darkistheway
Member
So we're not talking about the GPU anymore?
WiiU "Latte" GPU Die Photo - GPU Feature Set And Power Analysis
- Thread starter Thraktor
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Very much so. He's a charlatan in my books and basically bullshitted us all the way along with a Wii U.
Smurfman256
Member
guess again.
http://playeressence.com/japanese-wii-u-sales-up-217-since-pikmin-3s-launch/
As of August 23, sales of the Wii U have increased by around 80,000 units sold between July 13 and August 23 in Japan.
Apophis2036
Banned
On Topic
I keep hearing people claiming Nintendo will be freeing up the OS's reserved ram in order for developers to have more to work with.
I think it's going to be hard to move away from having the full 1gb of ram reserved for the OS specifically because of the web browser. It was designed to be opened at any time and It's going to be tough to handle multiple tabs and buffer 1080p video with less than 1gb. I'm amazed it does what it does as smoothly as it does it with only 1gb reserved
I keep hearing people claiming Nintendo will be freeing up the OS's reserved ram in order for developers to have more to work with.
I think it's going to be hard to move away from having the full 1gb of ram reserved for the OS specifically because of the web browser. It was designed to be opened at any time and It's going to be tough to handle multiple tabs and buffer 1080p video with less than 1gb. I'm amazed it does what it does as smoothly as it does it with only 1gb reserved
They could disable home button functionality for games that use more than 1GB of ram to accommodate for that like they disabled it for some online enabled games games to prevent connection issues. Especially since some developers are moving towards games of the "online only" variety.
This month we will get our hands on W101 and Zelda in NA.
Smurfman256
Member
true, but that would disable Miiverse functionality.
Not entirely. Some games can post directly to miiverse without actually going into miiverse. And if you've seen Wind Waker videos, you can acess the Wind Waker comminuty (although limited) without actually going into miiverse. They can do something like that.
Andddddd the amount of ram being used up by it is unkown so there's that. Back to topic.
MrPresident
Banned
Hibernating apps has never been an issue on any iOS device with just 512mb of RAM. There's little reason why Nintendo shouldn't be able to do the same on a system that's unlikely to be running as many concurrent applications as an iPad or iPhone. Wii U and iOS devices both run on flash storage so that disk thrashing shouldn't be an issue either.
Safari on iOS also limits the number of open tabs to 4. Nintendo could put a similar limit in place.
Smurfman256
Member
...What if (if they DO decide to give devs an extra half-gig of RAM) Nintendo puts a limit on the amount of Home Menu apps you can have open at once? For instance; if you want to open Nintendo TVii or the eShop, but already have the Internet Browser open, the Wii U will create a save-state of whatever webpage you were on so that once the Internet Browser was opened again, it would give you the option to either reload your past state or start a new state. The point of a save-state would be so that way the IB data would be wiped from the RAM, but the info of the web-page(s) would be saved so thatway they can be quickly reloaded.
ElectricKaibutsu
Member
8, actually. And Wii U is 6, for reference. You're right though, that could definitely be improved through OS upgrades.
lostinblue
Banned
I seriously think the logic behind OnLive should be used on the browsers.
The quantity of RAM freed is pretty much all that had to be allocated for it, and it'll simply work. I mean to navigate the web you need an internet connection anyway, and if the page doesn't animate a lot you won't have a huge bitrate to it anyway; latency is also not a problem, as it's not a game. And crashing the browser in order to exploit the console (very popular thing to exploit, both Wii, PS3 and PSP suffered through it) also turns into a non-issue.
They should seriously use it, rather than the console's own resources; at 6 or 8 tabs per machine god knows how many consoles can one machine via virtualization service.
The quantity of RAM freed is pretty much all that had to be allocated for it, and it'll simply work. I mean to navigate the web you need an internet connection anyway, and if the page doesn't animate a lot you won't have a huge bitrate to it anyway; latency is also not a problem, as it's not a game. And crashing the browser in order to exploit the console (very popular thing to exploit, both Wii, PS3 and PSP suffered through it) also turns into a non-issue.
They should seriously use it, rather than the console's own resources; at 6 or 8 tabs per machine god knows how many consoles can one machine via virtualization service.
To have the image quality to comfortably read text would actually be pretty big, it's not like you could have twitch or even HD youtube IQ if you want to read text. And the infrastructure required to stream video of web pages (it would have to be video for modern dynamic web pages/scrolling) globally 24/7 would make it prohibitive expensive to run. And it would likely be a horrible user experience for most people.
Smurfman256
Member
And what logic is that, pray tell? Stream the web page as a video with commands sent over the internet to move the page up, down, zoom in, zoom out? For people with relatively slow connections (like me) this would be a nightmare as the image quality would be plagued by macro-blocking and input lag.
From what I understand there's a hibernation mode but the apps still remain in memory in that state. When iOS needs more memory for the foreground app it just kills the oldest app to reclaim the memory, there's no disk thrashing because it doesn't page out to disk in the first place (although that kill/reclaim process does seem to adversely affect performance too).
All that said...
This type of save state stuff is more or less what iOS does when it does kill something off (if an app supports it), albeit it doesn't really give any options on resume. It tries to resume as if nothing happened, if done well it seems like the app was always open whether it was just hibernating or completely killed (there's more subtleties to it but that's the general gist).
So for something similar on Wii U, the game would probably have its dedicated memory and remain open (just cause saving/restarting would be the longest with a game), along with whatever system background services* like the menu and download/update manager and whatever. Then there would be another chunk of memory reserved for those regular "background" apps like the browser and whatever that don't actually need to remain open at all times, they'd save state on close and reload on open.
For all we know it sort of acts like this as is, in which case the issue would be that the apps just take long as hell to launch.
*And this stuff can be separate from the UI to save more resources. Like have faceless background processes while dynamically loading/unloading the front end apps as needed.
(...wait what's this have to do with GPUs?)
lostinblue
Banned
You can do most web tasks over a lowbit rate and low framerate as long as you allow for a spruced up bitrate to do the trick in the occurences where it's animating and it's not like Nintendo would be the only one to pull: Sony is doing Gaikai with PS4, albeit to stream PS3 games; streaming games being way more intensive.
Hey, I often use VNC's (I do it for leisure/convenience, my mother actually has to use it for work, since stuff has to be delivered on certain dates and it has to be sent from a specific remote computer/ip); I've definitely logged from my mobile phone to this computer over a crappy connection; playing games was understandably out of bounds (the connection being shared, and slow), but web browsing wasn't so bad, and that method doesn't even encode the stream.
So I disagree it's not doable, should be pretty doable and light compared to Sony attempting PS3 over web; and hey, some people will have slow connections for it, sure; I'm sure there are some people using 56k even today to whom loading a site like this (light, by our standards) is a nightmare. But it comes with the territory; sooner they'll be a minority; if they aren't already. (not the 56k dudes, dudes that can't stream browser navigation alright)
That's also not the only way to stream; they could go for a middleground like render pages and recompress images like Opera for mobiles does; just so sites become lighter on memory and the browser is doing actually no browser processing duties at all; it has no browser core to it (not really a browser which is why Apple allows it on iOS; it's technically running elsewhere).
Has this been discussed?
I am by no means certain of it's validity (Wii U GPU specs that is) and actually expect it's fake. Either way I came here expecting some discussion of it but found none.
Edit: Sorry I found an earlier spec sheet in post 7319:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=74532303&postcount=7319
I am by no means certain of it's validity (Wii U GPU specs that is) and actually expect it's fake. Either way I came here expecting some discussion of it but found none.
Edit: Sorry I found an earlier spec sheet in post 7319:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=74532303&postcount=7319
lostinblue
Banned
3 unequal cores? AFAIK, taking cache aside, they're equal.
And PS3 doesn't have 8 GB of acessible RAM it has 4.5 GB or up to 5.5 GB with limitations by request. So, 3.5 GB reserved for OS in the higher scope, 2.5 GB minimum.
There are probably more errors, dunno; 1.6 to 2 GHz seems misleading if it's a turbo feature.
And PS3 doesn't have 8 GB of acessible RAM it has 4.5 GB or up to 5.5 GB with limitations by request. So, 3.5 GB reserved for OS in the higher scope, 2.5 GB minimum.
There are probably more errors, dunno; 1.6 to 2 GHz seems misleading if it's a turbo feature.
OG_Original Gamer
Member
Has this been discussed?
I am by no means certain of it's validity (Wii U GPU specs that is) and actually expect it's fake. Either way I came here expecting some discussion of it but found none.
Edit: Sorry I found an earlier spec sheet in post 7319:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=74532303&postcount=7319
Problem I see, is eDRAM bus. Renesas doesn't even produce eDRAM(32MB) under 1024 bit bus. My guess and dream is 4096 bit bus.
Has this been discussed?
I am by no means certain of it's validity (Wii U GPU specs that is) and actually expect it's fake. Either way I came here expecting some discussion of it but found none.
Edit: Sorry I found an earlier spec sheet in post 7319:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=74532303&postcount=7319
Yeah, I'm going to go with not worth discussing. It's either all stuff we know, or unconfirmed (the GPU numbers). And a lot is not entirely accurate. Adds nothing to the discussion that wasn't on the table before.
The chart is inaccurate. For example, the clocks on the Xbox have increased. There are the already-discussed possibilities that the clocks of the PS4 have increased slightly as well, according to GAF.
Also, the first iteration of Jaguar will not have the turbo core feature, as far as I can recall.
Edit: nor would it be smart to enable it for a gaming console, where predictable performance is a necessity to development.
Also, the first iteration of Jaguar will not have the turbo core feature, as far as I can recall.
Edit: nor would it be smart to enable it for a gaming console, where predictable performance is a necessity to development.
Smurfman256
Member
Has this been discussed?
I am by no means certain of it's validity (Wii U GPU specs that is) and actually expect it's fake. Either way I came here expecting some discussion of it but found none.
Edit: Sorry I found an earlier spec sheet in post 7319:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=74532303&postcount=7319
The CPU clock on Xboner is now 1.75GHz and the GPU is 853 MHz. I'm not sure if PS4 had any form of clock speed increase.
MrPresident
Banned
It's from June so some of it is simply outdated info. It's not accurate but probably not entirely inaccurate either. It's probably close enough to make rough comparisons.
Edit: We do know that the Latte is HD4600-based so chances are that it's 32 TMUs rather than 16. The rest of the specs seem to be in line.
Edit: We do know that the Latte is HD4600-based so chances are that it's 32 TMUs rather than 16. The rest of the specs seem to be in line.
OG_Original Gamer
Member
So is GPGPU cool now that a independent dev is using compute units for Resogun on PS4, with limited use of the CPU?
I remember a lot downplaying of the comment Iwata made about Latte being a GPGPU.
I remember a lot downplaying of the comment Iwata made about Latte being a GPGPU.
Not so much downplayed - the thing is that every GPU designed in the last couple of years is a GPGPU. There's nothing special about it. Unless Nintendo had the chip modified to increase its efficiency at GPGPU tasks. Which is possible I guess.
Well, and some people obviously didn't really understand what GPGPU is in the first place, and thought it was just a buzzword like blast processing. PC games hardly used it after all - which had more to do with the lack of standardization (several competing, incompatible APIs with varying levels of support from the GPU manufacturers), so developers didn't bother.
That's mine and it's inaccurate.
Part of the issue is that calling a particular GPU "a GPGPU" or "not a GPGPU" is pretty nebulous. The tag seems to be applied when a GPU has been specifically designed to couple nicely with a "wide" range of non-graphical tasks (i.e. has "nice" support for use with GPGPU APIs). But strictly speaking there are tons of GPUs that are never called "GPGPU"s that could technically be used for general-purpose computing, simply because they have functionally complete instruction sets and more or less manipulable I/O structures.
Even the now-ancient DX9 GPUs in seventh-gen consoles have been used for tasks that are only peripherally graphical. For instance, there are PS360 games that carry out the physics in their particle systems on the GPU. These systems can be somewhat restrictive in practice, such as only being efficiently able to use whatever is in the G-buffers to determine what the physical game world is shaped like. But they're still custom-made GPU physics systems that only contribute graphically when their results are actually rendered into the scene. And these systems are extremely fast, clearly taking advantage of GPU-style parallelization to get the kind of efficiency you expect from GPGPU. Is RSX or Xenos thus "a GPGPU"?
The point really shouldn't be whether Latte is "a GPGPU" or "not a GPGPU," but rather to what extents its level of support for GPGPU can be leveraged. Simply calling it "a GPGPU" sort of is a buzzword, even if people are saying it because of actual advantages over other systems.
prag16
Banned
Since when do we "know" that?
Where did you get this information?
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
For what it's worth, I use a simple rule of thumb when calling a GPU a GPGPU. It's whether the GPU vendor actually supports any of the GPGPU APIs (or compute shaders in the Graphics APIs) for their product. Otherwise yes, practically all GPU (including a 3dfx voodoo) could be used for non-graphics tasks.
Its Iwata who made a point about calling it a GPGPU.
And probably acquired NERD to do something with it.
w1gglyjones
Member
MrPresident
Banned
It was a poor choice of words but the HD4600-series rumors go way back and performance seems in line with that.
Assuming that the Latte is HD4600-based then chances are that it's 32 TMUs rather than 16. AMD never made a 320:16:8 GPU that I know of, in any case.
Disorientator
Member
Not sure if the guy asking is a gaffer, but here's what shin'en replied anyways. (old?)
Wonder if the "its all light and shadows that counts" is supposed to mean something. (other than the obvious)
Wonder if the "its all light and shadows that counts" is supposed to mean something. (other than the obvious)
HD Remake of Metroid Prime 2 Echoes by Shin'en confirmed 
Colonel Mustard
Banned
FAST!Not sure if the guy asking is a gaffer, but here's what shin'en replied anyways. (old?)
Wonder if the "its all light and shadows that counts" is supposed to mean something. (other than the obvious)
HD Remake of Metroid Prime 2 Echoes by Shin'en confirmed
Light Dark mechanic on the tracks.
Smurfman256
Member
Not sure if the guy asking is a gaffer, but here's what shin'en replied anyways. (old?)
Wonder if the "its all light and shadows that counts" is supposed to mean something. (other than the obvious)
HD Remake of Metroid Prime 2 Echoes by Shin'en confirmed
Is Shin'en a second-party developer for Nintendo?
lostinblue
Banned
Technically.
Nothing on paper or anything like that, but they chose to be nintendo exclusive and seem to get some beneficial treatment for that (ie: their relation with Nintendo is solid and they often get dev kits and the like early).
Nothing on paper or anything like that, but they chose to be nintendo exclusive and seem to get some beneficial treatment for that (ie: their relation with Nintendo is solid and they often get dev kits and the like early).
shakin_haitian
Banned
Yeah, I think they choose Nintendo hardware because they want to work on doing crazy things on not so standard hardware.
lostinblue
Banned
They like non-documented challenges.
They like non-documented challenges.
I'm wondering as the 2nd gen of games comes out that take greater advantage of the hardware if they are documenting these things and giving it to 3rd parties so they can make better ports or just letting them figure it out still on their own.
This is treading already covered terriotory.
That was never true. Also, there were not a bunch of "people" who assumed that it, it was Digital Foundry using information that they got from this thread when it was only two pages long. I still haven't figured out how they came to that conclusion, because its looks nothing like a 4600 or any known ATI design.
The only R700 bases "known" for the GPU was the 4850 which is what was actually in the early dev kits.
Latte is a mix and match of component from the HD4000 series to the HD6000 series with bits from Renesas going by what has been learned. Also, we know from AMD's own statement that they didn't actually make the GPU at all, Nintendo made it. AMD just provided the hardware and helped them design it. This thread wouldn't have gone on this long it that fabricated DF claim was even 1/10 true. They have never gone back and changed which has lead to a lot of people believe its absolute fact when its 100% made up.
Things that we do know from the analysis:
Its custom made and unlike any single other GPU on the market.
The EDRAM was provided by Renesas and its 32MB(speed is still uncertain)
It has 2 other small ram caches.
It has GPGPU functionality.
It uses the GX2 framework, not DX9/10/10.1/11 or anything DirectX. It is able to produce at least some DX11 "specific" effects.
Its clocked at 550hmz.
Its draws less than 30 watts.
Its streams data to the gamepad at 60hz
Anything beyond this is theoretical.
No. They are completely independent. They simply choose to make games on Nintendo hardware. I believe they also make demo's for PC and other hardware under different group names.
lostinblue
Banned
The development environment changed greatly from the time development was kinda blind.
This said, even if it's more efficient now it has been said a few months ago that documentation is on the light side of things, there's one page or two for tesselation, thankfully it's clearly a ATi part so most calls will work and that documentation is available.
That said, I've never seen neither.
Nintendo also gives developers support via tickets on their support forums; early on they were having lots of problems internally with the architecture being new so they wouldn't be much help, most studios that spent a whole generation with a more modern architecture in hands could probably be more knowledgeable regarding programmable shaders and the like. And that's obviously changing, via training and trial and error (if there's a hole for people to fall into, multiple teams will be trapped on it, and once there's a pattern it becomes easy).
Obviously, developers like Shin'en being on the front end of development testing all the bells and whistles of the hardware also helps, if anything it shows it's possible. Kinda how when Normal Mapping started being used on the Wii (on Dewey's Adventure) a few games opted to implement it later on; being on a commercial product proves it's doable, and it also lifts the bar.
Like saying the best proof Wii U is not a X360 is the software itself.
MrPresident
Banned
Thanks for the write-up. This is actually the first I've heard of HD4850 being used in devkits and I'm sure you have it confused with the 4600-series. The Latte is very obviously slower than the 4850 because that one is more than 3x faster than the 360's Xenos and its performance is only slightly below Xbox One specs. Wii U ports of 360 games would all be at 1080p if that were the case because performance would be 'free' at the resolution with those kinds of specs.
But, yes, GPGPU was always a given since the entire HD4000 series is OpenCL capable. And there are no DX11 specific effects; tessellation just didn't exist within the DX spec until DX11. It still existed in the HD4000-series though it wasn't DX11 compliant.
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