Examining the Wii U's power - Comments from multiple devs, 4 GamePad play was considered at first
The CPU
- IBM-made CPU
- three Power PC core
- out of order execution is supported
- lower clock speed than 360/PS3
RAM
- 1GB of RAM is available to games
- twice the level of PS3/360
GPU
- custom AMD 7 series GPU
- supports DirectX 10 and shader 4 type features
- eDRAM is embedded in the GPU custom chip in a similar way to the Wii
- 32MB eDRAM
Power in general, Nintendo considered use of 4 GamePads originally
"It's comparable to the current generation and a bit more powerful than that. "The funny thing about Wii U is, as each week went on, we discovered more cool things we could do with it. It's very much a fast-moving space with shifting sands. Because we were fairly early on with this, the specification for the machine wasn't nailed down. In fact, Nintendo were still chasing the idea of having four of the tablets running concurrently. Now they've stepped away from that and said you can have up to two depending on what you're doing in the game. That's given us a base level specification which has changed our thinking and some of our design.
Now we've got a final specification of what's going to be delivered on release, we're re-factoring a lot of our designs because the assumptions we made are now in concrete. We know what the specification is going to be.
As game producers and consumers, of course we would be absolutely delighted if the thing would run four Wii U tablets. That would be great. And it might even be part of their strategy for the next evolution if they do another rev of hardware. But at the moment it's purely limited to processing and signal transmission bandwidth and a combination thereof." - Blitz Games Studios' design director John Nash
"The Wii U is a nice console to work with because it's got so much RAM in comparison [to the PS3 and Xbox 360]. For E3 we simply dumped the whole game into memory and never once used the disc after the content was loaded from it." - Anonymous dev
- (Wii U version of another company's game will be ) "the smoothest console version"
"We're a GPU-heavy game. Wii U has a powerful GPU with more oomph than the rivals - and is more modern in architecture and shader support, which may come in handy later on. The CPU on the other hand is a different question. We are not limited by it but some other games might suffer from it. Still, because of the GPU, I expect most multi-platform games to look the best on Wii U, even if the difference might not be huge sometimes."
Dual GamePad streaming brings up framerate issues
"That's one of the areas we're looking at to find out if that's always the case. And even if it is, if you want to use two screens, you need to design around that and produce a game genre, type and set of mechanics where that, fundamentally, is not going to cause any problem whatsoever.
The holy grail of everything having to run at 60 frames per second is great, but it's only actually that important when you're using a twitch game or a shooter or a racer. Below that, it doesn't matter at all. If you're playing a third-person character game then it absolutely doesn't matter." - Blitz Games Studios' design director John Nash
1080p support
"GPU fillrate is not a major bottleneck for our game, so we should be fine rendering our game in 1080p. In fact, it already runs on 1080p on the Wii U, without problems. It is an extra framebuffer, which obviously consumes some memory, but with Toki Tori we don't run into memory problems, so this extra buffer isn't a problem." - Two Tribes boss Martijn Reuvers
Why specs don't matter
"It's very easy for people to get hung up on hardware specs and technical specs. It's great to have a massive processor that's got a graphics pipeline that uses DX11, but what people need to focus on particularly for games going forward, is, what kind of experience can you build in the space of possibility afforded by the hardware in terms of features? Not in clock cycles. Does it connect out to the internet well? Does it connect to mobile well? How does it connect to your other friends and involve them in that experience? That's where games are moving forwards.
Nintendo's approach is to say, we're going to package that other screen with the console straight out of the box so there's nothing to worry about and the developers have a stable platform, whereas maybe the other platform holders are saying, maybe we're going to involve other devices. That will bring another set of problems. Sony and Microsoft will go toe to toe again as they have done on this rev. They will do the same on the next one. Nintendo are doing something different.
There's going to be some geek out there who will screwdriver that processor out from the machine, run it through all the tests and compare it to Pentium 3 upwards and tell everybody how rubbish it is. Of course they will. That's great and I applaud people for doing such things. However, as a game designer that means absolutely nothing to me.
On the hype rollercoaster ride we go on with all new hardware, everybody's super-focused on specific details, processor speed, RAM and all of that stuff. But people need to look beyond that, because Nintendo's rationale in terms of building game platforms and exploiting their huge roster of cool IP is to build a piece of hardware that allows them to explore new ways to interact with their IP. That's their rationale behind designing hardware.
It's not about beating everyone else in a surface shader processing clock speed war. That's not what they're about. They're about saying, we've got this great roster of IP, all these great characters, how do we build a piece of cost-effective hardware - they're a business, they've got to make profit - that will allow our players, our very loyal Nintendo players, to interact with this IP and great worlds and characters in a new way?
"If you think about the Wii U in that light, suddenly it makes a huge amount of sense. Suddenly we're going to be able to explore the world of Zelda and Mario in a new way with our friends. And that's the rationale behind that platform. It's not a gunning war in terms of hardware. As soon as you do that, you start to think about the games in a different way. You start to get excited about what it affords you as a game designer, and players should get very excited about it as well."
Thanks to all that sent this in!
- IBM-made CPU
- three Power PC core
- out of order execution is supported
- lower clock speed than 360/PS3
RAM
- 1GB of RAM is available to games
- twice the level of PS3/360
GPU
- custom AMD 7 series GPU
- supports DirectX 10 and shader 4 type features
- eDRAM is embedded in the GPU custom chip in a similar way to the Wii
- 32MB eDRAM
Power in general, Nintendo considered use of 4 GamePads originally
"It's comparable to the current generation and a bit more powerful than that. "The funny thing about Wii U is, as each week went on, we discovered more cool things we could do with it. It's very much a fast-moving space with shifting sands. Because we were fairly early on with this, the specification for the machine wasn't nailed down. In fact, Nintendo were still chasing the idea of having four of the tablets running concurrently. Now they've stepped away from that and said you can have up to two depending on what you're doing in the game. That's given us a base level specification which has changed our thinking and some of our design.
Now we've got a final specification of what's going to be delivered on release, we're re-factoring a lot of our designs because the assumptions we made are now in concrete. We know what the specification is going to be.
As game producers and consumers, of course we would be absolutely delighted if the thing would run four Wii U tablets. That would be great. And it might even be part of their strategy for the next evolution if they do another rev of hardware. But at the moment it's purely limited to processing and signal transmission bandwidth and a combination thereof." - Blitz Games Studios' design director John Nash
"The Wii U is a nice console to work with because it's got so much RAM in comparison [to the PS3 and Xbox 360]. For E3 we simply dumped the whole game into memory and never once used the disc after the content was loaded from it." - Anonymous dev
- (Wii U version of another company's game will be ) "the smoothest console version"
"We're a GPU-heavy game. Wii U has a powerful GPU with more oomph than the rivals - and is more modern in architecture and shader support, which may come in handy later on. The CPU on the other hand is a different question. We are not limited by it but some other games might suffer from it. Still, because of the GPU, I expect most multi-platform games to look the best on Wii U, even if the difference might not be huge sometimes."
Dual GamePad streaming brings up framerate issues
"That's one of the areas we're looking at to find out if that's always the case. And even if it is, if you want to use two screens, you need to design around that and produce a game genre, type and set of mechanics where that, fundamentally, is not going to cause any problem whatsoever.
The holy grail of everything having to run at 60 frames per second is great, but it's only actually that important when you're using a twitch game or a shooter or a racer. Below that, it doesn't matter at all. If you're playing a third-person character game then it absolutely doesn't matter." - Blitz Games Studios' design director John Nash
1080p support
"GPU fillrate is not a major bottleneck for our game, so we should be fine rendering our game in 1080p. In fact, it already runs on 1080p on the Wii U, without problems. It is an extra framebuffer, which obviously consumes some memory, but with Toki Tori we don't run into memory problems, so this extra buffer isn't a problem." - Two Tribes boss Martijn Reuvers
Why specs don't matter
"It's very easy for people to get hung up on hardware specs and technical specs. It's great to have a massive processor that's got a graphics pipeline that uses DX11, but what people need to focus on particularly for games going forward, is, what kind of experience can you build in the space of possibility afforded by the hardware in terms of features? Not in clock cycles. Does it connect out to the internet well? Does it connect to mobile well? How does it connect to your other friends and involve them in that experience? That's where games are moving forwards.
Nintendo's approach is to say, we're going to package that other screen with the console straight out of the box so there's nothing to worry about and the developers have a stable platform, whereas maybe the other platform holders are saying, maybe we're going to involve other devices. That will bring another set of problems. Sony and Microsoft will go toe to toe again as they have done on this rev. They will do the same on the next one. Nintendo are doing something different.
There's going to be some geek out there who will screwdriver that processor out from the machine, run it through all the tests and compare it to Pentium 3 upwards and tell everybody how rubbish it is. Of course they will. That's great and I applaud people for doing such things. However, as a game designer that means absolutely nothing to me.
On the hype rollercoaster ride we go on with all new hardware, everybody's super-focused on specific details, processor speed, RAM and all of that stuff. But people need to look beyond that, because Nintendo's rationale in terms of building game platforms and exploiting their huge roster of cool IP is to build a piece of hardware that allows them to explore new ways to interact with their IP. That's their rationale behind designing hardware.
It's not about beating everyone else in a surface shader processing clock speed war. That's not what they're about. They're about saying, we've got this great roster of IP, all these great characters, how do we build a piece of cost-effective hardware - they're a business, they've got to make profit - that will allow our players, our very loyal Nintendo players, to interact with this IP and great worlds and characters in a new way?
"If you think about the Wii U in that light, suddenly it makes a huge amount of sense. Suddenly we're going to be able to explore the world of Zelda and Mario in a new way with our friends. And that's the rationale behind that platform. It's not a gunning war in terms of hardware. As soon as you do that, you start to think about the games in a different way. You start to get excited about what it affords you as a game designer, and players should get very excited about it as well."
Thanks to all that sent this in!
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