You're not, it was very impressive.
Wii U Speculation Thread 2: Can't take anymore of this!!!
- Thread starter ClovingWestbrook
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Ok, it isn't final hardware but dev kits, right? We can't judge, but next HD consoles should deliver noticeable more punch than Wii U.
AceBandage
Banned
Obviously systems that launch after the Wii U will be more powerful...
That isn't up for debate.
However, you're basically posting stuff that has been dispelled since E3...
What? AA? I wasn't aware of that, sorry, could you tell me what the reason was?
AceBandage
Banned
No, that we could judge the system based off in production tech demos on rushed hardware.
We know that the Wii U's used at E3 were actually being underclocked because of heat issues.
We know that he tech demos weren't even complete by E3, as they were still being updated.
And we know that Nintendo always outdoes its tech demos pretty easily.
Oh, ok than. I was solely going by what I read on B3D on WiiU hardware.
AceBandage
Banned
B3D is a nice forum, but they don't really have any more info than we do.
I don't even consider the NeoGeo to have been competing with the Genesis/SNES/TG16.
Like you said it was WAY too expensive, the system and the games.
GameplayWhore
Member
The PC Overlords are frowning upon you.
bgassassin
Member
Well yeah I agree that they should have a noticeable difference. That's not the same as "will be considerably more powerful".
I also agree the Zelda demo didn't have AA. That was pretty obvious. But you also can't deny that the lighting in the demo was well done. Plus Nintendo has a history of making demos that look worse than the final.
All indications pretty much say that the memory amount is 1.5GB. Depending on memory densities, you may very well see the other two consoles end up with 2GB.
What the dev kit had for a GPU isn't that relevant if it's known that the GPU will be customized. Xbox 360 went from a Radeon 9800 to x800 to Xenos. PS3's kit at one point at dual Geforce 6800s. Wii U's GPU could have somewhere between 640-800 ALUs and maybe probably clocked around 600Mhz (though one rumor said the GPU in the dev kit is beyond 1TFLOP). Looking at heat and cost I see Xbox3 and PS4's GPUs having between 16 and 20 compute units (1024-1280 ALUs) max and probably around 2TFLOPs if on the higher side of that range at 800Mhz.
I focused on these two as IMO those two factors will be the main things to determine the gap between the consoles.
TheCongressman1
Member
They're always frowning. Consoles make me happy.
Your mistake is equating being "competitive" to winning the arms race, but that word isn't being used to define winning the arms race at all. Being competitive in the console gaming arena means attempting to win using ALL methods, not just power.
To say power is all that matters is foolish, we have WAY too many examples of how power doesn't equate to market strength (such as your very own list of most powerful machines, with many of them holding last-place sales) to show that power isn't enough for a competitive advantage.
However, making the power difference marginal enough so as to be negligible to the consumer makes the power argument totally invalid, thus IS a tool of competition in this industry. See the PS2 for a recent past example, or the recent history of this generation and its multi-platform strategy from developers as complete and utter proof of that between the HD twins.
360 wins out in North American sales figures by virtue of all its other competitive advantages, just like Sony, not being able to play the power game against its chief rival, leveraged its marketability in regions the 360 has trouble touching, like Asia and certain areas of Europe.
....... And then there's the Wii. By pulling themselves so far out of the race in power AND price by virtue of vastly altered gameplay mechanics, one could suggest Nintendo created its own category among consumers with the Wii, which gave them a competitive advantage of, essentially, not having anyone to compete WITH for 3-some years before motion controls hit the other consoles and the advantage they leveraged was eroded.
There's more to the word "compete" than you give it credit for, especially in this business.
Oh yeah, and this too.
I never said any of this. What I said was that Nintendo is falling behind (most of the time) when it comes to graphical performance.
This discussion is over.
You're like a puppy that's had an accident indoors. Yeah, you made an obnoxious mess, but you're just so adorable that it's hard to stay mad.
Which was my point... you can't "fall behind" when you never have an explicit intention to lead the pack. This is a part of Nintendo's competitive strategy and has been since as long as any of us can remember: to be just good enough at just the right time, depending on market conditions and competitor advantages. You can disagree with that, but it is still a fact, and is still a valid consideration when discussing a console in comparison to others.
And the level which they "fall behind" has often been not enough to matter to a consumer, otherwise Nintendo wouldn't be the industry power that it is in the first place, making your assumption that Nintendo will have this gigantic power lag behind MS and Sony to be a hypothesis that you presented as an outright fact.
Oh no, unfortunately it isn't.
ClovingWestbrook
Banned
Up until the Wii, Nintendo has been actively engaged in the technology race. Just because Nintendo jumped out of the race for one generation, doesn't mean they've always been that way. Hell, how many debates where there about how much more powerful the SNES was over the Genesis? Or how about Nintendo talking about how bits didn't matter when comparing to the 3DO and Jaguar back in the day? Or what about the N64 being a technological jump from the Playstation and Saturn? Up until very recently, they haven't been engaged in the technology fight, but they have been for a long time.
Their sales were declining from generation to generation, with each generation being absolutely on par technologically. Then they made the unprecedented move of re-releasing a product during the next console cycle (the Wii is a refreshed gamecube, there is no question) and found unprecedented success. There is a lesson to be learned here...
The lesson I learned is that specs will continue to matter less and less as time goes on, and that it will be increasingly difficult to show difference beyond the JND as well.
That success they earned came at a cost, as mentioned before, where Nintendo basically created a new category for itself via differentiation, but as we saw, publisher and developer expectations don't completely sync up with the market and sold their content to only a select portion of that market (us as core gamers). Hence the game selection disparity.
So there's more than just a single lesson to be learned with the Wii.
It's pretty ironic in the aspect that the GameCube didn't sell well and yet the wii is basically just a re-skinned GameCube with motion controls, and it did sell well.
Several lessons, actually - just not the way you think.
The Wii U is not a Wii re-release. It's completely new hardware. I guess that's undisputed. The hardware was in development for years and Nintendo spent huge amounts of money on R&D, all of that is known. Maybe Nintendo plans to re-release the Wii U five years down the line as well to save R&D expenses, but that means the Wii U needs to be future proof. It would be far more expensive to develop new weak hardware every five years, and developing weaker hardware isn't even cheaper than developing a powerful system.
Even more important, though, is that - while the success was certainly unprecedented - Nintendo is well aware that not getting ports hurt them in the end. To prevent that from happening again, they need hardware that's at the very least close enough to that of their competitors to make ports possible, if not downright easy.
If Nintendo didn't care about all that and just wanted to release a cheap HD console sold solely on a new gimmick, with just as bad 3rd party support as before, simply using off-the-shelf quad core Armadas or something and calling it a day would have done the trick just fine. Would have been much simpler, no huge R&D expenses, very small console, and the system wouldn't even require active cooling. But that's not what they did.
Money is money, yes they created a new category for themselves, which is the entire concept of the "blue ocean" strategy. Looking at the Wii-U, Nintendo is once again more concerned about being seen as different by the consumers.
Nintendo is trying to achieve a balance between cheap, affordable hardware and unique features which differentiate themselves from the competition. It is true that they could slap together some cell-phone parts and call it a day and have not, but at the same time, they do not have an interest in matching their competition. Instead they are trying to create an architecture suitable for current engines. I can be proven wrong if their competition is far weaker than I anticipate.
Usually when people bring up Nintendo's past and how they used to compete technically with their hardware, they are implying they may very well do so once again. I think those days are over.
snowdog1971
Banned
This ^^ x 10!!!
There's nothing more annoying for me personally - having a great looking game that looks fantastic when standing still is bloody pointless. Move the camera and the eye candy turns sour. REALLY annoying!!!!!
Thunder Monkey
Banned
Honestly my friend the only time they have is with the Wii.
Their handhelds are following its own divergent line, and so far they've increased in power along the same line their consoles have barring the Wii. GB to GBC would be the most applicable to the GCN/Wii deviation. But GBC to GBA to DS to 3DS is pretty much NES to SNES to N64 to GCN.
The increase is actually larger because the GCN didn't feature per pixel precision offered by modern day fixed function pipelines.
ItWasMeantToBe19
Banned
When do you think the EAD Tokyo Mario will come out for WiiU and what direction should they take it? EAD Tokyo just finished with 3D Land, but IIRC they said it didn't take that many people so maybe there were enough working on Mario WiiU to make it 2013 or early 2014...
It could be time for Mario and classic Nintendo franchise to evolve.
User Name Here
Member
Current engines run just fine on ARM, though. And Nintendo might not care about matching their competition, but that doesn't mean their own line of thinking might not lead them somewhere close. You don't have to follow someone to end up at the same spot, especially not if there's only a limited number of ways to begin with.
Oh lawd. :lol
StreetsAhead
Member
Someone, quick! Post the thread again!
Lupin the Third
Member
People trying to pull more than there is to take from some speculation in Official Nintendo Magazine.
ShockingAlberto
Member
jump_button
Banned
ShockingAlberto
Member
PS3 is most powerful according to what practical measure? If you look at multi platform games as a benchmark then it's not. Comparing first party games is highly subjective and there's no telling how well those games would run on the other platform if optimized. If anything we've been told (by Platinum Games) that its far easier to convert PS3 games (to run well) on the 360 than the other way round.
You can think that all you like, but with developers and publishers obviously wanting spec bumps in conjunction with new control methods, a return will happen. They have seen their failing with Wii and their strong words on the subject of losing developers indicate they want to not repeat it.
EDIT:
On another topic, what's the likelihood of a customized Evergreen (or Radeon 5000) series GPU? It supports OpenGL 4.2/DX11 and isn't that much newer than the 4000 series. Couldn't really hope for better than that, and if they're going to go for GDDR5 memory for graphics, it requires less tweaking to do it as opposed to the 4000 series, which to my understanding had very few cards with GDDR5 memory on board.
I'm not really sure what to think about GPUs in WiiU, to be honest, so the idea of this being feasible isn't really in my realm of expertise.
Oh please don't say that. Now I'm going to be forced to look at really bad fanart.
Ahh Code Geass, such an awesome anime.
From a hardware standpoint, PS3 is definitely more powerful than the Xbox 360. By how much, I'm not sure about myself. I'd have to Google that, but I'm far too lazy for that right now.
In practice, however, the 360 has been able to push out pretty nice looking games itself, such as Gears of War. I still say that the PS3 is able to push out slightly nicer looking games, but that is all subjective, honestly, so I won't bother bringing that argument up.
Also, portability is not entirely indicative of power. Final Fantasy XIII looked worse and ran worse on the Xbox 360 than it did on the PS3. The 360 was just, apparently, a hell of a lot easier to work with.
stop the presses folks, still having this argument well into this gen lol
fabricated backlash
Member
People still argue that the PS2 had better graphics than the xbox, or RE4 on PS2 looking vastly better than on Gamecube...
People see what they want to see, nothing more nothing less.
As for WiiU-PS4-Xbox3, even if the performance gap is considerably high (2 or 3 times the raw performance) it would still be easy for developers to port to WiiU. Unless Microsoft or Sony adopt some weird unheard of shading model the difference between WiiU to Xbox3 and PS4 is going to be similar to Mid to lower high end PCs.
And I'm more than ok with that. Sure it sucks for those people that can't get excited over games and hardware unless they blow everything out there out of the water, mostly those people that buy graphic demos and convince themselves that they are great games as well (Lair, Luigis Mansion...)
After this gen it is really beyond pathethic for any one console owner to argue about superior graphics. Those hypocrits should get a PC asap, instead of arguing which enclosed box is superior to the other.
Technical adequacy is another discussion, and anyone who shits on the Wii for not having at least HD signal support and no digital audio out has my full support. The Wii is simply not cutting it anymore.
But with a system that should easily be able to get 1080p for most of it's games for the first year (as all of those are 360 and PS3 upports) I really have no worries at all.
I will roll with 2 consoles again next gen, just like before, so as long as the WiiU is comparable and doesn't make my eyes bleed on an HDTV (allthough my old Grundig really does a fantastic job at upscaling SD images) I'm more than ok with that.
Yeah, but thats because they were aimed at different audiences. Third parties and therefore enthusiast gamers drifted away from Nintendo. Therefore they thought they needed to go find someone else to buy their consoles (because of refusal to change or frugalness I don't know). It worked wonders but turned on them in the last year or two and so they're coming back to try and get us into the fold again, as well as keep a lot of their current customer base. I actually think they can do it if they execute correctly. The U Pad is a brilliant idea.
Pretty damn well, actually
No really, I don't like getting into that argument. I'd rather just state what I have to state, and then be done with it.
Also, it's 4:30 a.m. here, and I have one more day of winter break. I figured I'd make this one of my laziest and least productive days of the year :/
fabricated backlash
Member
Gamers didn't leave with the Wii, if anything some or many came back to then leave again. The Gamecube did more than enough to scare away gamers in hordes with an uninspired catalogue of 3rd party games, half assed advertisement, and the position as the middle child who is ignored because it isn't the oldest or the strongest. It's just mediocre in every aspect. And the Wii wasn't an initial success because it was aimed at different audiences, but because it was marketed to hell and back, with a very competent campaign and agressive exposure on all major distribution channels, as well as the promise of innovative software that would be exclusive to the system and impossible to do on the other two machines. Gamers were brought in by this premise, and they left because both Nintendo and 3rd parties failed at delivering this vision in the first 2 years.
That's why the 3DS failed at launch, Nintendo acted like they were able to launch a system without having to do appropriate advertisement, and when they realized it was allready too late to just ramp up the PR.
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