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

If Nintendo would of given themselves an extra 15-20w to play with Wii U would of turned out so much better.

 

I stand to be corrected, but i think its two tablets only...and you can only use 2...

 

this is baffling, what the nintendo reason for choosing this?

in iwata ask they already says that power draw is a big concern but why? This is a home console, not a portable device.

or they really really want to put Wii U in miniscule case and dont want it to be big ?

 

I probably shouldn't say it's weird that nintendo sticks to 480P rendering, but considering the general level of incompetence, ineptness and may I say just plain INDIFFERENCE towards anything decently modern in the way of 3D rendering/hardware, it shouldn't surprise us that is the case.

Disappointing, for sure. At least we could have expected some sort of smooth GPU-powered upscaling, because seriously, 480P looks like shit on a big-screen TV.

Extremely doubtful about your realtime software emulation claim. Celeron is a strong OoOE microprocessor, xenon is crap in comparison. Running not just the celeron workload, but also an emulation layer on top seems pretty impossible to me. Many MAME games using far from modern chips run hella slow on CPUs decades more recent.

I'd say xbox emulation used either recompiled binaries, or (possibly pre-) transcoded.

 

That seems to be the driving factor. Nintendo wanted a Wii sized case, and made design decisions prioritising that, and Wii BC, meaning the HDD sits outside the case and the innards are low draw. Had they aimed for slim PS3/XB360 size, they could have had much better performance for the same price, presumably using cheaper off-the-shelf components too although at the loss of Wii BC. If Wii U doesn't appeal to Wii upgraders, Nintendo's choices could be very costly. But if Wii owners do upgrade, it may prove exactly the right choice.

 

Heck, Nintendo could have aimed at gamecube-size enclosure and it would still have been small and neat, would have allowed for a much more powerful system and still been silent, and even had enough room for an internal power supply. *sigh*

 

What's interesting is that the Wii U is about twice the size of the PS2 Slim yet it consumes the same amount of power and probably has a similar TDP. Obviously the Wii U has a slot loading as opposed to a manual loading drive but I'm wondering if the arrangement (ie, shortest end facing forwards, compared to longest end for most consoles) made thermal management more difficult.

 

Yeah they basically said that using two tablets would half the bandwith for transferring data to the pads. So for some reason that leads to half the fps. (I've no idea how that works). I can't see them ever using two 'pads outside of Madden/FIFA tyoe games where fps wont matter as all thats on the pad will be play charts/menus etc.

Not sure if you were asking this but fyi you can currently use 1 GamePad and up to 4 wiimotes simultaneously.

 

We had exactly the same situation with Wii. That could have been far sweeter little console in terms of hardware and visual output.

Finite bandwidth to the tablets. Let's say they have 60 mbps for sake of convenience. That's 60 mbps for one tablet to reach 60 fps, one frame consuming 1 megabits of data. Across two tablets, you'd either have to halve the framerate to each console and issue 1 megabit of data every 1/30th of a second, or halve the bitrate per frame and have 0.5 megabits pre frame at 60fps on two consoles. The encoding of the video stream will be a critical factor. Encoding a single video stream means far better compression can be achieved by encoding variations per frame. Encoding two parallel steams would either need two processes running, or you treat each frame as a static image and compress it like a JPEG, which is exactly what DF reckons is happening. So I expect we have hardware MJPEG encoding on Wii capable of 60 fps, and hardware decoding on the Wuublet. For 4 tablets, you'd be reduced to 15 fps.

Anyone able to hazard a guess as to what MJPEG decompression hardware will consume powerwise? Is that going to be big draw on the battery?

 

Hopefully some enterprising engineers get to work on the Wii U soon, so we can see whether blu ray playback can be achieved on the console, like DVD playback with the Wii. In fact Nintendo probably borked the custom blu ray drive intentionally to read only single layer knowing what happened with the Wii.

 

According to the guy most responsible it was emulation. He was extremely proud of it, and I used to have some of the links where he talked about it. Arrrgghh. I can't find them. It was definitely not recompiled binaries. 100% it was not that.

Edit: here you go:

http://www.qbrundage.com/michaelb/pubs/essays/xbox360.html

He's a real bad ass (his CV):

http://www.qbrundage.com/michaelb/resume/michael_brundage_resume.pdf

 

Its a Japanese company designing their products for primarily their Japanese market.
Like when Japan exported cheap small cars to the US who were into making big expensive gas guzzlers. Look what happened.

Utilities is very expensive in other parts of the world. Im glad Nintendo tries to keep the energy footprint of their products as low as possible. It does not influence the quality their first/second party games. Third parties are the ones who have problems. Because they have to figure out which console will be the defacto console to make their games on, from which to port up or down unoptimized versions to the competition. I think many people fear the WiiU being the main console next gen.

 

Probably not, the arrangement they've chosen now just makes the console longer than it would neccessarily have to be.

The reason for this is the thickness (and probably also depth) of the optical drive. They moved away from the slim laptop-style drive used in the wii - cost reasons likely - to a larger, more standard-sized drive. If they'd stayed with the slim drive they could have put the MCM carrier with the big chips in under the drive and used a heatpipe arrangement to the heatsink in the rear of the console and put the fan in front of the sink, instead of behind it like now. That would have saved the fan a lot of heat-induced wear and tear.

However, this setup had to have been cheaper, and as the saying goes, a saved buck is an earned buck...

 

I don't know that the UK's prices are particularly low, but when PS360 launched there was a Gadget Show investigation into the cost to run them, and it was all of £30ish a year on ~200 watt machines. The savings from energy footprint should be close to nothing, ten quid a year tops.

 

This is not true at all of course.

The NA/EU market is much bigger than the Japanese market and with only 12 million wii's sold vs 80+ million in the rest of the world I doubt they design their products with the Japanese market as their #1 priority. If they did, they would have been out of business long ago.

Anyway don't trust the Japanese. They might say they care so much about size and/or don't want to waste energy, but if you ever go there you will quickly notice the opposite is true.

 

This party is over as soon as Xbox 3/ps4 hit

 

Yeah, I was wondering also about player count being limited on some Vita games that use HD console engines - more likely a CPU limitation than a GPU limitation.

 

When a company makes an "energy efficient" product, it rarely actually benefits the user individually. When 10 million WiiUs are in use, that power saving becomes significant and thats why people are bothered about "being green". We aren't making a difference on our own, but collectively & every company has a responsibility to make their products as efficient as possible.

So Nintendo can claim their product is "energy saving" or whatever - but its not going to benefit you beyond a few quid a year unless you leave it on 24/7. They can make that claim though and the company/product looks good. Job done

Well it aint cheap

Also remember the cost of electricity has gone up exponentially since 2005 (ie not in line with inflation) so its likely not a straight line down between ~200w and ~50w to calculate the yearly cost based on those figures.

But as I said above, and you have touched upon -the benefit is never to the consumer (unless its a 24/7 device like a fridge or something), the benefit is to the company - in this case Nintendo - as it comes accross as caring and enviro friendly. This perception in turn helps market the product as the consumer feels all warm inside for saving the planet. And I suppose when its used on mass it does make a difference for the planet too (not that the company care about this part).

This was gonna be the case anyway unless they were also GPU heavy. It seems Nintnedo was/is banking on the industry shifting to GPGPU biased games, where the GPU takes over alot of the physics etc. They would have still been "down ports" (less assets, lower res etc) but similar architecture might have made it easier. I fear they've gone a bit too far thought with gimping their CPU and as soon as the first wave of Next Gen games are over, WiiU likely won't be seeing any straight ports. Doesn't mean it wont see it's own versions of games (al la Wii) and that depends entirely on the size of WiiUs market by then. This is a numbers game not a popularity contest, after all.

Right now WiiU's only saving grace is that not too many companies look like they'll have the capital to compete in a high-budget "AAAA" game market, so intially it might not be too much of an issue as many devs (publishers) will see the benefit in making cheaper games for the established WiiU audience over spending big on loss-leading projects. It also seems set to become a bit of an Indie haven as the eShop is very friendly to smaller devs (some even comparing it to Steam in its cost effectivness, simplicity and openness) so that might add to its longevity too.

 

I've almost never seen a consumer pick a product for socially conscious reasons save a bit of Fair Trade. It's not a high priority except in a niche demographic. People will pick over higher priority factors (cost, performance, quality, aesthetics, popularity, etc.) and then, if it happens to be socially conscious, give themselves a pat on the back. Nintendo have been performing miserable on Greenpeace's corporation greenness ratings for ages, and haven't cared one just, and haven't suffered in market success as a result.

 

Well here in the UK its happening more and more. Especially with consumer electronics. Your average buyer probably doesn't care, no. But many do.

I think its more of a "string to its bow" kinda thing than a unique selling point in its own right though.

Nintendo is starting to feel the wrath of the media about its lack of greenness. They actually addressed their latest eco/conflict mineral-ranking with a press release This is also their first console in 6 years and back then it wasn't really as much of a public concern. The world has since gone eco-mad and even if it turns out not to make a difference Nitnendo would've been silly not to factor that into their design. In product design nowadays, environmental friendliness is one of the first things on the design brief.

It's not because they care, its because they have to look like they care.