WiiU "Latte" GPU Die Photo - GPU Feature Set And Power Analysis
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frankie_baby
Member
the rumours all pointed to 2gb a year or two ago
The console was specced to a 4 core steamroller core with a 1.8tf pitcairn fed by 2gb of gddr5 in 2011.
Pristine_Condition
Member
Designing in the flexibility to change what should be flexible product specs anyway with changes in supply conditions is not "luck" at all. Sony obviously knew what products might be available from their supply contractors, and had the flexibility in their design to go all the way up to 8GB if supply was available/affordable and it was determined necessary.
Did that supply chain open up in the 11th hour? By all indications, it did.
Was it "lucky?" No... No more than say Apple rolling out the retina display with the iPhone 4 was "lucky."
It was pretty lucky that 4Gbit Gddr5 was available just in time to roll into ps4, IMO. These console are design many years ago. Like xbone was design with ddr4 but it fell behind.
You can call it whatever you want....
Pristine_Condition
Member
Hynix, Sammy, and even Micron (then relative newcomer Elpida) were talking about a production schedule for 4Gbit GDDR5 way back in late 2010. Don't know about Winbond since they had barely started then. Wouldn't call it THAT lucky.
This type of production is delayed all the time, in the same way that smaller nodes are quite often delayed, which then snowball into production delays of products elsewhere.
So was ddr4. So did MS get unlucky or just poor planning?
Pristine_Condition
Member
Well MS and Nintendo, in particular Nintendo, also put themselves in a precarious situation with their eDRAM/SRAM solution. Dont forget:
I dont follow... explain.
I don't understand the question. Backwards compatibility with the Wiis SRAM, for one, power consumption which is always important to Nintendo second, and also what makes you think GDDR5 would be cheaper than the eDRAM?
A lot of the design goals are oriented at backwards compatibility, at that.
The Wii U even has low power consumption RAM typically found in ultrabooks and cell phones iirc.
lostinblue
Banned
I wonder, AFAIK that closure was predicted to happen for quite a while.
Still, I feel we're derailing from my original point, which was not focused on eDRAM or GDDR5 alone (well it kinda was) but it was also trying to tackle a tendency bigger than that; for Sony the risk comes not from GDDR5 alone, but also a GPU that is not mimicking others as it's aiming higher. It doesn't really strike a balance because it's shooting for the stars not for competitive matching.
Compromises are done to save money; Nintendo did them to no end (probably too much) on Wii U as did Microsoft with XBone; they did so though in order to include peripherals in the spec, something that apparently backfired. Sony invested it all on having the best box, just like they did on PS3 or how Sega did on Sega Saturn; minus the problematic inherent architectures. Slimming down and competing in price could end up being troublematic due to that (sega saturn was discontinued by the time Playstation became popular and cheap, as they had too much logic for being able to follow; and PS3 never really matched X360 prices).
Going higher is also a risk and a risk I don't really understand on Sony's part right now, but they played their game of chess perfectly to this point, something Microsoft and Nintendo didn't. Had they flunked on it, or things happened differently they could be royally screwed now, as their strategy was actually handicapped.
If it fails, it's like Vita, they aimed too high, so they can't pricedrop it for a while; something Microsoft can do (that or throw Kinect out) as can Nintendo to some extent (yes, they say it's break even right now, but they can sure lose some money too; Sony can't afford that, so it's riskier business).
Nintendo64
Neo Member
Just been doing a bit of reading about the wii and didn't realise that the Hollywood is a gpgpu.
http://forum.wiibrew.org/read.php?15,50783,50791
http://www.1up.com/do/my1Up?publicUserId=6079479
http://forum.wiibrew.org/read.php?15,50783,50791
http://www.1up.com/do/my1Up?publicUserId=6079479
lostinblue
Banned
That's because it really isn't.
You should disregard those fanfic things you just read.
Hell, I only read the first line and they speak about Darkside Chronicles having HDR and AA; I don't know if the HDR going on in there can be considered real, but the thing has zero AA going for it.
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
Thanks for the reply
Wasn't sure this would get answered as it's not directly related to the thread topic.
I come from the field of math, but my understanding is pretty similar to what you describe, and while it does seem like this is a procedure that could be automated for the most part - as far as having sufficient information available in the current (30 Hz) data to allow algorithms to extrapolate correctly to 60 Hz - it would still require some work from Nintendo's programmers to build the tools to make this conversion simple, if they don't have such tools yet.
edit: to make myself clear, from an algorithmic point of view, I'm assuming all the information about the motion of bones (position, speed and acceleration as a function of time, or frame #) can be extracted from the existing 30 Hz data, from which point the problem to solve is finding the proper method of interpolation for each new frame that is to be created. It's still possible a human would need to be heavily involved in this process though, as a combination of different methods may be required to achieve a good result.
as an example, consider this animation, taken from wikipedia:
There are three different animations in this gif - one for the position of the ball, a second for its shape, and a third for its color. While it's possible to find and fit appropriate curves to each of these animations, it may require additional knowledge of "cartoon physics" to get the best result when combining them together, meaning a human may still have to examine and make adjustments to many procedurally created frames.
Nintendo64
Neo Member
Sorry, just can't believe someone would go to so much trouble to make this all up. Found another link:-
http://tapionvslink.weebly.com/uplo...lywood_is_a_gpgpuaccording_to_dan_emerson.pdf
That's why there are "key frames", seriously, that's the whole reason for them. In your example, for specifically motion and squash animations:
There are three different animations in this gif - one for the position of the ball, a second for its shape, and a third for its color. While it's possible to find and fit appropriate curves to each of these animations, it may require additional knowledge of "cartoon physics" to get the best result when combining them together, meaning a human may still have to examine and make adjustments to many procedurally created frames.
1) motion, key frame at top left, key frame at bottom, key frame at top right, done. Ideally, it would have ramping and tangents to give a proper angle. With those 3 key frames, every frame between can be extrapolated, you didn't have to "key frame" every frame.
2) similar,unsquashed would be a key frame at first frame, unsquashed just before impact, squash at most deep impact, unsquashed again after impact, and unsquashed again at end of animation.
These will run at any FPS. Especially things that need smooth motion, you don't want to be manually key framing every frame since it's easier for the engine/player to do it smoothly than for an animator, and makes for easier fine tuning of animations (and reuse).
Thunder Monkey
Banned
Haven't been active for a couple of days.
I don't know that's why they limited it. I honestly doubt that's why. I honestly just figured they said "Meh.. too much work for little pay off." The animation work was already serviceable. The more apparent technical issue would be the texturing, severe dithering, and the rudimentary lighting system.
I'm one of the few that does not see the beauty in Dolphin WW shots. Consistent yes... but good looking? I don't know about that. Maybe if poly counts were much higher, giving everything a smoother appearance.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
I'm not following here. 'Keyframes at every frame' is an oxymoron. Keyframes make sense only in animations which also have interpolated frames. If there were no interpolated frames, then keyframes would lose their meaning.
Re the frame drops, that could also be unrelated/indirectly related to the game's main loop. Like, say, miiverse-related comm latencies or some such.
But regardless, I think that once devs established the targeted fps, they also decided what their frame budget would be spent on. So it's quite likely they went for things they could not reproduce at 2x the fps.
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
I'm not familiar with animation software so I don't doubt your knowledge about what key frames are required to achieve the results in the gif, but I can say with certainty that in terms of the math being done to produce the interpolation, you'd need to provide more information than that in order to get the result we see in the gif.
Maybe some animation programs are designed to make clever guesses, accounting for elements such as gravity and other things, which is why they require less data points. But as an example, from a strictly mathematical point of view, with no further knowledge you'd need at least five data points to uniquely describe something like the ball's path in the gif (assuming piecewise-polynomial interpolation with the middle point used twice, and assuming constant acceleration as is custom in Newtonian dynamics).
But even this is based on assumptions which don't apply to every possible method of interpolation (i.e not polynomial), and certainly don't necessarily apply to non-Newtonian dynamics (like those seen in "cartoon physics"), so without knowing what method Nintendo employ it's not possible to say with certainty that further information is not required.
lostinblue
Banned
It's still rampant speculation by people that couldn't accept the Wii was what it was. And that last link goes as far as before the console launched and to the x1600 speculation; which was bull.
An improved Flipper; for whom they didn't even bother adding more framebuffer memory, making AA a rarity in comparison to what it could have been; and dithering a feature won't have Radeon x1x00 stream processors added just because, if they were to do that they would have added vertex and compliant shader units.
And PsysX can run on software.
Nvidia CUDA. On an old fixed shader ATI design. Really.
it's fake
Only if you're using a very loose definition, sure, even those old GPU designs could do some general processing, but it's not in the same sense we speak of today. As lostinblue said, there were a lot of fanfictions about Wii hardware back then and even now, something I'm sure will be repeated (and is being repeated) with the Wii U. There were theories that it was meant to be overclocked with a firmware update but Nintendo aborted it, or that it's framebuffers were used wrong by every single developer including Nintendo due to documentation, etc etc. It got into some really crazy stuff. This is some of it.
Especially seeing as even the 360 and PS3 had cores that were cut down from the G5 core. Or that the G5 targeted huge TDPs while the Wii drew 18W. Those were the days.
This was repeated with the Power7 in Wii U thing, come to think of it.
frankie_baby
Member
The difference this time was the whole power 7 idea was kind of IBM's fault
lostinblue
Banned
That's not right. I can understand why someone would say that, as it's an easy way to get the point across (they're simplified PPC cores, and G5 were contemporary PPC used in high spec computers at high speeds; Sony touting PS3 as a supercomputer, no less); but they had very little in common, or for a basis.
CELL and Xenon are a further development of the IBM guTS/Rivina project:
Source: http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell4_v2.html
Going onto a Power4/PPC970 and simply peeling everything out and making it 2-way (which they weren't) would make no sense; it would be going back to turn left; instead they uncovered a test system with the PPC instruction set that was abandoned for good reason, but whose development teams hadn't given up completly; with Power6 eventually pulling a 2-way in-order execution solution too.
Ironically so, saying PS3 and X360 borrowed heavily from PPC970 is like saying Wii U is heavily related to Power7.
But I'm sure you realized that by now; Cell/Xenon Altivec/VMX implementations were most certainly backported from Power5, just like SMP implementation probably was; Power ISA too. As for Espresso, it inherited eDRAM as replacement for 6T-SRAM from Power7. It's the same situation/misconception.
Wow, a coincidence that someone has brought up Elebits (does anyone know why it was called Eledees over here in Europe, I've always wondered..?). I brought the game up and linked to this video when someone on a forum mentioned that nobody can expect decent physics from what he incorrectly assumed was 3 x Broadways duct-taped together lol.
I also linked to the video done by the same guy with over 400 objects in an open area outside too (which personally I think is more impressive despite the considerably lower framerate).
I wonder whether next gen engines will be using the CPUs for physics or use GPGPU functionality..? I would guess the latter.
I also linked to the video done by the same guy with over 400 objects in an open area outside too (which personally I think is more impressive despite the considerably lower framerate).
I wonder whether next gen engines will be using the CPUs for physics or use GPGPU functionality..? I would guess the latter.
frankie_baby
Member
I thought it was because bits means genitals in the uk and eledees is a play on L.E.D.s
I'm aware, I just didn't want to say the whole history (but thank you for taking the time
). I meant from a performance standpoint though, compared to contemporary G5s the cores were cut down in that sense. The per-core performance of the PPE (and the similarish 3 cores in the Xenon) output about half the performance per clock iirc, barring advanced SIMD instructions (which admittedly they had up the wazoo, perhaps using them well they would have came closer to or surpassed G5s at their clock). The 3.2GHz parts offered similar throughput as 1.6GHz G5 cores without any optimization, at any rate
ForeverZero
Member
This question might be beating a dead horse but..
Is 320sp really the maximum for Latte?
Is 320sp really the maximum for Latte?
frankie_baby
Member
the custom nature of the chip means it could be higher than that but that would be very unlikely,
Smurfman256
Member
I've been thinking about something; during the Iwata Asks for Wind Waker HD, one of the developers said that the game essentially runs off of the same shaders as the Zelda HD Experience demo. I think that it's very clear for whoever's played Wind Waker HD that it makes rather heavy use of screen-space ambient occlusion. So, if Wind Waker HD rund off of the same shaders as the tech demo, why did nobody notice that during the tech demo it was using SSAO?
EDIT: looking back at this photo, maybe we thought that it was baked-on AO for the backgrounds?
If those backgrounds are actually being shaded in real time, am I the only one who's impressed?
EDIT: looking back at this photo, maybe we thought that it was baked-on AO for the backgrounds?
If those backgrounds are actually being shaded in real time, am I the only one who's impressed?
Hmm? I was always under the impression that we knew it was all in real time?
I'd really love both of those tech demos as a free download from the eShop. I'm surprised Nintendo didn't have them both preinstalled on every Wii U since launch tbh. I'd love to see them both up close and personal because I haven't been able to go to any conferences.
Do they still have them these days..?
Do they still have them these days..?
frankie_baby
Member
well i'm sure they've got the demos somewhere, i'd even pay money if they put them up for download
/I know, it's just mental that they don't do it. It'd get nerds like us excited. The conclusion I've come to is that this will be a dungeon in the new Zelda
ArchangelWest
Member
The fact that they haven't and apparently won't, along with their choice to re-release Wind Waker instead of a less cartoony styled game as they learn HD development better makes me think that they really don't want us expecting the Zelda Wii U to look like that.
Unfortunate. But hey, maybe these things mean nothing and they'll surprise us.
Unfortunate. But hey, maybe these things mean nothing and they'll surprise us.
Smurfman256
Member
I meant "If the self-shadowing in the background is real-time" instead of the shadows being baked on. I know that the demo WAS actually running on early Wii U hardware.
Isn't it possible to tell from a video? I mean, you could change between day/night in real-time, with the lighting changing accordingly. (Lighting effects were pretty nice at night-settings)
Yes, slowdown means a console cannot possible do anything more than that.
this is a place of learned doctors
Zoramon089
Banned
I'm hoping this is a joke post
megabytecr
Member
If serious quetion then look for a 60fps video of Bayonetta 2 on gamersyde.
Is W101 a 60fps title?
Because falling under 60fps is generally more noticeable than
falling under 30fps.
Not really surprising or very important, but I got confirmation that the connection between Espresso and Latte is, in fact, a modified 60x bus.
Also, and that seems more interesting and quite a bit weirder, Latte can apparently do hardware PCF (Percentage Closer Filtering). The strange thing about this is that only Nvidia GPUs support that feature as far as I know, which means it's usually implemented using shaders (which is slower, but works on AMD GPUs as well) - or not at all.
Also, and that seems more interesting and quite a bit weirder, Latte can apparently do hardware PCF (Percentage Closer Filtering). The strange thing about this is that only Nvidia GPUs support that feature as far as I know, which means it's usually implemented using shaders (which is slower, but works on AMD GPUs as well) - or not at all.
Saint Gregory
Member
From my playtime it hits 60fps sometimes but hovers around 45fps most of the time with dips to 30. In other words it's a Platinum game.
I'm hoping that Bayo2 will be locked at 60fps but I haven't gotten the impression from other Platinum games that a locked framerates are a high priority for them. It's never impacted my enjoyment of any of their games honestly.
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