BO2, AC3) have managed to get by, and the developers of Metro can't do the same?

I'm wondering what is going on here.
Is this what Nintendo had in store for the Wii-U? or are developers just not being guided by Nintendo or getting to grips with how they should use the system's performance to their advantage.
 
Chief technical officer, Oles Shishkovtsov, explains why Metro’s sequel won’t be appearing.

“[The] Wii U has a horrible, slow CPU,” explained Shishkovtsov. “We had an early look at it, we thought we could probably do it, but in terms of the impact we would make on the overall quality of the game – potentially to its detriment – we just figured it wasn’t worth pursuing at this time. It’s something we might return to. I really couldn’t make any promises, though.”

Despite Nintendo’s console offering Metro: Last Light new experiences to its players with it dual screens, when asked Shishkovtsov was adamant that the Wii U would ever seen Metro: Last Light when asked directly.

“We had an initial look at the Wii U, but given the size of the team and compared to where we were last time, just developing for the Playstation 3 is a significant addition.”
Click to expand...

Ouch...
http://www.nowgamer.com/news/1687689/wii_u_has_a_horrible_slow_cpu_says_metro_last_light_dev.html

Or is this a case where they dont understand the architecture?
 
ZeroEx said:
Are Nintendo sacrificing system and gaming performance just to benefit the power consumption of the Wii-U. Is this a result of that minuscule per watt usage?

How is it that other games that have launched on Wii-U/ ie. ports of Xbox 360/PS3 games (Batman, COD: BO2, AC3) have managed to get by, and the developers of Metro can't do the same?

I'm wondering what is going on here.
Is this what Nintendo had in store for the Wii-U? or are developers just not being guided by Nintendo or getting to grips with how they should use the system's performance to their advantage.
Click to expand...
Well I would expect that the titles you are speaking about to both having benefits from more fonding than what the Metro devs can invest, and they are also more likely to sell more so making the odds for a tinier company to invest a lot of time in a less solid IP, unlikely.
 
I really don't think that guy would have any problem understanding the Wii U's architecture. While I don't qutie like the art direction of the Metro games, they're still pretty impressive on the technical side.
 
liolio said:
Well I would expect that the titles you are speaking about to both having benefits from more fonding than what the Metro devs can invest, and they are also more likely to sell more so making the odds for a tinier company to invest a lot of time in a less solid IP, unlikely.
Click to expand...
You know when it comes down to it, maybe they were expecting the Wii-U to be closer along the lines of Xbox 360 and PS3 and it'd be a good time investment to get a port of Metro Last Light on the Wii-U in time for launch next year. It seems they were wrong in assuming it's anything like Xbox and PS3 and they just don't have the time to work on that version right now. Wii-U having a slower CPU would mean they'd have to re-work their engine and work within the Wii-U's performance strengths (if it has any...pfff) and that would require extra time to develop the game, which they don't seem to have.
 
As much as the game is GPU limited on PC it is also very CPU dependant as well, 6 Core+ CPU's really show a huge increases in minimum frame rates so I assume that they're doing something compute heavy on the CPU side of things with the engine and thus is causing trouble on Wii U?
 
The CPU die is 33mm^2. An Atom N270 is 29mm^2. Might be on similar lithography. Hmmmm... Yeah I'm gonna guess that it's not exactly a beast. I wonder how it compares to a modern tablet or phone CPU, actually. Anandtech showed some slow-n-nasty SunSpider results but noted that it runs an older version of Webkit.
 
if the new version would allow it to complete in half the time, it would be competitive with the top smart phones. seems unlikely imo.

otoh does sunspider browser benchmark represent the average gaming load, probably not. but still doesnt say much when youre being beaten by most modern cellular devices.
 
snarfbot said:
if the new version would allow it to complete in half the time, it would be competitive with the top smart phones. seems unlikely imo.

otoh does sunspider browser benchmark represent the average gaming load, probably not. but still doesnt say much when youre being beaten by most modern cellular devices.
Click to expand...

But phone manufactorers, Google, Apple and RIM all put a heck of lot of effect making these devices as fast as possible at sun spider like processing loads as users spend a lot of time surfing the net on these devices.

Wii U users will not spend any where near as much time surfing the net on the machine compared to gaming so you could find that it's just not had as much time and effort spent on making code efficient as these mobile devices have.
 
I don't get it. I'm reading that the memory bandwidth and CPU are absolutely terrible compared to the 360, but they paired it with a GPU that should be significantly better than Xenos. Makes little to no sense to me.
 
Scott_Arm said:
I don't get it. I'm reading that the memory bandwidth and CPU are absolutely terrible compared to the 360, but they paired it with a GPU that should be significantly better than Xenos. Makes little to no sense to me.
Click to expand...

Well it does have the second display to deal with, the wuublet.
 
ZeroEx said:
Are Nintendo sacrificing system and gaming performance just to benefit the power consumption of the Wii-U. Is this a result of that minuscule per watt usage?

How is it that other games that have launched on Wii-U/ ie. ports of Xbox 360/PS3 games (Batman, COD: BO2, AC3) have managed to get by, and the developers of Metro can't do the same?

I'm wondering what is going on here.
Is this what Nintendo had in store for the Wii-U? or are developers just not being guided by Nintendo or getting to grips with how they should use the system's performance to their advantage.
Click to expand...


I think it's obvious some devs are being given way more support than others...

Ubisoft and Namco Bandai have seemingly gotten their games up to scratch no problem, same for BLOPS 2 from what I've seen. The CPU is obviously not a powerhouse, but it's also obviously useable as its being used by other devs. THQ are pretty much screwed at this point and whether his assesment is correct or not, the game wouldn't have been coming to WiiU even if it had an i7 in there. He ain't kidding anyone by blaming the WiiU cpu as the sole reason. (although I'm sure it's one reason, as he stated)


I'm also wondering how Gearbox managed to compliment the CPU earlier this year. Was the guy maybe referring to the GPU instead?? Or maybe somthing changed. Or maybe he was talking bollocks.

Whatever turns out to be correct about the cpu, this doesn't bode well for the WiiUs future unless next gen is a GPGPU revolution (it isn't)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Speaking of the CPU Kevin Femmel at gimmegimmegames.com has floated an idea about the clock speed of this continuing conundrum. The Wii Broadway CPU had its clock "hidden" on the CPU itself and there is a number on the Wii U CPU which can be construed to be giving the same information. The last, and potentially relevant, string of text reads "1226LP734", or could it be 1.226Ghz as Femmel suggest?

http://gimmegimmegames.com/2012/11/rumor-wii-u-cpu-clocked-at-1-22ghz/

It's been rumoured that the Wii U CPU might just be a new version of Broadway, so I turned to Wikipedia for more information on it. According to them the 750cl on which Broadway is based (or vice versa) reaches up to 1Ghz at 90 nm. There is just the caveat that the same Wiki tells me that the 7xx series has been shelved, and we know that the CPU would have to be at or below a 45nm process node according to the teardowns. Was IBM willing to redesign a shelved design for a new process node? I guess time will tell.

Those are just my 2 cents.
 
snarfbot said:
if the new version would allow it to complete in half the time, it would be competitive with the top smart phones. seems unlikely imo.
Click to expand...
Sun Spider is a software benchmark to the same extent as it is a hardware benchmark. One can easily find a factor of 2 difference with the same CPU by just using another OS/browser combination (also on smartphones). If something is in a quite unoptimized state (as it appears to be for the Wii U OS right now) I wouldn't be surprised by seeing at least that as the wiggle room (or potential for improvement).
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top