Rumor: Wii U final specs
- Thread starter EatChildren
- Start date
Corrected.
Not making peripherals mandatory would just kill the console outright. You think as it stands devs won't do much with it? If it was an optional controller they'd do nothing.
Anyway, the attraction of the GamePad isn't that it will transform gaming completely for every game out there - that's really just something haters say so they can be proven right when it doesn't happen, like with the Wii. It will do that for some games (Zombi U). It will add niceties to other games (Batman, Darksiders, ME) and it will have additional non gaming features. TV Remote, video chat, browsing etc.
Fahrenheit
Banned
I'd rather a traditional console without the tablet gimmick. Look how many games use waggle well on Wii, not that many. Some games are outright hurt over forced waggle. Now they have to sell a underpowered console at a over powered console pirce point over a tablet that 2 years in will have few if any worth while games that use it.
Throwaway123456789
Member
N64 is capable of creating dynamic light sources.
Wait what? The tablet is a gimmick now? 2004, is that you?
But we don't know how much the WiiU is underpowered compared to the competition, nor we don't know how many titles will make a good use of the GamePad (especially in 2015...), so why such negativity? And 300$ now is not the same 300$ that people paid for Xbox 360 at launch in late 2005.
JordanN
Banned
I think you need to re-read my post, because I never implied that.
I said dynamic lighting can be expensive and it's effected by the complexity of a scene. Anything more and you're reading way too much into my post.
JordanN
Banned
We don't even know if those kits are permanent. For all we know they could be leased.
"I guess..."
There's still uncertainty and context to consider.
You said it was an impressive feat.
Being able to do a few dynamic lights in a scene like in that gif you posted has been standard since...Quake 2 or earlier. Games can do hundreds of dynamic lights per scene these days.
Maybe it's easier (more fruitful) to talk specs when we can actually see the difference between Wii U games and the other next gen consoles.
JordanN
Banned
That's just how powerful Wii U is. Takes computer graphics from 20 years ago and makes them cool again.
Can't wait to see how they'll implement texture mapping next.
I would say 95% of this forum maybe more is like this, not just Nintendo Fans, I mean we are constantly posting posts from Beyond 3D's forums just because they are more knowledgeable about tech (they are a tech site afterall, and we are a games site)
Honestly what you said can be applied to the people in some of the other next gen console threads talking about the other consoles needing 3TFLOPs of power, they don't know why of course that a GPU would need that sort of power, especially when UE4 is fully featured above 1TFLOPs, but you know, bigger numbers are better.
I'll say this one more time, Architecture is far more important than processing power, having a modern feature set from AMD in their GPU will push Wii U, 720 and PS4 much further into next gen territory than GFLOPs the GPU pushes. I'll still point out how tegra 3 pushes into current gen graphics much more than Wii's despite them having roughly the same performance.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Can be said about fans of all platforms.
MadeInBeats
Banned
"Bro, Xbox720 dun got 16Gigs RAM" *wank wank wank*
"Why would a console game need 16 gigs RAM?"
"Bro, don't bother me with stupid questions. They just will!!!"
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Probably true, I guess the reason they don't annoy me as much is that they don't flip-flop as vigorously. (Between "graphics don't matter" and "omg GPGPU!")
How do we define "more powerful". In terms of power in a console, you surely want your GPU to be more powerful. Personally I like having a powerful CPU as well though, since that's usually what enables new gameplay design.
Sub-pixel polygons are the only way to roll. And you can skip the pixel shader! Reyes for everyone.
Gemüsepizza
Member
I'm not sure you understand what they meant with this 1 TFLOPS comment. This may be enough to make use of all features, but of course they can put a lot more and better effects on the screen with more processing power, if they want. And you can, of course, see this.
This is beyond silly. Just because Microsoft and Sony are aiming high does not mean they don't care about costs. You can bet that developers want even better hardware specs than what we will get with the Xbox 3 and PS4.
I wonder how successful a new Nintendo console with HD graphics for $150-200 would be. I think it could be more successful than the Wii U.
I think the fact there won't be the resolution disparity will help a lot too, along with 24-bit color minimum (I'd hope). Being 480p with several sub 24-bit color games was the most damaging aspect of Wii visuals, fixing those two will make the comparison between the Wii U and the next Xbox/Playstation more akin to PS2 versus GC/Xbox at best, HD collections versus native PS3/360 games at worst. And quite a few of those games actually do hold up surprisingly well, even if the jumps can be blindingly obvious (God of War 1/2 versus God of War 3 especially).
Ugh, no no no. Granted, the Wii Remote in hindsight does seem to have been something of a misstep, but once you start making that stuff optional you'll rarely see it properly supported, and even if you have wide support (Dual Shock) you'll usually have concessions made so people without that controller can still play the game (right stick for camera didn't take off until the PS2). And this is by far the least offensive controller for core games: it's literally a regular controller with a touch screen in the middle! A few idiot gimmicks aside that'll likely remain very useful just displaying a map or status information there even if it's barely used otherwise, and it isn't inherently an obstacle to many traditional games like the Wii Remote was.
EDIT: Another way to look at it: you don't include it with the console and most publishers/developers write off supporting it because it's a $100+ peripheral. Granted, one much easier to support than the Kinect or Move, but you'd rarely see games making good use of it and it'd be mostly blown off. Thus, for better or worse a necessity to get it to actually be used well and not be something of a scam. Also, now that I think about it the Wii Remote isn't the best comparison, but instead the DS. And after a lot of developers got the gimmicky angles out of their system we saw a lot of games that either made really good use of the touch screen, or simply used the extra screen to do mild augmenting like an always visible map.
I could have sworn I read that before, perhaps in a hardware rumor thread.
DeFiBkIlLeR
Banned
Most Gfx engines out there these days rely more on the GPU than CPU, certainly in PC gaming you'll get far more mileage out of a combination of a relatively weak CPU, but strong GPU.
Battlefield 3 being a prime example, a fast 2 core CPU with an ATI 78xx or Nvidia 6xx class card will give great frame rates.
Unreal Engine 3 is pretty CPU dependant though, will be interesting to see if they've addressed that with UE4, given all the extra computational power modern GPU's have, they really should have shifted more of the burden over to it.
Though for the WiiU, that will be pretty irrelevant, as UE4 wont be on it.
MadeInBeats
Banned
Gemüsepizza;44246628 said:
I can top it by saying I respect your opinion.
fixed, As Epic said, if a studio asks, they can put UE4 on Wii U, and I assume Wii U will easily hit 50million units sold minimum, that is a lot of potential sales 3rd parties are ignoring, considering houses like THQ can't afford to ignore sales from anywhere. Activision will keep Call of Duty on Wii U (they kept it on the Wii after all) BF4 is expected to make it to Wii U, and Ubisoft is heavily supporting the console, so the biggest developers won't be walking away from Wii U, reality is showing that Epic will bring UE4 over to Wii U. BTW we have heard from members of gaf in the know that UE4 has already been tested on the console.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
I'm pretty confident UE4 is on the Wii U. Extent of feature sets and portability of 720/PS4/PC UE4 titles is another matter entirely. But I'm...very sure UE4, in some form, is on the Wii U. Could be just the heavily improved toolset and optimisation features.
R
Rösti
Unconfirmed Member
If anything, the in my opinion vastly improved framework over Unreal Engine 3 could help developers more easily develop games. As for features, I agree with you, it's more likely just improved tools etc. For things as standard in the package, I can see Code View and to a lesser extent Hot Reload being very valuable for Wii U developers (for any developer really).
UE4 on Wii U is a foregone conclusion at this point. All Epic said is that they have no plans to do it themselves - in other words, there's no game coming from Epic for Wii U that uses it. But they said the engine could be compiled for the system, unlike UE3 on Wii, for example.
in single player but not multiplayer. multiplayer needs a quad core unless you like gaming at 25fps with large dips any time the action heats up.
dgrdsv
Member
Considering that both use AMD's graphics that's rather unlikely. We'll probably see more tesselation in PS4/Xb3 titles than we see in current DX11 PC versions of multiplatform games (with some exceptions like Crysis 2 DX11) but it won't be as heavy as in Unigine Heaven for example.
R
Rösti
Unconfirmed Member
To prevent the thread filling up too early with "My body is ready" and such, I'll wait just a bit more before posting it. But it's coming within a day or two.
DragonSworne
Banned
Rösti;44247316 said:
My body is ready.
Hope it turns out good
DeFiBkIlLeR
Banned
Is that right.?...it's not a game I own, I was just going by benchmarks I've seen, which show very little difference between 2 or 4 cores, only GPU seemed to affect the frame rate.
As for UE4, maybe it will make an appearance on the WiiU, maybe it wont, time will tell, but we know one thing for certain, it wont be able to work to it's full potential on the WiiU given the (relatively) weak CPU/GPU and low available RAM, compared to what it will be able to do on the PS4 and Xbox next and PC.
There's no such thing as 'fully featured' with a programmable graphics pipelines. Maybe you need a certain amount of power to use certain or all effects that come as part of the UE4 package, but there's nothing to stop developers going further with their own shader programs with more power.
I get the impression some people look at UE4 as a pinnacle of graphical achievement, with a 1Tflop requirement to do whatever you could ever want, and beyond that it's just scaling polygons or resolution or something. That's rubbish.
A Wii U version with fidelity above this gen but below the other consoles of next gen, yeah that is comparative to everything we will eventually see out of Wii U, for while the CPU/GPU might be weak compared to consoles coming out a year or two later, they are still stronger than consoles that came out 6 and 7 years ago, especially the GPU.
Right... more power equals more that can be done. I understand that, I think everyone here does... But Epic was saying multiple TFLOPs for the "full feature set" and changed it to 1TFLOPs+, he could do this because there is no such thing, but again we sit in a forum eating up marketing from EPIC, and we will just get fat, because there is plenty. Reality is that PCs don't push super high end graphics because the budget simply isn't there for them to do so, and while $100m has been shown to work on consoles from time to time, every developer for every game won't get that sort of money, so you'll probably see for the first time (thanks to resolution change not being very high and the extended length of this generation) games that really don't look much better than last gen. Both better hardware and budget has always scaled together to increase fidelity with succeeding generations but this time hardware alone will grow, budgets for the most part will stay the same or even shrink because more developers are likely to die off just like the beginning of last gen, especially when the target markets in 2014 for these games are 1/10th of what they are right now.
Also we talk a lot about UE4 and even cryengine, but Unity 4 is probably going to fill out a large portion of smaller developers, so next gen is going to be a mixed bag for the first couple years, especially with game development largely staying the same. (developers were forced to grow and adapt to unified shaders in 2004/2005) They can just keep business as usual at least until the market grows viable enough to release games that have a chance of selling 5million+ units, that won't happen until there is at least 40 million next gen consoles (in your case PS4/XB3) consoles in the wild, and that means 2015 at the earliest.
This is probably old right ? http://mynintendonews.com/2012/11/10/downloaded-wii-u-software-cant-be-saved-to-sd-card/
There goes our last chance of getting higher load speeds than USB2.0
Maybe we could persuade nintendo in future.
There goes our last chance of getting higher load speeds than USB2.0
Maybe we could persuade nintendo in future.
frankie_baby
Member
Very old, we had a long annoying thread on it yesterday and it was already old then
Right, but the rendering pipeline in an engine like this is not going to be overly prescriptive. They talked about 'things getting interesting' beyond 1Tflop. Which I guess means using their full-fat lighting pipeline that they provide out of the box.
But that doesn't represent a cap. If you gave Epic, or another team, more to work with, they'd do different, better things.
The best looking console games don't typically cost that kind of money to make.
PC development does not push the high end because developers are either a) working off a console base (7 year old hw, basically), or b) keeping a door open to console ports or c) working with limited budget and resources and concentrating on other things and a wide hardware base.
Budgets won't change a lot next gen, but the results achieved for the same cost will differ when the world's best developers turn their sights from 7 year old hw to roughly contemporary hw. The first slate of software will pick at relatively low hanging fruit, but within a couple of waves of software you'll see stuff a world apart from the top studios. Every gen we've had naysayers wrt tech advancement, every gen they've been proven wrong to one degree or another.
But I felt it was kind of important to mention.
frankie_baby
Member
This first part is wrong, many of the AAA games this generation have pushed $100million and beyond: GTA4, RDR, LA Noire, Max Payne 3, SWTOR, Modern Warfare 2, Gran turismo 5 even hit 80million.
So basically you agree with me. 2015 will be the 2nd maybe 3rd cycle of software.
To be clear its the game pads that would have to run at 30fps when using two not the game itself (the game on the TV could still run at whatever framerate the developer decides on/whatever the system can handle given the game). Also not because of extra processing power requirements but because the consoles wireless protocol was originally designed to handle 60fps to a single controller.