WiiGeePeeYou (Hollywood) what IS it ?

[pc999]

I dont think that compare early 360 games with early Wii games is very meaningfull, first of all because the dev of the games of the games for both consoles are really diferent, on Wii side no dev knew Wii till around May 05 and had to care manly with a brand new controler and very little care for gfx at the begining (first users will be hardcore Nintendo fans), on the other side you have a well documented console with a lot of tools, always updated HW/SDKs and a lot to prove. With this I dont mean that Wii is or not powerfull just that a direct comparition isnt a good thing.

I think that is about what I was expecting, which imo falls under a tweaked Flipper, overclocked. So maybe not everyone is so far apart on this one

And that is what most people do expect to, what we are trying to know is if it is upgraded then how it is upgraded.

For one we knew litle things, like that The CPU is more than twice as big as it is supossed to be, so the interesting thing is to know what is in the extra space. It can be some thing as simple as minor tweaks and extra cache or whatever is needed to better suport the new OS, or something indeed more "advanced" like a extra FPU ..., or as complex as a dual core or even something to offload some kinds of work*.

There is other things like the Rare comments about being a new architeture, or we have the comments about the number of carachters in games like SMS (in the crowd) or more recently the flood like thing in the new MP3 demo, or like darkblu said the lighting in MP3, the physics in Elebits... They are smal thing but that deserve being analized IMO.

Other interesting part of the discussion is what kinds of improvemnts could be made what what are those beneficts, for example vertex shaders could be very helpfull, not only would make possible that numbers of caracthers on screen but also offload a lot the CPU and even make posible more tech on the TEV.

*I just put this option because there is coments that may lead to this conclusion "The development was not that difficult, as the Wii system has built in physics simulation. "

Whether it's 50% clock increase or something else that puts it 2-3x over gamecube is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. It's still in that league where it's fairly accurate to call it spiced up Camecube or overclocked etc.

Would you care if 360 had 6 cores instead of 3 and 96 Alus instead of 48 (or if you prefer the equivalent to PS3)?

I mean, full specs have to leak out at some time, don't they ?

Maybe they give them when Wii2 is coming .

Anyway the best we heard is that it is more powerfull than XB (althought not as capable as it) and about 2,5-3x The power of GC.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

A 50% overclock would increase performance by no more than 50%, not 100%-200%.

I never said otherwise. What I said was that 50% would come from overclocking and that possible 100-200% would come from something extra.

Would you care if 360 had 6 cores instead of 3 and 96 Alus instead of 48 (or if you prefer the equivalent to PS3)?

Not too much if the competition would still be 10x more powerful(just a toss in figure), or if the power never was the thing I bought the thing for.
Obviously if everything else remained the same thus making X360 clearly more powerful than say PS3 it would make a difference, but this is not the case here with Wii. Whether it's 1.5 or 2.5 as powerful as Cube is basically meaningless for me and I bet it's also meaningless for average Wii consumer.

 

[swaaye]

Well I suppose in the end I don't really care how fast the machine is. I was just hoping to see the dithering go away. It just stood out so obviously in RE4.

 

[Ooh-videogames]

I want to make it clear, that I wasn't suggesting Hollywood is or could be an exact equivalent of R300. I was considering the possibility that Hollywood may have an equal number of pixel pipelines and can do 16 textures in a single pass. Maybe, a increased number in hardware lights. IMO, what has been shown is not possible on GC(although there are some exceptions), Excite Truck is one example.

Is it hard to believe Hollywood has an additional 4 pipelines over Flipper?

What would, in your(anyone) opinion be required to suggest that Wii is more powerful then Xbox?

 

[darkblu]

What would, in your(anyone) opinion be required to suggest that Wii is more powerful then Xbox?

watching the latest mp3 trailer? ; )

seriously, though i would expect wii to trash the 'box in most vertex and especially fill-rate tasks (the cube already did the latter), i still think some visual techniques that are more or less trivial on the 'box may still be way too expensive or too big a headache for the wii devs to implement. of course, if we assume that wii will have fillrate (and transformrate) to burn i may just as well be proven wrong.

btw, while we're on the topic of the power of efficiency, after one recent videodriver update my slightly outdated bebox is the snappiest desktop in the house once again (versus an xp wintel and a mac mini)

*darkblu's bebox duality says hi*

 

[Corwin_B]

I want to make it clear, that I wasn't suggesting Hollywood is or could be an exact equivalent of R300. I was considering the possibility that Hollywood may have an equal number of pixel pipelines and can do 16 textures in a single pass.

But then again, you shouldn't have mentioned R300. For most people, the novelty brought by R300 was not the number of pipelines, but the combination of incredible IQ (gamma-corrected FSAA, fast AF...) and fast SM2.0 shaders.

Is it hard to believe Hollywood has an additional 4 pipelines over Flipper?

Not at all, and I think most people agree to consider this possibility. But more pipelines does not mean the basic pipeline was improved. From what we have seen so far, some of the corners cut in Flipper are still cut in Hollywood (dithering for example). FSAA has been either lacking or extremely lackluster so far in Wii games.

What would, in your(anyone) opinion be required to suggest that Wii is more powerful then Xbox?

I'm pretty confident that Wii is superior to XBox in brute force (fill rate, static T&L rate...). But it will probably lack many effects that XBox sported with its shaders, or those effects may be too hard to program (or too slow) through the TEV. Also, its IQ may not be up to par with what the XBox had to offer.

 

[OtakingGX]

Regarding my speculation that Broadway is a PowerPC 750GX, I think there is more at play here. Yes, the GX comes out at the right die size, but it also has 1 MB of L2 cache. Is that even necessary? It seems overkill for one core to have so much L2 when you could be using the space for other features. From what I understand, large L2 caches are intended to combat high latencies of memory, but Nintendo is using 1T-SRAM to do so.

So if all that die space is not intended for cache, what is it for? You could also fit two 750 cores and 512KB L2 in the same space. Also possible (and unlikely) is a 750 core with 512KB L2 and a PPC 440 embedded core. Or the same but with 6 embedded 440 FPUs. That chip would give you 10 GFLOPs performance at a tiny power budget.

 

[pc999]

Regarding my speculation that Broadway is a PowerPC 750GX, I think there is more at play here. Yes, the GX comes out at the right die size, but it also has 1 MB of L2 cache. Is that even necessary? It seems overkill for one core to have so much L2 when you could be using the space for other features. From what I understand, large L2 caches are intended to combat high latencies of memory, but Nintendo is using 1T-SRAM to do so.

So if all that die space is not intended for cache, what is it for? You could also fit two 750 cores and 512KB L2 in the same space. Also possible (and unlikely) is a 750 core with 512KB L2 and a PPC 440 embedded core. Or the same but with 6 embedded 440 FPUs. That chip would give you 10 GFLOPs performance at a tiny power budget.

That is exactly my question to your post, it doesnt make sense that they have made a investiment in what is (given GC HW) in what is probably the lowest priority in upgrades for GC like HW (at least so much cache, I mean 512KB may make sense once the chip is also faster but 1MG seems to much). Personally I would bet in some very specialized HW (mainly because things like the Elebits guy comments), nothing major yet something that could give a good bost over Gekko.

Even more strage, IMO, would be if this is the only upgrade to the HW, but that is anouther matter.

 

[darkblu]

Regarding my speculation that Broadway is a PowerPC 750GX, I think there is more at play here. Yes, the GX comes out at the right die size, but it also has 1 MB of L2 cache. Is that even necessary? It seems overkill for one core to have so much L2 when you could be using the space for other features. From what I understand, large L2 caches are intended to combat high latencies of memory, but Nintendo is using 1T-SRAM to do so.

unless the 64MB pool is of the GDDR3 variety that has been seen floating in the air around here, in which case the hefty cache could be intended to counter the former's latencies. which would establish a fine tradition of ninty actually addressing the latency problem, a tradition started with the cube.

 

[Urian]

I can understand that because the high cost of the 1T-SRAM the amount of memory in the system is 88MB but if they are using a 64MB GDDR3 chip this could be disappointing since the cost and availability of the GDDR3 is several times better than the 1T-SRAM.

The reason why Wii is an overclocked with extra RAM Gamecube is simple, Nintendo wants to reuse their engines in their games, they want to make a "x game" in few months and launch it when it can be a success in the market. Wii is a console designed around this philosophy, if they see that an idea is good for sell they don´t want to wait 2 years for make an spectacular game with it, they want to make the game in the less time possible and launch it for take all the advantage of the idea in the market.

 

[StefanS]

I can understand that because the high cost of the 1T-SRAM the amount of memory in the system is 88MB but if they are using a 64MB GDDR3 chip this could be disappointing since the cost and availability of the GDDR3 is several times better than the 1T-SRAM.

I think, it is pretty much confirmed that it is indeed GDDR RAM as Faf said, especially as he avoided questions about the source of his knowledge. So that means that the some insider and or NDA involved.

 

[Teasy]

I think, it is pretty much confirmed that it is indeed GDDR RAM as Faf said, especially as he avoided questions about the source of his knowledge. So that means that the some insider and or NDA involved.

Nobody asked for specifics, just wether this was his own knowledge or based on the rumour posted here a while ago. Answering that question wouldn't break any confidences.

 

[darkblu]

btw, the latest pack of shots from ubi's 4x4 monster trucks:

http://www.jupiterii.ath.cx/nintendotown/news_suite.php?id=5388

if that game ends up with that much motion blur and such hefty fillrate fx, then we may actually have a good case study here.

 

[ban25]

A 50% overclock would increase performance by no more than 50%, not 100%-200%.

I've said it twice already, but I'll said it once more to make it three: the #1 bottleneck on the Gamecube was memory. Just increasing memory, with no other changes, would go a long way towards increasing the quality of games and visuals on the system. So, when I look at these visuals, frankly I wouldn't expect more than higher clockspeeds and more memory.

 

[Ooh-videogames]

btw, the latest pack of shots from ubi's 4x4 monster trucks:

http://www.jupiterii.ath.cx/nintendotown/news_suite.php?id=5388

if that game ends up with that much motion blur and such hefty fillrate fx, then we may actually have a good case study here.

I would like your opinion of the Nintendo Recirculating shader patent, particulary its possible implementation as a part of Hollywood.

Question, if it is a part, would you expect documentation to be available for first devkits, or could the docs appear later in new dev docs? After Nintendo has come up with all the possible algorithms.

One more, if you don't mine. Does the examples(algorithms) in the patent resemble any related to DX?

This example is for detail texturing. The difference textures have a bias of 0.5.Final Color=Base Texture+(Difference Texture A-0.5)+(Difference Texture B=0.5)

[0188] It can be implemented as: [0189] 1. R=(0, 0, 0, T.sub.BASE, 0, 0, 0)=T.sub.BASE [0190] 2. R=(T.sub.DIFFA, 0, 0, R, 0, 0, 0)=T.sub.BASE+T.sub.DIFFA-0.5 [0191] 3. R=(T.sub.DIFFB, 0, 0, R, 0, 0, 0)=T.sub.BASE+T.sub.DIFFA-0.5+T.sub.DIFFB-0.5

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph...s1=Nintendo.AS.&OS=AN/Nintendo&RS=AN/Nintendo

 

[ban25]

Regarding my speculation that Broadway is a PowerPC 750GX, I think there is more at play here. Yes, the GX comes out at the right die size, but it also has 1 MB of L2 cache. Is that even necessary? It seems overkill for one core to have so much L2 when you could be using the space for other features. From what I understand, large L2 caches are intended to combat high latencies of memory, but Nintendo is using 1T-SRAM to do so.

There's a substantial difference between on-chip and off-chip latencies and increasing the L2 cache will be a big win, whether it is 512 KB or 1 MB.

 

[czekon]

filtering out the PR talk (e.g. 'and much more', yadda, yadda), what the above says is: we added so much of the same old that no other machine (except for recent PCs) could handle that.

.

l
so xbox was able to use parallax mapping????

 

[pc999]

unless the 64MB pool is of the GDDR3 variety that has been seen floating in the air around here, in which case the hefty cache could be intended to counter the former's latencies. which would establish a fine tradition of ninty actually addressing the latency problem, a tradition started with the cube.

That makes more sense.
Just one question, being you a programer, do you have any idea to what is refering the Elebits guy, in this: "The development was not that difficult, as the Wii system has built in physics simulation. ". (a bit more info)

I think, it is pretty much confirmed that it is indeed GDDR RAM as Faf said, especially as he avoided questions about the source of his knowledge. So that means that the some insider and or NDA involved.

I also think that FaF info is probably the most reliable one, but it does can raise doubts about the info in IGN.

 

[ban25]

That makes more sense.
Just one question, being you a programer, do you have any idea to what is refering the Elebits guy, in this: "The development was not that difficult, as the Wii system has built in physics simulation. ". (a bit more info)

They are probably using something like Havok as part of the SDK.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I've said it twice already

"ban25 said so" isn't a very good argument around here. You'd have to first establish how you know Gamecube could do all this stuff if it only had more RAM. You may also want to explain how more RAM allows for things like depth of field, motion blur, higher-quality vertex lighting, etc. You could also get ERP to corroborate what you say.