Would GTA V be possible on Wii U?

[milk]

The people on the other side of the argument are just as bad tbh, they fail to take into account that WiiU with its "shit" SDK's, tools and documentation, rushed development with tiny C tier / mobile development teams / tiny budgets was running 6th generation PS360 third party games like Assassin's Creed III, Blops II almost at parity on day one.

People seem to think WiiU won't ever produce anything better than what we saw at launch yet all you ever hear from PS4/Xbone owners / fans is "Infamous and Killzone are just year one games, just wait until year three and four !!!" ect.

To put this into perspective. Wii games graphics or simulation complexity improved marginally if at all throughout its lifespan. And that was a hot selling system. WiiU provides enough hardware for some technical wizardry, but no third party is going to invest the time to come up with it, nor is nintendo ever prioritize those things either.

 

[function]

The GPU is much more efficient and modern in it's feature set, there is more to a GPU than just flops. The WiiU's memory bandwidth is also completely built around it's eDRAM so the main system RAM isn't really an issue. We have never once heard developers complain about it's RAM bandwidth.

Actually, eDram BW might not be sufficient to support 360 levels of transparent overdrawn (particularly with MSAA), but as MSAA isn't really in use so much any more, and as PS3 sets the low bar for render target BW, that's more of a interesting thing to note than a real problem for the WiiU relative to its performance level.

eDram is used differently in WiiU to 360, so quantities aren't directly comparable, although they do seem to favour the WiiU.

The people on the other side of the argument are just as bad tbh, they fail to take into account that WiiU with its "shit" SDK's, tools and documentation, rushed development with tiny C tier / mobile development teams / tiny budgets was running 6th generation PS360 third party games like Assassin's Creed III, Blops II almost at parity on day one.

Seven years after the 360 launched 'almost parity' is not remotely impressive. Seven years is an eternity, especially given the radical advances in GPU technology and process that Nintendo had easy access to. 45nm (and a rather large 45 nm at that) is lots of nanometres. And that means not a lot of shaders.

People seem to think WiiU won't ever produce anything better than what we saw at launch yet all you ever hear from PS4/Xbone owners / fans is "Infamous and Killzone are just year one games, just wait until year three and four !!!" ect.

I don't think anyone here thinks this. There's isn't the power leap to learn your way into though (which PS360 had at introduction and PS4Bone has now), and WiiU has missed the best bits of the compute revolution. Wii U isn't a strong position to see big lifetime gains. Nintendo have a long way to go in terms of HD production though, now they're putting their back into it, and so 1st party stuff that already looks nice will continue to looks better and better.

The point for multiplatforms though is that where the WiiU is weaker than PS360, it will always be weaker, and if developers wring every last drop from those systems there will always be difficulties to face up to. Or there would be, if anyone was making games for WiiU still.

Nintendo's focus on multiplatform titles at launch highlighted their lack of hardware progress, and kinda backfired for them.

I think Watch Dogs might be the best comparison when it releases later this year when looking at the differences between PS360, WiiU and PS4/Xbone multiplatform games.

I think WiiU Watch Dogs is very like to be, or have been, binned. If Wi U doesn't see a sustained uptick in sales and 3rd party sales in the immediate future expect to see it waving goodbye from the jaws of a garbage truck.

 

[Lalaland]

Seven years after the 360 launched 'almost parity' is not remotely impressive. Seven years is an eternity, especially given the radical advances in GPU technology and process that Nintendo had easy access to. 45nm (and a rather large 45 nm at that) is lots of nanometres. And that means not a lot of shaders.
....
The point for multiplatforms though is that where the WiiU is weaker than PS360, it will always be weaker, and if developers wring every last drop from those systems there will always be difficulties to face up to. Or there would be, if anyone was making games for WiiU still
....
I think WiiU Watch Dogs is very like to be, or have been, binned. If Wi U doesn't see a sustained uptick in sales and 3rd party sales in the immediate future expect to see it waving goodbye from the jaws of a garbage truck.

I agree with your thoughts on WD, the silence from Ubi is deafening and it's the #1 candidate to be the 'completed' WiiU title that Yves Guillemot has said they're sitting on. Nintendo has always asked it's s/w teams what they want and delivered it with almost no external consultation (certainly not w/3rd parties at any rate). This has led to them having a backwards compatible box that is utterly hamstrung by that backwards compatibility.

Yes you can get PS360 stuff to look as good on Wii but if it requires a major re-engineering job to do it and the Wii user base is small why would you? The lack of competent SIMD is a huge issue and while there are engineering workarounds they all take time and $$$. A majority of WiiU owners appear to have either a PS360 or one of the XB1/PS4 so you're already reaching those consumers without spending another dollar.

 

[Goodtwin]

There are plenty of people who've hands-on worked with the WiiU that believe it's less powerful than the PS360.

A nicer GPU isn't much consolation if your CPU limited game is stuttering.

And for the record, no-one with an ounce of common sense ever believed that the WiiU was even remotely close to PS4Bone in terms of power. Just a look at the case and fan in 2012 instantly told you that.

I speculated that there might be as few as 160 shaders back in 2012. Hooray for me. I win (nothing). (As usual tbh).

Someone, may have been you, has said a long time ago in the Wii U hardware thread that a strength in one area may not offset a weakness in another area. The CPU certainly seems to be the culprit of distress for porting 360/PS3 games to Wii U. I have yet to here a developer complain about the GPU's performance. Fuzzywuzzygames, developer of Armillo commented on the difference between working with Wii U compared to the 360, and getting his game running on 360 required a resolution of sub 600p while the Wii U handled it with more effects at 720p. He did mention that the CPU could be a problem for some of the larger developers, but said Indies shouldn't have any trouble with it.

Games from the ground up will easily avoid the CPU's limitations, but for ports, this is not an easy task. Not to mention the dev tools have always been of lesser quality on Nintendo consoles. If Nintendo had released the Wii U back in 2009, developers most likely would have created solutions to these hurdles, but releasing so late, there just isn't much incentive to dig deep. Getting GTA V is running on Wii U could happen, but the business incentive just isn't there.

If you pay a team to port a game to Wii U, and only break even on that expense, then that is really losing money. The project your currently working on has to provide the revenue needed to pay the team working on the next project. That's why teams can go broke even if they technically didn't lose money, they didn't make enough money to start a new project that wont starting making them money for years. You have to be able to pay the bills for that 2-3 or more years leading up to the release of your project. If your game cost 20 million dollars to develop, you really need to make about 40 million dollars just to be keep the cycle going.

 

[creaks]

I guess this is a decent place ot post this since its, kind of already about fp/simd of wii u and other systems and has also already gone towards bayonetta discussion.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-bayonetta-wii-u-face-off

I know Bayonetta 1 was tailor made for 360, for Xenon. I dont want to talk about or compare the ps3 abortion. It was a bad port.
I want to know where this performance parity is coming from. This game was specifically made for the Xenon, with its 2x vmx128's.
Anyone have any guesses or brainstorms on why 2x32 'simd' x3 @1.24 Ghz is performing the way it is against 2X vmx128 @3.2 Ghz?

 

[TheWretched]

Because the game isn't CPU limited at all?

 

[creaks]

Because the game isn't CPU limited at all?

Well, I agree with this, but it makes such little use of the cpu it can go from running on an altivec to a nonsimd cpu @ 1/3rd the clock without issue?


My guess was that bee tribes bayo 1 wii u uses the bayo 2 engine, and was more a nintendo funded remake than a port.

 

[function]

The engine has probably improved significantly over the last several years and games. A remake of the 360 original, on 360, would now be able to run better.

We don't know what the games was doing on Xenon, and we don't know what's it's doing on WiiU CPU. All we know is that it doesn't appear to have been much (or any) of a bottleneck on either.

It's unlikely that Bayonetta is requiring the level of floating point/SIMD work that a huge open world sim like GTA does.

 

[EsppiraK]

I don't see why not, the major problem is that GTAV streams data constantly from the HDD on both ps3 and xbox 360, I don't know if the Wii-u allows to install game data on the HDD as a cache.

 

[Goodtwin]

Because the game isn't CPU limited at all?

It really does seem to be that simple. Bayonetta seems to be a GPU strenuous game. If DF is correct, then Bayonetta's framerate drops are fillrate bound. Perhaps the edram in 360 and Wii U is the closer match than people have thought. Bayonetta is likely a terrible game to really judge the CPU on.

 

[Commenter]

Well, watch dogs is coming out soon so this'll be as near as good a test to judge how well GTAV would run on Wii U. Perhaps the developers could use gpgpu to offload some of the physics but if it's really a 160sp part I don't think there would be much headroom to do that.

Maybe Ubisoft Bucharest have pulled off some heroic optimizations or they're whining to Ubisoft HQ right now. "I canna push it any further captain it just doesn't have the poowah!"

 

[Goodtwin]

Well, watch dogs is coming out soon so this'll be as near as good a test to judge how well GTAV would run on Wii U. Perhaps the developers could use gpgpu to offload some of the physics but if it's really a 160sp part I don't think there would be much headroom to do that.

Maybe Ubisoft Bucharest have pulled off some heroic optimizations or they're whining to Ubisoft HQ right now. "I canna push it any further captain it just doesn't have the poowah!"

I have been going back and reading developers comments, and reread the "Secret Developers" article on Eurogamer last night. It really seems like it will come down to how well they can manage the CPU performance. Its not even in question that the GPU is a better performer, if you believe the article is legit, then that developer outright says the that the GPU is better performing and that memory bandwidth was of no issue thanks to prefetching with the edram. I would think that if the CPU was going to be a problem they knew they couldn't get around, then I would hope that they would have just scraped the project entirely. If they can manage the CPU, then they should have some perks of porting from X360 to Wii U. The extra memory "should" at the very least give them the same benefits of a large hard drive install that developers have use don the 360 and PS3. An extra 512MB of ram should be more beneficial than a hard drive install. You can stream from a hard drive quicker than you can from the disk drive, but its still no where as fast as pulling from the DDR3 memory. Im optimisitic that they are really using this time to actually create a really good port of Watch Dogs, but with the history of underperforming ports to Wii U, Im not going to hold my breath.

 

[Goodtwin]

Well I think Watch Dogs proves to any doubters, that an open world game like GTA V would be perfectly possible on Wii U. World on the street is the Wii U port is closer to the 360/PS3 build, but with some better weather effects, and player feedback suggest the framerate is solid, and the only noticeable dips are when driving through a high traffic area. Hopefully DF runs some test soon. Im actually hearing that the rain in the Wii U build looks exceptional, better than the PS4 version apparently. So back to the title of the thread, GTA V possible on Wii U? Yes, no doubt about it. Watch Dogs proves it.

 

[Nesh]

Well I think Watch Dogs proves to any doubters, that an open world game like GTA V would be perfectly possible on Wii U. World on the street is the Wii U port is closer to the 360/PS3 build, but with some better weather effects, and player feedback suggest the framerate is solid, and the only noticeable dips are when driving through a high traffic area. Hopefully DF runs some test soon. Im actually hearing that the rain in the Wii U build looks exceptional, better than the PS4 version apparently. So back to the title of the thread, GTA V possible on Wii U? Yes, no doubt about it. Watch Dogs proves it.

link? AFAIK PS3/360 Watchdog games werent as impressive as GTAV

 

[Goodtwin]

Hopefully DF does a comparison video. Player comments in forums have been positive though.

 

[Shortbread]

LOD and draw-distance seems to take the greatest hit. Seeing powerlines, building details, so-on-and-so-on, being drawn in your face is somewhat cheap and distracting.

 

[Karamazov]

the water looks really bad too, honestly to me it does not look as good as GTA 5 ps360.

 

[function]

No doubt the WiiU can do open world games, but GTAV really was baller at slammin' on Xenon. Years of optimisation went into squeezing the game onto those three cores.

 

[Goodtwin]

 

[Commenter]

Yes, it looks like a decent port effort for once, but the one thing I noticed is the pedestrian count seems low. Almost like the city is devoid of inhabitants.