Gemüsepizza
Member
Really, that is all you have to say?
Rumor: Wii U final specs
- Thread starter EatChildren
- Start date
Really, that is all you have to say?
On a technical level they were massively better. "Looks better" isn't measurable but I'm sure that when it is, that same device will be able to measure "Cooler" and "Funner".You might be able to talk me up from looking alike to looking a bit better, but I'm never agreeing with massively better....
How did you come to that conclusion?
Many things are theoretically possible. However you mentioned that there are great looking games on low budgets, and I'm just saying that while that may be true none that I know of look as good as Halo 4, which is the crux of this particular argument.
What's that in English?
Saint Gregory
Member
Fixed that for you.
I understand why enthusiast gamers, expecially those on a budget, love Sony and MS but if I was a shareholder of either I would be so pissed.
I went to business school and if I proposed a business model where it was necessary to lose even a fraction of what MS and Sony lost selling their consoles at launch I would have been sent to the dean's office.
Gemüsepizza;43488073 said:
I do have to question your hypothesis here, from an admitted position of ignorance.
You say that developers had to "get used" to a new shaderset and multi core CPU's in 2005, while saying that the Wii U will not benefit from that same learning process because engine technology has since accounted for all that...
But, we know that there were PC games running on DX9 (or in the case of Doom 3, the OpenGL equivalent) more than two years before the 360 was released, and there were engines built to support multicore CPU's at least a year before the 360's release (CryEngine 1).
If your argument is that developers in the console space had to jump into all of that, would they not also need to learn to utilize a GPU-centric box that utilizes GPGPU and a more advanced feature set? And those engines would have to be optimized for the Wii U's design, no?
Yep. Because that's really all there is to it. Wii U isn't an Xbox 360. It's not even an overclocked Xbox 360. It's new hardware with new capabilities that enables new approaches. And even if it were just an Xbox 360 with a Nintendo logo, there'd still be massive room for improvement. Just look at what capable devs do on the fucking 1982 C64 these days. That shit is lightyears beyond anything anyone considered possible 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago - and the system came out 30 years ago.Gemüsepizza;43488073 said:
lostinblue
Banned
Are you seriously suggesting something optimized for current gen consoles is optimized for the Wii U?Gemüsepizza;43488073 said:
Of course there's a big space for improvement; as for that kind of improvement (PDZ till Halo 4) you've gotta have in mind that PDZ was as rushed as it gets and a lot of the tools and artistic knowhow wasn't there.
It's like saying modeling when the Dreamcast came out was still stuck with the 32 bit way of doing things (by avoiding skinning and instead using "separate parts" for assembling, say, a body) it's not that the Dreamcast couldn't do it the "modern way" but developers took a while to get to it, hence, the definite switch happened while the DC was dying further dating it's software.
The more far along we get the fewer of these "game changers" in the way you do something happen; it's certainly true for both Wii U and any follow up console from other manufacturer; but that doesn't mean there isn't a huge space for improvement.
For starters, a tesselation unit, if well used (and well used across all newer consoles/engine tech) is a pretty big game changer when it comes to how stuff works and how much you have to optimize it for a certain pre-set roof. Of course time will tell how it well it takes off. Just an example.
With a tesselation unit used to cap detail rather than add it like mad in the areas next to the game camera X360 games wouldn't be struggling as much as they are with open world for instance, and it's like saying a HD Xenoblade could, all of a sudden not sacrifice graphics at all for the scope (just imagine that). Tesselation done properly and effectively can be a huge game changer; even if the Wii U only matched X360 with a modern feature set that feature could effectively make the results possible very different; that's not the only feature that makes it (theoretically) far more efficient too.
Gemüsepizza
Member
1. How many console games did use id tech 4 and CryEngine 1? Quake 4, Prey, Brink, Wolfenstein and Farcry. Five games.
2. All current engines should support most features of the Wii U. The Wii is using an out-of-order PPC cpu and an AMD GPU. This is neither exotic nor revolutionary hardware. And guess what: Nintendo did choose these components with current software tech in mind, to make development easy.
Then please name me those Wii U features which aren't supported by current engines. And regarding your silly C64 comment - I honestly don't care what devs can achieve in 2042 on the Wii U. There is always room for improvement, but development for a modern console is "a little bit" more complicated than development for a C64. And companies don't have the same motives as some hobbyists. Game development costs time and money, and I have explained why I don't think we will see much effort from devs in the next years.
All modern, current engines should support most of Wii U's features. UE3 for example supports tessellation. There are UE3 games for the Wii U. One of them, Batman: Arkham City, even has several tessellation effects in the PC version. Why are there none in the Wii U version? Is this a taste of how much devs will care about Wii U optimization?
But that's not the case with the Wii U. The tools are there. The artistic knowhow is there. So what leads you (or wsippel) to believe we will see a bigger jump then from PDZ to Halo 4?
Gemüsepizza;43488073 said:
What else is there to say. You clearly do not have the same authority on the subject as Wsippel. What else would you have him say? When Xbox360 came out, devs had been making high def PC assets for years prior. According to your logic, there was nothing new to learn with 360 because the same procedures had existed before on different hardware (pc). The fact that WiiU may or may not be much more powerful than 360, has nothing to do with it being new hardware, with its own quirks and completely custom architecture. By your logic, again, PSVita will not see improvements over its launch line-up.
Gemüsepizza
Member
Maybe he should try using arguments?
How many devs did that?
The Wii U has a PPC cpu and an AMD GPU. This hardware is not exotic and not revolutionary. It wasn't meant to be. Of course there is always room for optimization - but how much? And how much does this cost?
If sales stay low, we probably won't see many improvements here. That's a point from my post which wsippel chose to ignore.
Yeah, and the point is that even on a platform that simple, a platform every developer thought he had completely figured out 30 years ago, massive improvements were still possible. So I guess you should care after all.Gemüsepizza;43490480 said:
And I'm not quite sure what the asinine "supported feature" comment is supposed to mean. The Xbox360 supported all the "features" you see in Halo 4 back in 2005. It's not so much about what features you have, it's about how you use them. And that changes and improves over the years, even on the same hardware.
Gemüsepizza;43491677 said:
Seriously? lol... dude, check what PC games came out 7 years ago. You'd be surprised. How old do you think Half-Life 2 is?
Gemüsepizza;43491677 said:
What makes you think 360 had any kind of revolutionary and exotic architecture? Yet we went from PDZ to Halo 4. Now, WiiU has launch games taking a crap on 360 exclusive launch games (ACIII, ME2...), why would a similar jump be out of the question?
Gemüsepizza;43490480 said:
There's a huge difference between writing code with a low level custom API for a GPU that's a heavily customized version of an R700, and writing code in a high level API like DirectX that just happens to run on a R700. And all "out of order PPC CPUs" aren't created equal, especially when you're talking about, once again, a heavily customized chip.
I think the difference between WiiU launch games and its eventual best will be less than that of PDZ to Halo 4 for a few reasons. First WiiU will have the normal Nintendo life cycle or 5-6 years (Halo 4 is coming out 7 years after PDZ). Second while WiiU is far from getting optimised games its still going to be off to a bit of a better start than 360 development simply due to developers having more experience with this kind of hardware than they did 7 years ago. Having said that I still expect a jump that will see WiiU's best surpass 360 and PS3's games quite comfortably. What could have a big affect and increase that difference is if Nintendo free up more of that 2GB RAM, for instance if 1.5GB becomes available for games.
brochiller
Member
Gemüsepizza;43491677 said:
You're arguing against yourself now. The point here is that no devs could just take what they were doing on the PC and port it straight to 360 even if they already had the experience in developing HD games. It's not that simple. People give put way too much emphasis on the fact that this is the first HD console generation when analyzing the reasons why games coming out today look so much better than the launch games 6 years ago.
It's not about something trivial like the DSP - gemüsepizza somehow believes that pipelines and engines are static all of a sudden. And that's bullshit. Everything is constantly in flux. And that didn't suddenly stop a month ago. Current Wii U engines are ports of current PS360 engines - obviously. And the pipelines didn't suddenly change either. But they didn't suddenly change when the Xbox360 came out, and they won't suddenly change when the 720 comes out. They improve all the time, because Autodesk and Pixologic and Adobe and Luxology want to sell new software. There's no direct relation to hardware, and if there was, it would actually work in Nintendo's favor, as significantly less powerful, less feature rich platforms become more and more important to middleware developers.
That was just an easy example to show him that at this stage even some of the most basic tools aren't there. Also an example of something that engines ported from other consoles can't just instantly adapt to support. Obviously engines will continue to improve in general as well as becoming more optimised for WiiU, and that combination will give us better looking WiiU games. Expecting launch games to be representative of what any console can do is odd, as its never been the case in the past.
Not sure I'd say its trivial considering the performance that could be saved for other things. But I suppose compared to the bigger picture it is.
lostinblue
Banned
Using them on the PC whilst supporting two manufacturers and lots of GPU's lacking those features (and varying levels of performance) is different than using them on a console.Gemüsepizza;43490480 said:
It's not so much about them being supported as it is them being the driving force of the engine/tech. (sure you can support anything on top of the engine hood you have, but it's not that simple)Gemüsepizza;43490480 said:
Unreal Engine 2.5 supported shaders and can support any shader model you throw at it till this day with a few changes but didn't rely on them so could run on consoles that weren't shader model compliant. Unreal Engine 3 changed that. It's along the same lines, most stuff is supported, but it's an extra rather than something serving as the foundation, and if you don't make those core changes... well, they're just that, optional; something running on top. It's not by chance that a Unreal Engine 4 is coming, by your reasoning of "it fits everything" no new engine's would be needed too because the paradigm isn't shifting an inch, in fact there would have been no need for UE3 as well seeing we've had some current gen games using UE2.5 with awesome results; but in the end that's a falacy, the biggest evolution is in making new tech being the core of the tools we're using rather than being the outer skin layer of an onion.
This new hardware and others that'll come afterward, are away from PS3/x360 standard and tech ballpark, that will allow software to not have them in mind as a fallback and therefore evolve past that preset of "standard" features, adding some more to the mix that will no longer be optional/an afterthought for those with an high spec pc; thus be used more intensively than something optional.
I bet the Wii U version isn't using tesselation; and do I really have to put into words how different it is using it on PC games and using it on a closed architecture?Gemüsepizza;43490480 said:
On the PC it's optional, experimental even; and it doesn't really matter; on a console though, instead of being a way to increase LOD it might be used as a means to maintain it. And it never was used for that because it was never in a closed architecture.
Tesselation has been a way to maximize a power roof rather than scaling it for a lower spec or allowing to do more with less; how to say this, it has been all about adding some bells and whistles on top of an existing foundation that doesn't rely on it rather than being the driving force behind the whole geometry structure.
It might be one of those changes in development paradigm, depending on how well it takes off; but the potential is there; only possible on the Wii U and up though.
I didn't say you should expect such degree of difference quite the oposite and explained why actually, but from what I've read you were implying the Wii U to be on the same development paradigm as the x360.Gemüsepizza;43490480 said:
That's only half true; you certainly can't push it with x360 tech and that's not because of it being less powerful, has to do with feature set and the fact that it works differently at parts, just like any new hardware really.
In short, I think you where on the wrong side of the fence. Generational differences will always feel smaller than before from now on; but that doesn't mean x360 tech and hardware knowhow is appropriate to take out the best on the wii u and other newer consoles. It's certainly not.
Some stuff is more mature and not going through changes/trial and error compared to 2005 (the developers knowhow on shaders and high polygon modeling/skinning for one) and this console isn't as rushed as x360 which by it's turn benefits launch software; but that doesn't mean nothing changed and toppling and maxing it out is an easy feat.
Anywho even with the x360-port degree of control over the hardware a talented team could make a game that would make your jaw drop; because above tech and feature implementations a lot of it depends on artistic direction (and at least until new consoles come around this console is a RAM behemoth compared to current gen).
lwilliams3
Member
Wow, that is a nice tidbit, wsippel. Thanks for sharing.
Any guesses on what kind of ARM and how many cores there are? It would be interesting the the multicore ARM's power is around or above iPhone/iPad level. I also would wonder on what kind of ARM is in the Wii U Gamepad.
360 used an entirely new GPU architecture compared to anything in any consumer product before it (unified shaders), and used eDRAM, and a tri-core CPU with 6 threads when games were developed primarily for single-threaded execution. I think to claim that the architectural novelty developers have to deal with on Wii U is equivalent to that is incredibly far-fetched.
Anyone expecting a PDZ to Halo 4 leap out of the WiiU are setting themselves up for disappointment. You aren't getting that far beyond current hardware and titles like Arkham City with system.
Originally Posted by ozfunghi:
Originally Posted by ozfunghi:
Because hardware wasn't what prevented those titles ftom being there at the 360 launch. The WiiU has them not because it's beastly hardware but because they now exist. As I said, Arkham City looks incredible and I see no possibility that later gen WiiU games will show a PDZ to Halo 4 leap over titles like that.
And you have a time machine?
To be fair, are you even getting that far with these launch titles? It might be more powerful, but only in an Xbox > PS2 kind of way. The games will eventually look better than PS3/360, but anybody expecting a clear leap between what is possible now and what the Wii U can do, are probably deluding themselves. A few nicer textures here and maybe a couple of extra frames there, but the true progression in IQ, performance, animation and AI will come with the PS4/Durango - not the Wii U.
That being said, potential Zelda, Mario and Metroid HD sequels are easily worth the price of entry for me.
Yes, it wasn't just a modified X1800 series, and HD2000 series were based on the Xenos, not the previous Radeon X line.
At this point I'm not even expecting an Xbox > PS2 scenario. The Xbox showed superiority out of the gate even when most titles were being developed for PS2 and ported over. I would be more than happy to see the WiiU turn out to be a powerhouse as I love the Prime and Zelda series, but so far I've seen nothing from it to think that's the case. That's not to say I won't love me some HD Nintendo games, but this is a spec thread and games aren't hardware.
Christberg
Member
Pretty sure you're low balling things to a significant degree based on what little publically available specs we have. The Wii U has 4X the memory of either if the HD twins, with 2X available now. Just optimizing the OS down to a more manageable size, say 256Mb or so would make a huge difference.
We have next to nothing reliable to work off of because al live media for multi platform titles is almost all either off screen footage or bullshots from a PC version. What little direct feed footage we have isn't of much use either due to video compression differences. Add in the fact that 3rd parties have basically entirely abandoned Nintendo these past few years. It's fair to assume they're just releasing quick, low cost ports without significant investment in graphical improvements and most of their effort being directed at the game pad or Nintendo fan service related stuff.
Then you have Nintendo's internal development teams just now switching to what's a brand new development platform in what's essentially the same situation as what PS3/X360 devs had to deal with at launch.
Granted I'd say it's fair to assume that nothing anywhere close to an order of magnitude is in the offing. If it was we wouldn't even be having this conversation and we'd be looking at a system that costs twice as much with 3X the power draw and case size. It's still far, far too early to judge the overall capabilities of the hardware IMO regardless.
And hardware is not all about graphics
I know what you're saying but given the Wii U has more grunt, more RAM and a usable GPGPU then I do expect to see better results than the HD twins. Whether those results will look better to most people I can't really say. For example, making more shadows dynamic instead of the baked stuff we get now may or may not be noticeable to most.
I think 1080 is irrelevant given the massive number of 720 TV's still around.
Global Illumination approximation may be something that's present in custom Wii U games down the track and that may provide obvious visual differences.
We need to wait for Retro basically.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Let's see..Gemüsepizza;43487227 said:
SMP has been common on the PC since the P3 days. The mass-market Celeron Mendocino was launched in 1998, and did dual-core SMP perfectly well. My first SMP setup was a Coppermine in 2000 and ran the pervasively-multithreaded BeOS5 like a charm. Cell-style asymmetric multi-processor architectures were less common, but one could argue Cell's SPUs were largely a continuation of the idea of the VPU units in the PS2. Anecdotally (from talks with peers) PS2 devs felt right at home on the PS3, while PC devs had a very steep PS3 learning curve. Conversely, the latter felt right at home on the 360, abnormally low IPC non-withstanding.
Shader support per se (read: glorified texture combiners)? Since NV20/R200 in 2001. Shader support by today's standards (i.e. Shader Model 2+)? Since NV30/R300 in 2002-2003.
While I do agree with you that software advancements played a more important role in the state-of-the-art on consoles, you place the emphasis on the wrong horse. It's not SMP and shaders per se that developers had to get acquainted with, it's new graphics algorithms which simply did not exist back in pre-2005 which made games like Halo4 possible on the exact same hw circa 2005. Theory advancements in the field, while backed up by hw advancements, are not solely a function of the latter. Mankind's advancements in theoretical mathematics have been done on largely the same hw since the beginning of time - the human brain.
This is where your argument fumbles - algorithmic advancements will be pertinent to the lifespan of the WiiU, just as much as they have been to each and every embedded piece of hw with a sufficiently-long lifespan. There are no ifs, buts and maybes here.
Did you talk to a WiiU dev about this?
Well, I'd say your arguments don't back up your conclusion, but that's normal since you did go on the wrong foot from the get go.
Lord Error
Insane For Sony
It is approximately how it works. If I got a PC that shows approx 3x increase in various practical CPU and GPU benchmarks, that would be exactly how it would work. I'd get such resolution and framerate bump in practically all modern games without any development work involved. It's of course possible that Nintendo somehow massively bungled their development software, so the power that's there is going to waste, but I doubt that's the case.
On a positive side, I think it's very impressive how much they've got out of such small packaging and power use. Even after all these revisions, I'm pretty sure latest PS3 and X360 still draw a lot more power than 45W that Wii U does, and they are somewhat less powerful than it as well.
But the 360 slim is actually a more powerful console than the OG 360.
So does that mean its as powerful as the WiiU?
Lord Error
Insane For Sony
Yeah, but the question is by how much. There's been a wave of groundbreaking discoveries for various types of optimizations and approximations over the past few years, but I doubt it can continue for many more years with that rate while being applicable to the low power hardware. There's already some new things that just don't work well, or at all, unless on very fast or SM5 capable hardware, so it's possible, and likely, that the grunt of research and advancements will move to target primarily higher end hardware now. To illustrate this, there's still impressive audiovisual demos being made for C64, by some of the smartest people who are most knowledgeable about its architecture, and while they do things no one ever thought possible back in the 80s or 90s, they still look unmistakably like C64 demos made cca. 10 years ago. What's possible to do with the machine has slowed down after the wave of discoveries.
I wasn't aware of this. I thought the base hardware is exact same, just shrunk down.
Gemüsepizza
Member
All this hardware you have listed was not something a console dev did usually work with.
Gamecube = No shaders. PS2 = No pixel shaders. Many console devs had little experience with shaders when the current generation hit, and had to learn how to properly use them.
What? Of course devs had to learn how to properly use this hardware. This was new technology in console space. This goes hand in hand with developing algorithms for this hardware.
Wii U will profit by some of the advancements made in graphics development, but in the end it's dependent on how much developers will care. I have already pointed this out in a post before, yet everybody seems to ignore it. I mean, it's not like every Xbox 360 title from now on will look like Halo 4. Please tell me, how realistic is it, that we will see devs putting their best graphic experts and big money on Wii U development to optimize their engines by the same amount they did for Xbox 360 and PS3.
What I mean is: The hardware in the Wii U is not supposed to be something completely new. Because Nintendo didn't want this. They wanted hardware that is easy to develop for.
Maybe because you didn't read all of them. Optimization is always possible. But it costs money and time. There is no doubt that the Wii U's hardware is more capable than the hardware of Xbox 360 and PS3. But is there any sign that devs will actually care about this? That they will put the same effort in the Wii U that they did with Xbox 360 and PS3? That they will put more effort in it? And how much effort is needed to produce a jump like PDZ to Halo 4? We won't see a magical jump just because "graphic algorithms will advance".
Gemüsepizza;43504669 said:
Hi.
It seems like you're new here. Let me help you.
The company that are making the Wii U are called Nintendo.
Nintendo don't just make consoles.
They also make game.
These games are known at 1st party games.
Nintendo is known for having some of the best 1st party studios (the ones which make the games)
You can be pretty sure that Nintendo's 1st party titles will, for the most part, see them "putting their best graphic experts and big money on Wii U Development"
Gemüsepizza
Member
Right, because Nintendo is known for investing millions in graphics optimization. I am sure they have good graphic experts. But that does not mean that they have a budget which will allow them to go crazy. Devs spent a ton of time and money to get Xbox 360 and PS3 games to where they are now. I am not sure Nintendo is willing to invest the same or a bigger amount. We haven't seen anything yet that suggests they will.
With Retro I expect 60fps, clean visuals and my jaw on the floor.And hardware is not all about graphics
I know what you're saying but given the Wii U has more grunt, more RAM and a usable GPGPU then I do expect to see better results than the HD twins. Whether those results will look better to most people I can't really say. For example, making more shadows dynamic instead of the baked stuff we get now may or may not be noticeable to most.
I think 1080 is irrelevant given the massive number of 720 TV's still around.
Global Illumination approximation may be something that's present in custom Wii U games down the track and that may provide obvious visual differences.
We need to wait for Retro basically.
Bluemercury
Member
Off course we all want to be impressed visually, but Nintendo doesn't want to enter the tech race, and apparentely that's 2 times at once, so we can say with confidence they won't any time soon. The question is how will Sony and MS cope with it. They can't charge 600 for their consoles can they?
pepone1234
Neo Member
Gemüsepizza;43491677 said:
The gamecube also had a PPC cpu and an AMD gpu so the x360 was also not exotic and not revolutionary.
Gemüsepizza
Member
A ppc cpu with multiple cores and an AMD gpu with unified shader support. That was the revolutionary part (at least regarding consoles) of it.
thats a simplistic comparison though. Most modern PC games are based on console assets, so increased CPU power doesn't have much impact (even quad core CPUs are often only using two cores), and GPU increases are going directly to fillrate allowing higher res/AA.
MadeInBeats
Banned
Gemüsepizza;43504763 said:
lhere, a games dev on here, has already commented something to the effect of with the Wii U they are forced to learn new ways to build games with the modern GPGPU. There are also other quotes on the net which say something similar.
End of.
I don't see what would be so challenging for third party devs. They are already used to multcore CPUs and shader based GPUs.
Nintendo first party teams will need to go through that learning curve though.
if there is specific effort required to 'get the most' from the hardware by coding for the GPGPU portion, then ordinarily I'd argue that no third parties will bother and they'll just port with minimum effort.
However, if the next gen consoles have GPGPU elements, then teams will need to get to grips with this anyway, which might benefit WiiU development.
Why did we have all the moaning from dev's that the Wii U was weaker than the PS360 because it had such a slow CPU then?
Backfoggen
Banned
Prob cause it has a weak CPU, but I'm just guessing here.
Why not ?
You all seem to think that videogames are all about graphics and horsepower.
Well, they're not.
Some devs cater to the graphics whores, some to the gameplay fanatics, some to both and then some.
Why does everything have to be black or white, if anything, last gen proved that there is room for all kinds of shades of grey.
frankie_baby
Member
While that remains a possibility I find it highly unlikely for reasons that have been repeatedly stated