Wii U Speculation Thread The Third: Casting Dreams in The Castle of Miyamoto
- Thread starter AceBandage
- Start date
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Most 'up-ports' are straight ports, as you notice yourself in the PC parallel. For a platform to be fully utilized, it'd either have to be the lead SKU in a multiplat, or be the target of an exclusive. And Durango/ps4 will face the exact same situation with up-ports as the WiiU does/will. So I'm not sure I get your WiiU concern here. Let's not forget the original problem with Wii was the absence of practically any down-ports from the other platforms (technically it did get downports but those were so few and far between that those exceptions just prove the rule), which had to do zilch with power per se.
As per the UE4 vs WiiU situation: for all the marketing BS Mr. Rein managed to produce over the past month or so, one thing he said was spot-on: the start of next gen will be marked by UE3. So we can expect all-inclusive multiplat galore as far as Epic tech goes. And that situation will last sufficiently long before we even have justifiable reasons to ponder if WiiU's featureset is good-enough for UE4 or not.
i don't think he has an idea, man
TheNatural
My Member!
It's pretty amazing how Nintendo has kept this under wraps for basically a whole fucking year. I mean jack shit has come out since last E3, it's pretty nuts. Yeah you get some vague financial report references to things that wouldn't be a tidbit of a tidbit when real info is released. But it's been basically nothing.
Well, i can't please everybody sagitario, some others don't mind or even like this tease. Just ignore my messages then. And the last time i made an announcement of an info (the resolution part), i spilled the bins 3 days after, there never was "weeks" of wait. I understand that it's irritating for you, but to the point of writing such a diatribe, well, calm down, just take all this in a more light-hearted way 
/end of the polemic
/end of the polemic
btw, Nintendo & GameFreak trademarked Pokemon Tretta (apparently related to toys or other products, but still. Maybe future NFC figurines ? 
)
)btw, Nintendo & GameFreak trademarked Pokemon Tretta (apparently related to toys or other products, but still. Maybe future NFC figurines ?
It's a card game I bet
DaSorcerer7
Member
ready to spill the beans on the devkits yet Ideaman??
Glorified G
Member
Well, i can't please everybody sagitario, some others don't mind or even like this tease. Just ignore my messages then. And the last time i made an announcement of an info (the resolution part), i spilled the bins 3 days after, there never was "weeks" of wait. I understand that it's irritating for you, but to the point of writing such a diatribe, well, calm down, just take all this in a more light-hearted way
/end of the polemic
He has a point. It seems like you want to "spice" up the thread, by having posters say "Did IdeaMan leak any info yet!" "Gosh, I hope today is the day IdeaMan tells us some info!"
Case in point:
There's no reason to do it besides seeking attention.
It's late here, it take time to write these posts, carefully choose my words (and even in this case, there are misunderstandings). And when i said "i want to monitor the possible answers after", i mean maybe some gafers need more hindsights & precision, so i have to free some time to post & refresh the thread. I'll post something tomorrow or sunday
Some of you are rather harsh and take this too seriously, really. Now if the thread could be back on tracks, thanks.btw, Nintendo & GameFreak trademarked Pokemon Tretta (apparently related to toys or other products, but still. Maybe future NFC figurines ?
Hm, we do crazy speculation here yes?
Okay, prepare yourself:
Pokemon Toretta -> take the tsu out = Pokemon Toreta (とれた
Toru means to "take" , as in to take a picture
POKEMON SNAP FOR WII U CONFIRMED!
Alternate Theory:
The Nintendo Ninja are actually Pokemon and stole all the Wii U information (toreta could also mean 'taken away/stolen')
bgassassin
Member
Only if Wii U had a Nvidia GPU right though BG?
Haha. Since Wii U will "supposedly" have a GPU beyond 1TFLOP, for an AMD gpu that might be just enough based on that hypothetical ~830 GFLOPs, though it could be even lower. Now if Wii U was using a modified GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 on a smaller process...
oh my god.... IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW
WiiU weaker than Wii confirmed!
Hm, we do crazy speculation here yes?
Okay, prepare yourself:
Pokemon Toretta -> take the tsu out = Pokemon Toreta (とれた
Toru means to "take" , as in to take a picture
POKEMON SNAP FOR WII U CONFIRMED!
Alternate Theory:
The Nintendo Ninja are actually Pokemon and stole all the Wii U information (toreta could also mean 'taken away/stolen')
Pokemon Snap is SO tailored for the Wii U ><
But it will be exhausting to spot them in a "virtual environment" around you by scanning your living room at 360°, etc. Maybe just an extended field on each side of the TV, like 180°.
Hm, we do crazy speculation here yes?
Okay, prepare yourself:
Pokemon Toretta -> take the tsu out = Pokemon Toreta (とれた
Toru means to "take" , as in to take a picture
POKEMON SNAP FOR WII U CONFIRMED!
Alternate Theory:
The Nintendo Ninja are actually Pokemon and stole all the Wii U information (toreta could also mean 'taken away/stolen')
Treta, which would be read the same way as Tretta means something along the lines of bullshit in Portuguese. Take that as you wish.
lol yeah i felt upon that while searching on google. Nintendo, beware of some trademarks
bgassassin
Member
herzogzwei1989
Banned
With the output of Nintendo on Wii in recent year (save SS) you have to wonder if 1st partys are going to have a MASSIVE amount of games on offer at E3.
I know I;m being a bit over-optimistic here.
I know I;m being a bit over-optimistic here.
I'd really really love a new Snap, 'twas amazing back in the day.
I can't be the only one thinking of this game right here too now (i know we've been through the pkmn snap phase a few times before in these threads :3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c40jvv0Uug&feature=related
Cross-Platform with 3DS, paging Miya-samus right now.
Pokemon+Pikmin+Elebits Colabo of the forever one button press of 'send' away.
XD
It's still accurate.
Seriously though, do you still think it will do more than 1Tflop? Because if that IS the case, wouldn't it have been a whole lot more obvious for devs that this is out of PS360's league? Wouldn't it be rather plausible for it to run UE4? because you seemed to doubt that it could run Samaritan at 720p and 30fps. Does that still correlate with it being over 1Tflop?
Edit: Both the Japanese dev who stated it would do over 1Tflop, and the rumor of the RV770 in the eary devkits... this was from right around E3 last year, yet developers (Ancel? etc) at that time didn't seem to think it was really much over PS360 level.
ShockingAlberto
Member
Tretta might be the name for the Nobunaga's Ambition crossover outside Japan.
Why did they register it in japanese then? I don't think that's actually it.
Maybe it's the sequel to Pokemon Trozei
That has to be it actually. Pokemon Trozei is ポケモントローゼ　(toro-ze) in japanese, which would translate to "let's take/catch [something, them?]", thus keeping in line with our culprit Toret(t)a.
Detective Gaf wins once again!
Good thing we got that out of the way, now for that GPU
herzogzwei1989
Banned
I don't see how it WON'T be 1TFlop. The HD 4870 has a theoretical max of 1.2Tflops, and the HD 4850 is at 1Tflop. For comparisons, the 360's Xenos GPU does 240 Gflops
People really did get the misconception that the Wii U will be barely more powerful than the 360/PS3 when it's actually considerably more powerful. We're not even factoring in the big upgrade on the CPU with the Wii U using an IBM Power7 based chip.
Christberg
Member
The article is complete garbage. Basing the Wii U's power based on a case mockup from last E3 is silly IF it winds up being the same size because you have no idea what the cooling setup is and the process size of the chips.
Thing is, that's a very, very big IF. Changing the case or cooling layout to accommodate changes in power is a fairly simple task. Redesigning a processor or GPU to fit into a case cooling solution is not. If the hardware inside isn't anywhere near final, guessing what it's power is based on the case size is really, really stupid.
Yet the RV770 that was rumored to be in the DEVkit (retail chip is supposedly completely custom and not based on an existing Radeon line), could also be like a 4830. And the 1Tflop quote from the Japanese interview, was also never verified. I just don't see how the guy from Vigil could be so dismissive. Sure he's not a "tech" guy. But neither am i. And where did he get that from? Someone must have told him a ballpark figure.
herzogzwei1989
Banned
I seriously hope you're right about the 1TFOP GPU. That would send shockwaves through my soul!
The HD 4870 is a very nice card. I own one in my living room PC. It has no problem running Skyrim in full details, played Metro 2033 with mixed very high/high settings, BF3 on high settings. It's not a slouch when combined with the correct CPU.
Many people who complained about using 2008 tech just focused on the year of the tech instead of it's capabilities. This was a high end card from AMD back then and is very capable. It's not top of the line anymore, but it wipes the floor with the 360/PS3 easily.
It's not confirmed to be in the actual Wii U itself, but it was rumored to be in the dev kits. Dev kits are never final in the early stages, so that could have just been a placeholder for something of similar power or greater to replace it. I would assume Big N would put a smaller sized GPU into the console because the 4800 series was based on 55nm tech. An HD 7770 is of similar power to the 4800 but it's much smaller and way more power efficient along with DX11 support. Not saying that's in there, but just giving an idea of how they could use something different than what was in the dev kit.
bgassassin
Member
Actually it was someone from AMD that said that. It was just reported on a Japanese site. Back during E3 they pretty much still had the underclocked kits so those weren't exactly going to have much of a jump over PS360 when factoring in the usage of the controller. It's very possible that the UC'd GPU was just over 2x the FLOPs of Xenos. So that's why it would be easy to say Wii U is on par with PS360.
As for Samaritan and UE4, first dealing solely with Samaritan my view is that AMD/ATi FLOPs aren't "accurate". Sticking with that estimate I made of an FXAA Samaritan being ~830 GFLOPs, just because the GPU would be say 1-1.2 TFLOPS, doesn't necessarily guarantee the GPU could run it. I made some posts about this in the following thread. This was before the change to FXAA.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=35057552#post35057552
As for UE4 and maybe Samaritan, it's going to be more about GPU functionality over power. Wii U's GPU could be at the bottom of my guessed range (which would be 768 GFLOPs to keep perspective), but put simply as long as the shaders are "akin" to DX11 shaders and they are using a modern tessellation unit, it could still get down-ports even once the shift to UE4 occurred. I make the assumption that these are requirements for UE4 because Epic officially confirmed that UE4 was not scalable to current/previous hardware. It would seem that they have set what the minimum will be and for those that feel consoles hold back PC games, making DX11/OpenGL 4.x the minimum for that engine is more important for PC gaming than having outrageously powerful consoles IMO.
Only if Wii U had a Nvidia GPU right though BG?
True, he's not in a position to mince whether the Wii U is 0% more powerful than PS360, 20% more, or 50% more. It seems clear it's not a generation leap though. I imagine MS and Sony breathe a sigh of relief (but no doubt they knew what Wii U was months or years ago), and Pachter was right.
At this point we'd probably be happy if Wii U was a stock 360 with 1GB of RAM instead of 512 LOL. That would be pretty nice.
I think the other thing this whole new hullballo indicates, is one of the difficulties I knew Wii U would face right along, even if it is lets say, 30% more powerful than current gen, all it's going to get are straight PS360 ports. Nobody is going to bother taking advantage of that 30% except Nintendo themselves (and they arent exactly know for cutting edge mature games anyway). For the same reason PC's, which are already 10X more powerful than current gen, usually just get quick minor upgrades at best from the console version. Wii U likely wont even get that, because 1.3X is a lot different than 10X. Another example here is the Xbox-PS2 era, where Xbox despite being maybe 2X PS2 imo, mostly just got a lot of PS2 ports with little difference.
Even if its 30% more powerful? Its going to be much more than that..
Yeah. It could be like a 4830, but I dont see the point in wasting money shrinking down a 55nm chip just to use it in the WiiU when they could simply choose a layout already done on a smaller process and give similar performance ie: HD 7770.
it's all rumors at the moment though. Just expect the Wii U to be significantly more powerful. Remember IGN's rumor article about the Xbox 720 being 6x more powerful than the 360 and the 20% more powerful than the Wii U? They got those numbers by taking the GFLOP performance of the HD 6670 (rumored to be in the 720 by IGN) multiplied it by 2 cuz it was said to be in a crossfire/SLI config and divided it by the 240 GFLOP performance of the 360's GPU. What you get is about 6x the theoretical GFLOP and when you do the WiiU, they just took the 4870's 1.2 TFLOP and divided by the 360's flop # and got 5x which is 20% less than the numbers they got from the rumored 720 flop performance. It's all BS though cuz it doesn't factor in CPU power, or anything like that. Just people creating news for more hits on their website.
Take anything you hear with a grain of salt other than what devs working on projects say. They've said it's definitely more powerful than the 360 and we should leave it at that until June.
Sorry, this post is a mess... im rushing cuz im about to leave work to go home!
Then again, there would be no reason to shrink it, because it's just the GPU for the devkits and not the final hardware (which will be custom) and early devkits are more of a target than anything else. In that sense it isn't impossible that the 4830 was the chip closest to what the definitive retail chip will be able to push, thus made it into the devkit.
Fourth Storm
Member
Yeah. It could be like a 4830, but I dont see the point in wasting money shrinking down a 55nm chip just to use it in the WiiU when they could simply choose a layout already done on a smaller process and give similar performance ie: HD 7770.
it's all rumors at the moment though. Just expect the Wii U to be significantly more powerful. Remember IGN's rumor article about the Xbox 720 being 6x more powerful than the 360 and the 20% more powerful than the Wii U? They got those numbers by taking the GFLOP performance of the HD 6670 (rumored to be in the 720 by IGN) multiplied it by 2 cuz it was said to be in a crossfire/SLI config and divided it by the 240 GFLOP performance of the 360's GPU. What you get is about 6x the theoretical GFLOP and when you do the WiiU, they just took the 4870's 1.2 TFLOP and divided by the 360's flop # and got 5x which is 20% less than the numbers they got from the rumored 720 flop performance. It's all BS though cuz it doesn't factor in CPU power, or anything like that. Just people creating news for more hits on their website.
Take anything you hear with a grain of salt other than what devs working on projects say. They've said it's definitely more powerful than the 360 and we should leave it at that until June.
Sorry, this post is a mess... im rushing cuz im about to leave work to go home!
AFAIK, the latest rumblings are that it's not based on any existing AMD card. I'm with bgassassin in that it will probably resemble an R700 series card in core config only. And I'm betting Nintendo will use IBM's 32nm manufacturing process since that's what their eDRAM is fabbed on as well...
AceBandage
Banned
That's not really rumblings at all.
That was basically exactly what AMD said.
It'll be Nintendo's own graphics card, specifically for the Wii U.
Powered by Pikmin.
Fourth Storm
Member
AceBandage
Banned
Well, we know it's a Power variant CPU.
Likely a Tri Core and has a "lot" of eDRAM.
So, it should be good.
Diddy Kong
Banned
Pokemon Snap Wii-U would be awesome..
Sounds good to me, my 720BE is already overheating in gleeful anticipation of meeting another member of this very endangered species!
I'd take that - or any kind of nature photography game. Heck, it could be underwater photography.. that'd be fantastic!
Fourth Storm
Member
That eDRAM comment has left me scratching my head as it directly contradicts lherre's statement that there is no L3 cache. As good as IBM's eDRAM is, I'm under the impression that SRAM would still be much better as L2 cache (which was put at 3 MB according to bg's sources). The only other scenario that seems plausible is the "scratchpad" theory of wsippel and others that 32 MB of eDRAM will be on the GPU but the CPU will be able to access it at a bandwidth, which is atm completely unknown, except that it needs to be at least 3.2 GB/s since it seems they're using IBM's eDRAM to mimic the 1t-SRAM in Wii BC mode. Anyone have any guesses as to what that bandwidth might be?
It'll be custom for sure. We won't literally be seeing a HD 4830 chip in the Wii U. It'll be customized for the buyer (Nintendo). You wouldn't even have to say it's based on R700 or any series either. You can simply just say it's based on a VLIW4 or VLIW5 or the GCN architecture that AMD has used. I just don't see why Nintendo would use anything from the power hungry and inefficient R700 when they can go with VLIW4 designs (used in the HD 6800 & 6900 series) that bring better efficiency in power and gaming.
Consoles don't need to be high spec'd because the general masses are impressed by 360/PS3 level graphics, and there's no point in increasing your TDP for a console with limited breathing space.
They'll want the best of both worlds. Power efficiency + Performance and also a small die for better yields per wafer or to combine on die with a CPU. Mid range cards scream hello in this case. So a 4800 series performance would suffice for 720p gaming. Don't expect native 1080p if this is the case
herzogzwei1989
Banned
I still want native 1080p Hi-Ten Bomberman! Higher resolution than the original Caravan version from '93-'94. That would be amazing on Wii U.
93-94 version of Hi-Ten
Even if it's DD only, I just want it.
I know it's nice to want nice things ^__^
93-94 version of Hi-Ten
Even if it's DD only, I just want it.
I know it's nice to want nice things ^__^
I'd be down for Endless Ocean and (this one's obvious) Fatal Frame.