Barack Lesnar
Banned
I don't see how that's possible considering I'm taking it at face value.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Wii U Community Thread
- Thread starter Metroid Hunter
- Start date
- Status
I don't see how that's possible considering I'm taking it at face value.
Yeah, he didn't hear from most studios because they budgeted CPU tasks correctly on their own. Doesn't change the facts, nor does it allow you to backtrack on your statement. There are games that ate up an entire core of Xenon just doing audio processing, and the inclusion of a DSP to *any* system is a boon. With that said, most current middleware running on the Wii U right now is more than likely not yet running the audio on that DSP, instead relying in the CPU like the 360. This will be a problem until said middleware takes advantage of it. wsippel can speak more to this, as he's been paying close attention to this.
Yep, tekken shouldn't be beating the CPU up but it does make sense that they're not yet using the DSP.
As has been mentioned before, the IPC/general purpose performance of the PPE sucks.
Now all we need is specialguy and the thread is complete.
They were more than likely referring to the GPU. It's a modern part.
R
Rösti
Unconfirmed Member
The fact that the 476P can be configured for very high performance in uniprocessor environments while also being compatible with a tightly integrated FPU (floating point unit) makes me curious on what Nintendo has done exactly if the processor in Wii U is indeed based on this. 476P is 1.6 GHz+ by the way. Also, I cannot help wonder if it wouldn't have been better if Nintendo chose something compliant with the 754-2008 - IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic and not the 1985 standard. Sure, there isn't a crazy amount of systems that currently use that standard, but IBM, Intel and Nvidia to name some companies have adopted it in some degree. I wonder if Durango and Orbis will be compliant with it. If anything, it would be a good thing to have as I assume many systems starting next year will implement it.
Barack Lesnar
Banned
These dismissive posts that completely ignore the points being made aren't working to your favor.
Speak for yourself. Someone tried to tell you that the Wii U CPU is a different (lower-clocked but OOOe) architecture than the deep-pipelined in-order PPEs and you said "sounds like spin"
tkscz
Member
So am I. Why would he bring the power consumption up before the creative solutions? To me, that says he is solely talking about the CPU speed and nothing more.
Barack Lesnar
Banned
I'm taking what the Tekken guy said at face value. I'm not theorizing or anything. If anyone 100% unbiased read that statement they would come to the same conclusion, like someone who doesn't follow video games. Just reading it from an English standpoint it's not difficult to understand and doesn't require deep analysis to figure out. It's lower-clocked and they've had to figure out creative ways to get it working as well as the 360 and PS3 CPU's, bottom line.
lostinblue
Banned
Dual core @ 3.2 GHz? That's a Pentium D (they only came out in 2005 though).
31 stage pipeline ahoy.
Of course they sucked performance-wise, that's why intel abandoned the long pipeline architecture altogether.
Anyway read my previous post, I explained it the best way I can. Of course performance enhancements didn't happen just because of that; architecture efficiency along with fsb and other under-the-hood implementations such as E64, virtualization, NX bit support, etc certainly helped a lot.
Not just in Japan, although it's certainly more relevant there because of how expensive their electricity is and how small their homes are.
Anyway, ARM-based set boxes are coming and they won't spend much energy, from the moment they're able to play some games they'll be attacking this market; console makers know that, hence the need for convergence devices, small form factor and small power consumption. Of course Nintendo is probably the only one being really this anal about that, because no survey comes back saying "my console drains too much energy". The need to reduce energy consumption is there though (and manufacturers already felt it this gen, since they did multiple core shrinks), it's also one of the reason's laptop's and integrated solutions have been gaining ground on desktop PC's, not everyone needs a workstation form factor.
I doubt next gen we'll be talking about IBM, Intel or AMD processors, unless they're matching ARM consumption or ventured into ARM/equivalent RISC architecture (that or they are ultra-low-voltage x86 cpu's ala macbook air or intel manages their sub 1 watt x86 processors that doesn't suck).
exactly. Wii U is future proofing itself for the next gen. The CPU is decent enough for this gen. Nintendo is banking on next gen consoles using GPGPU.
Are we lacking news that badly? People taking a devs words out of context and analyzing it to death, either giving a positive or negative spin lol.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
"The Wii U, you know, it's a really great little system. Nintendo has packed in a great CPU, and we're doing some interesting things with the GPU. I could see some very interesting things being done on the Wii U hardware!"
Unless people are giving concrete numbers or clear, technical details, PR dribble should be taken as just that. It's all relative to how the devs see the hardware and their expectations, and also relative to how much they want to sell the game. You can put a positive, interesting spin on any hardware package, just as you can put a negative one.
Generally, unless I'm listening to a dev talk from GDC, reading design documents, or getting technical specifications, I don't listen to what devs have to say about hardware when on the topic of unreleased games. They might hint and tease and give a vague generalisation of what to expect, but they will almost always put a positive spin on whatever they have to say.
Not much point saying "Oh yeah, the Wii U CPU is kinda crappy but the game runs fine, so please buy Colonial Marines anyway!".
Did you perhaps think that their code for the game is optimized for a deep-pipelined, heavily parallel and/or tri-core console (those are your 2 HD choices this gen to port from) with high clocks?
A 476fp runs at 1.6ghz and eats somewhere around 1w per core. It is impressive for what it does, is OoO and short-pipelined and is better for some tasks than a deep-pipelined 3ghz PPE. It will also be worse at some tasks. It's simply "different"
tkscz
Member
For heavy yeah. The Tekken dev only brings up clock speeds, and somehow Heavy and a few others got WAY more out of that article. And claiming it is from face value no less.
Isn't that what the Tekken dev is saying? Because when you put it like that it kind of doesn't make any sense.
Thunder Monkey
Banned
I don't understand what's hard for everyone to get.
The CPU is unsuited to running code designed for the PS3/360(low clock speeds, OoOE, lacking adequate floppage). At this point that won't be changing. So the idea it was meant to be a current-gen port machine is flawed.
If it can't do it easily it was never intended to be. So where does it fit?
I wish we could get something definite on the capabilities of the GPU.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
It is, but he was giving an educated range of the CPU clock, flat out saying that he believes the CPU "maybe a little bit" clocked lower than the 360/PS3. He then gives an example of how these issues would be resolved on the PS3, and the need to do something differently on the Wii U.
"Really great processor" tells me nothing.
tkscz
Member
What!? The GC's CPU was better than the Xbox's and the Wii has an overclock GC CPU. Who told you that?
The issue with the Wii was the GPU and the TEV unit.
Dammit Nintendo, I demand information! Dammit insiders, I demand leaks! This thread is getting depressing and unrealistic.
I have taken drastic measures.
I have tied up HylianTom to a chair and pulled out his sealed Nintendo games. For every hour we don't get a leak or info on the Wii U, I will break the seal open on his sealed games and lick the disc, IN FRONT OF HYLIANTOM while he is helpless. The first victim will be Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.
Your move Nintendo/insiders (-_-)
I have taken drastic measures.
I have tied up HylianTom to a chair and pulled out his sealed Nintendo games. For every hour we don't get a leak or info on the Wii U, I will break the seal open on his sealed games and lick the disc, IN FRONT OF HYLIANTOM while he is helpless. The first victim will be Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.
Your move Nintendo/insiders (-_-)
Ok, wasn't sure, I'll fix my comment, thanks.
tkscz
Member
You want to see an unrealistic thread go hear
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=481866
Apple fans are fucking delusional.
I was going to mention this but you beat me to it. I was under the impression that we were done with the clock speed wars. Remember when clock speeds were approaching 4Ghz, then everyone realized that there was no way to sustain increases in speed like that. All of the sudden higher clock speeds didn't mean better performing processors. Just because the WiiU CPU is not clocked as fast as the 360 and PS3 parts does not make it any less capable or make it outdated. It is a new architecture and as such there will be a learning curve before it reaches its potential. It's very shortsighted to say "it's clocked lower than xenon so it must suck/"
R
Rösti
Unconfirmed Member
If only...
On related news, NoA Rob still hasn't replied to my inquiry. I haven't had time to get some envelopes and stamps, so I have not sent any regular mail to him yet. But I will try to do that this week. If you keep nagging, someone will eventually start talking. Or send a lawyer.
If not, I'm planning to do a thorough investigation of the Wii U hardware once the console is released. Most reports of this kind posted online by whatever enthusiast site I don't find enough, so I'll see if I can do something deeper.
Rösti;39718338 said:
If only...
On related news, NoA Rob still hasn't replied to my inquiry. I haven't had time to get some envelopes and stamps, so I have not sent any regular mail to him yet. But I will try to do that this week. If you keep nagging, someone will eventually start talking. Or send a lawyer.
If not, I'm planning to do a thorough investigation of the Wii U hardware once the console is released. Most reports of this kind posted online by whatever enthusiast site I don't find enough, so I'll see if I can do something deeper.
If only we knew a guy that had an account on Wario World.
I want Wii U news...
Honestly, I would take anything said by producers with a grain of salt. Usually producers aren't touching code, or working even exposed to it. What they know is what they hear from the engineers, and in this case we don't know how that conversation went.
For all we know it went something like this:
*engineer working with Wii U* "Hmm... running the mainline code on the Wii U is slower, I guess I'll have to dig into the technical docs on how to optimize our worker code to better work with it. If only the CPU was clocked 2x's as high, I wouldn't have to do ANY optimizations!"
*producer walks in* "so how's the Wii U SKU going?"
*engineer* "Well, I wish Nintendo had clocked it higher, right now our code is running slower than the other platforms"
*producer* "oh.. that's too bad, anything we can do about it?"
*engineer* "yeah, I think I can figure out some creative ways of getting it up to speed"
*producer leaves*
If the Wii U CPU is OoO, but lower clocks, or even a mix of two different CPU architectures, I could see optimizations making a big difference.
I've worked with plenty of "producers", and often they don't know much about the technical side of things. I would say the same about the Aliens producer.
lostinblue
Banned
Not really.
Doing the math on top of my knee, a 729 MHz gamecube CPU should be rated 1687.5 DMIPS. As for a 733 MHz Pentium III (which is what Xbox was, albeit with less cache) that would be 951.639 DMIPS). This is never an ideal way to do things (because it's never as linear seeing the front side bus and ram type is not the same for these different configurations) but should give you an idea.
Gamecube's CPU was a PowerPC G3, they were know for their very short execution pipeline sitting at 7 stages. Very effective per MHz performance, had a hard time scaling up though.
They were kinda equal cpu-wise (same ballpark being what I mean) with GC actually taking the edge (slighly more realworld GFlops as well). GC had to make vertex calculations on cpu though; while Xbox had to run some windows NT Kernel/Direct X API under it.
As for GPU's, simply too different to compare without going through "GC was more effective at this but Xbox was more effective at this" kind of situation, also true to wii's gpu of course; it certainly couldn't dream of doing 720p like xbox did for some games, but both GC and wii certainly pulled more polygons per scene and were better at texturing (a lot of Xbox games had to do the polygon trick in order to do more textures per pass this would halve the polygon performance though).
On a sidenote it has been said that each X360 cpu core can only double Xbox performance in general purpose tasks; certainly true for CELL's PPE as well going by drystone (DMIPS) benchmarks.
Barack Lesnar
Banned
I might have been wrong in calling tkcz's post spin but this one definitely has me dizzy. Just because he's a producer doesn't mean he doesn't have technical knowledge. The fact that he mentioned clock speed is evidence of that. A PR mouthpiece that doesn't know a CPU from a GPU wouldn't be talking about clock speed.
MadeInBeats
Banned
So you're saying they don't see the value in spending time making code work well on WiiU, instead looking for 'creative' (glue & sticky tape) solutions?
I'm not prepared to state this comment goes to prove anything one way or the other unlike some here, I am taking this at face value, but I agree it is miles away from anything definitive.
I'm not prepared to state this comment goes to prove anything one way or the other unlike some here, I am taking this at face value, but I agree it is miles away from anything definitive.
Apophis2036
Banned
Don't compare Wii U to PS4 / 720, it will only leave you disappointed as they will be around 3 times as powerful.
Just take Wii U for what it is, around 30 - 40 times more powerful than the Wii, twice as powerful as the PS360 and finally a Nintendo system that runs in HD that has a decent online environment.
Add to that the innovations the tablet controller could bring to gaming as a whole and the ability to play games / watch Netflix / surf the net on the controller to free up the TV.
The general public are going to go batshit crazy for NSMB U & Nintendo Land and once the system has an install base of over 10 million the third parties will be begging to make not only ports but exclusive games for the system.
Keep your head up, we are now less than 6 months from launch with a Nintendo Direct in late August and then another in late November to look forward to.
Games that cost over $100 million to develop and have to sell over 5 million copies to even break even is not the future of videogames, Microsoft and esp Sony will find that out the hard way.
I have a feeling Nintendo have pulled a rabbit out of the hat with Wii U.
Believe !!!
.I'm not saying he doesn't know anything, I don't know him, but I'm just trying to balance out the conversation, since some here are over-reacting and taking his comment as definitive.
You lost me there. Neither are plausible.
Ok than.
Don't compare Wii U to PS4 / 720, it will only leave you disappointed as they will be around 3 times as powerful.
Just take Wii U for what it is, around 30 - 40 times more powerful than the Wii, twice as powerful as the PS360 and finally a Nintendo system that runs in HD that has a decent online environment.
Add to that the innovations the tablet controller could bring to gaming as a whole and the ability to play games / watch Netflix / surf the net on the controller to free up the TV.
The general public are going to go batshit crazy for NSMB U & Nintendo Land and once the system has an install base of over 10 million the third parties will be begging to make not only ports but exclusive games for the system.
Keep your head up, we are now less than 6 months from launch with a Nintendo Direct in late August and then another in late November to look forward to.
Games that cost over $100 million to develop and have to sell over 5 million copies to even break even is not the future of videogames, Microsoft and esp Sony will find that out the hard way.
I have a feeling Nintendo have pulled a rabbit out of the hat with Wii U.
Believe !!!
If the PS4/720 is 3x more powerful than the Wii U than I'm perfectly fine with that.
They're is also the big Fall Conference which will show 2013 games.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Games that cost US$100 million to make on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720 will also cost US$100 million to make on the Wii U. The industry problem of over expensive game budgets and a shitty market will be problematic for everyone and the Wii U will solve nothing in this field. As I said earlier, this is a 'now' problem on 'current' hardware, and it will be a similar problem for similar games on the Wii U.
Where publishers and developers will find success with smaller budget titles will depend on hardware market penetration, sustainable software sales, and distribution models that benefit developers/publishers working on a small budget. If Nintendo is unable to provide these they won't be helping anybody.
Fourth Storm
Member
While I wouldn't take the Tekken producer's comments as "good news," it is true these comments shouldn't be blown out of proportion. He does say that the game is progressing and seems confident it will turn out well.
Still, that Tekken ran into a hiccup with the CPU does not bode well for more complex games. I wonder if it might be net code related.
Posters who mention that the future is in GPGPU have a fair point, but we must remember 2 things: a) We don't know how much better that feature will run on WiiU over a standard R700. It should hopefully be up to modern standards, but it's all speculation at this point. b) Next generation ports may very well not prove to be easier than ports from this generation, since Orbis/Durango will likely be using quad core CPUs (assuming Durango uses a full 4 for OS/apps, which who knows) with SMT, OoOE, and clocked higher. Games will be developed with those specs in mind, and porting those down to a tri-core with no SMT and low clocks will not prove easy.
Still, that Tekken ran into a hiccup with the CPU does not bode well for more complex games. I wonder if it might be net code related.
Posters who mention that the future is in GPGPU have a fair point, but we must remember 2 things: a) We don't know how much better that feature will run on WiiU over a standard R700. It should hopefully be up to modern standards, but it's all speculation at this point. b) Next generation ports may very well not prove to be easier than ports from this generation, since Orbis/Durango will likely be using quad core CPUs (assuming Durango uses a full 4 for OS/apps, which who knows) with SMT, OoOE, and clocked higher. Games will be developed with those specs in mind, and porting those down to a tri-core with no SMT and low clocks will not prove easy.
Barack Lesnar
Banned
Not only that but to imply that $100 million games are anything but a tiny fraction of all games is disingenuous. There's been like a handful of them the entire gen, not even.
That depends on whether they're using Steamrollers or Jaguars. A Jaguar is a similar class of CPU to the 476fp (and Intel Atom).
That is true, but the potential costs to develop new engines and take advantage of presumably higher specs would definitely increase costs on PS4/720 for most titles.
MadeInBeats
Banned
Exactly, almost any other U game in the making must boom Tekken for CPU tasks, ACIII, ME3, Batman... This game isn't even using the pad, lol... Yeah, very weird comment and am sure there's much more to it.
Think i'll file this one under 'X' for now.
Don't compare Wii U to PS4 / 720, it will only leave you disappointed as they will be around 3 times as powerful.
Just take Wii U for what it is, around 30 - 40 times more powerful than the Wii, twice as powerful as the PS360 and finally a Nintendo system that runs in HD that has a decent online environment.
Add to that the innovations the tablet controller could bring to gaming as a whole and the ability to play games / watch Netflix / surf the net on the controller to free up the TV.
The general public are going to go batshit crazy for NSMB U & Nintendo Land and once the system has an install base of over 10 million the third parties will be begging to make not only ports but exclusive games for the system.
Keep your head up, we are now less than 6 months from launch with a Nintendo Direct in late August and then another in late November to look forward to.
Games that cost over $100 million to develop and have to sell over 5 million copies to even break even is not the future of videogames, Microsoft and esp Sony will find that out the hard way.
I have a feeling Nintendo have pulled a rabbit out of the hat with Wii U.
Believe !!!
I think most of the regular posters have this impression. It's just occasionally someone pops in with some sort of hyperbolic statement that flares up those who are prone to overreaction and then we have to tolerate the Clock Speed Saga over and over again.
The WiiU will be whatever it is. It's not even that close to launch and most people in this thread have not even played a single WiiU game. We know little to no actual information.
I can totally see why some people want to own only a Nintendo console that gets all the third party games that are popular. For me, those days are long gone. I'm buying the WiiU for Nintendo games and that's it.
The whole gaming industry would be a much better place if enthusiast gamers were less concerned with who "won" a generation.
Is their new facebook cover image. the black one takes a secondary position but it's still showing off both ... so they're really not backpedaling from the black unit. I hope they don't disappoint and really do launch in white AND black simultaneously.
I just realized that, for the first time ever, Nintendo's anologue sticks have perfectly round barriers surrounding them, as apposed to the eight edges that were around since the N64.
Here's what I don't get though, isn't the next xbox/PS4 supposedly much more powerful than the Wii U? If that's the case then won't the prices be higher to develop for the other consoles than Nintendo's?
Development costs are going to go up across the board next generation, no matter the system.
Right. But it's not - for me - about the fact Wii U games will cost less to develop (at least, Wii U games don't need heavy infra/tech investments, already done for the HD twins, which makes the transition somoother than the PS360 2006 one) but more about $100 million/PS4720 games to be also (down)ported to Wii U in order to maximize the investment.
From the leaked documents and rumors, I don't think that's the case with the PS4/720.
lostinblue
Banned
Beating down some games into a PPE core on the CELL was originally hard as well. Only changed when developers started taking into account such an aberration existed from the ground up.
Wii U call to fame is clearly managing to be considered the lowest denominator this gen, and it has one year to do that. Might go wrong, yes. But nothing they can possibly do about it launching first and not trying to be a powerhouse (and with this industries mentality at play), that is.
Apophis2036
Banned
When games like Max Payne 3 fail to sell the 4 million copies it needs to break even, those same developers might think, okay lets make something on a smaller scale or shock horror something new and unique.
Wii U will be the ideal console for those sorts of projects imo.
Apophis2036
Banned
$100 million games will be the norm next gen if PS4 / 720 are the rumoured 6 - 8 times the power of PS360.
Apophis2036
Banned
Couldn't agree more, judge the system on the games you try for it, not some tech spec on a sheet of paper or a website.
Software makes the hardware, not the other way around.
Nintendo Land, NSMB U, Pikmin 3, ZombiU, Project P-100, Warioware and Lego City will all be amazing fun and i'd hedge a bet now that neither PS4 or 720 will have as many fun exclusive games at launch.
Glorified G
Member
lol. You got any facts to back that up?
Barack Lesnar
Banned
No they won't
I wouldn't quantify any kind of number, because it's not an easy thing to predict a specific number. But they *will* go up across the board. That is a fact. This isn't going to be the first generation in history where they go down. There is a clear graph somewhere on the internet that demonstrates the direction of the curve for the last 25 years - where the last decade is particularly interesting/alarming.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Game budgets are a weird thing. It's not simple a case of "better looking game = more expensive". Budget comes down to two things: production costs, and advertising.
Production costs can be influenced by numerous things that aren't necessarily tethered to hardware power. For example, I may wish to have a tremendous amount of recorded dialogue in my game, as well as cinematics to tell the story. Hiring script writers, voice actors, cinematic directors, cinematic animators, sound editors, recording equipment and more is costly and time consuming, and thus a lot of money can be eaten up by these kinds of things.
Most 'expensive' games are expensive because there's so much work put into making the games. They're 'big' games. Lots of features, lots of intricate directing and animation, lots of audio, lots of everything. It's less about how detailed individual assets are and more about how many of those assets need to be made.
The funny thing is that stronger hardware can, in theory, lead to cheaper development when certain parts of game designed become streamlined and easier to control. On dated hardware rigging up a complex and gorgeous looking environment for a cinematic might require collaboration between programmers and artists as they try and 'fake' how good the scene will look will maintaining optimisation. Lots of custom assets in lighting, shadows and lots of custom code specifically for making that particular scene look the way it does. On stronger hardware we might be able to render all of that in real time, allowing the artists to single handedly take the reigns as no programming, engine or custom asset hurdles are introduced.
Streamlining the development process aims to give developers more control and flexibility over their working environment. This is one aspect of Unreal Engine 4 Epic is really pushing. They want to give artists and designers the freedom to experiment and work on game code, testing it as they play and seeing accurate flowcharts of a game's functions, without having to compile the code and jump through hoops just to see if their level looks right, or that character animates correctly, or that encounter is balanced and fun to play.
Big budget blockbusters will still cost a stupid fortune, probably moreso next generation than now for the same reasons that Hollywood blockbusters are expensive. But strong hardware and streamlined engines come with their own advantages that can lessen the burden of development, decrease the need for meticulous engine tweaking, and actually speed up development work, thus saving time and money.
But again this is dependant on not what the Wii U is, but what position the Wii U has in the market. Those same smaller scale shock horror games can be made for the Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4, and if those consoles have a decent market penetration with a healthy software market. Same goes for PC. It doesn't need to be one or the other, blockbusters versus low budget. Platforms can sustain both quite comfortably.
If the Wii U can sustain a software environment for games with lower budgets then sure, we'll probably see a lot of games like that coming to the platform. But if they sell like arse, much like they often did on the Wii, developers wont give a shit as they can make their money easier elsewhere.
- Status