Indeed. And I should have been more clear in that last post when I said, "they changed it." I meant to say they modified it. Not switched it out for something completely different. Of course, the chip will resemble the e6760's GPU in some ways. I believe they are both VLIW5 (Would Nintendo tinker that deeply into the core architecture, though? Perhaps...)
I also don't know what kind of hardware changes would be made to enable whatever DX11/SM5-level effects they have chosen to include beyond the DX 10.1 base.
I'm looking at instances of convergent evolution in nature as an analogy. It's like how bats and birds both have the ability to fly, but they achieve it with different anatomy, movements, and efficiency. I suppose if I had the choice, I'd rather be a bird. But I'd rather be a bat than a rat. (Let's see if anyone makes sense of that haha)
I don't understand what you're disagreeing with me about in the first bolded statement. That Nintendo may have taken some bullet point features of DX11 and included support for them in GPU7, but they may not run as efficiently is what I took from that Kotaku article. As we've discussed, DX11 has no specification for raw performance, so I read that dev comment in relation to said features. We do know R700 includes features such as GPGPU and tesselation. I believe it possible Nintendo has "upgraded" these two aspects of their GPU, but likely in a different way than, say, a SI card. For GPGPU in particular, I think they might be using the eDRAM as L2 or L3 cache. I'm sticking w/ my prediction that the eDRAM is actually embedded on the same chip as the GPU. Seeing as how SRAM is expensive and Nintendo struck it from the CPU L2 design, I wonder if it's possible they did the same with the GPU.
But onto your second bolded comment, we simply don't know any of that (except the added effects, I'll give yah). There is absolutely nothing about the e6760 that points to a very similar GPU being included in Wii U other than the fact that it's an impressively featured, low drawing card, and it would be nice to have.
First, I'll get out of the way the point I disagreed with, I don't believe it's easy or clear to see what anyone means by DX11 features but not DX11 capable, or SM5 like features, but only used sparingly... How does that make sense to anyone? the changes from DX10.1 to DX11 are very small. It flat out is simply about moving tessellation into unified shaders as well as GPGPU targeting that same advancement. There is no long list of DX11 features that they might have or might not have, it's literally those 2 things from DX10.1, but I'm all ears if you have a list. SM5, well either the chip has it or it doesn't, it's a specification that Nintendo would likely not even mess with.
Now to move on, it seems like I'm rocking the boat or whatever, but how can that be when You, BG and myself are plainly saying the same thing. BG is right to ask where he and I disagree, because we don't. He said "No" to there being a different GPU than what was in early dev kits, but I think it was mostly misunderstood that I simply meant that a final silicon chip was put into the final dev kits that replaced the R700 card originally used. Beyond that I said it's possible that that card now supported DX11 (and for OUR purposes, any changes to improve GPGPU and Tessellation, would mean this.)
As for saying "we don't know" if Wii U's GPU is 2-3X Xenos, I think it's plain that it falls in that line, BG basically agrees with me and I don't see you disagreeing with him. We know that Wii U can render 360 graphics and beyond that, we also know that it can also render a second scene from the game onto the pad (batman did this during E3) we know that Batman isn't exactly pushing the hardware because it's an unoptimized port.
Now even 28nm is being taken seriously because someone else said that it's possible. The reason I don't post here much anymore is exactly because of this, reasonable discussion is halted, if not by trolls, then by people who just don't read or understand what others are saying.
I'd love to know where either of you disagree with me about Wii U specs. I'd love to have that debate, instead of what is "known" and what is "guessed" at... As for this spec leak in the OP, it's clearly second hand information from Arkam (he has said as much) so lets try not to treat it like a fact sheet.
BTW: I completely disagree with people trying to crush the E6760 rumor, because most people know it's a custom part, so of course it's not E6760, but it seems we all agree that it has the target performance fairly close and that is all people really care about, until someone can tell me a feature from DX11 they don't expect in GPU7, out of the two choices there really is to pick from. Then it makes no difference if people look at E6760 or an imaginary custom card that has the same performance. GPU7 won't use DX11 so I hardly see the point in telling people it's not E6760, because it would have all the same characteristics of whatever GPU7 turns out to be EXCEPT Nintendo customizations of course.
