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Wii U Faster Than 360 Or PS3, No Blu-ray Or DVD Support
jdkramar was one of several readers to write with news of the Wii U hardware information that's been trickling out since E3. The new console will run a multicore IBM processor based on 45nm architecture (technology currently underpinning Watson), and will have an AMD R700 GPU chipset found in the Radeon 4000 line of video cards. Apparently it will, in fact, run Crysis. Nintendo has confirmed that the Wii U will use a proprietary 25GB disc format, and won't support DVD or Blu-ray playback. A spokesman said, "The reason for that is that we feel that enough people already have devices that are capable of playing DVDs and Blu-ray, such that it didn't warrant the cost involved to build that functionality into the Wii U console because of the patents related to those technologies."
I'm pretty sure it has very little to do with the patents and more to do with the same reason they used those awkward, little, inverse-reading GameCube discs: fear of homebrew and fear of sharing backups.
But as we know from both the GameCube and the Wii, it's only a matter of time before people work around those limitations.
Disagree != mod troll.
They're not trying to distribute movies on it, just games. Nintendo consoles have always used proprietary media.
Eh? Pretty sure the Wii disks are just DVDs aren't they?
I know all the rest have been console specific, mostly because they were carts up until the gamecube, but I had thought they went with the standard last time.
Maybe the ease of piracy for the Wii made them change their minds.
Nintendo has always enjoyed being the only people who can duplicate media for their consoles. They've been doing it since the NES days.
It lets them set prices they feel comfortable with.
No sig today...
So... you don't think economies of scale would make blu-ray players cheaper than building a whole new disk player and new disk pressing plants to go with it...?
No sig today...
I also expect that the quality of the main (TV) screen will have to be severely downgraded when the other one is enabled. Considering the HW architecture of the ATI GPU, I think that a not negligible amount of GPU cores are used to trans-code the aux screen output to some kind of compressed video feed.
Nintendo makes and sells millions of consoles per year. At millions of units, economies of scale don't change much if you use common parts or proprietary ones.
The console business model depends on volume and technological advances to drive prices down quarter after quarter.
Patents, on the other hand, do not scale with volume, nor do they scale with technological advances. They can stay consistently high for the term of the patent, or even go UP year after year (as the h.264 patents do).
In other words, expensive video player patents are incompatible with a pure console business. Don't be surprised if the "25GB disk" is very Blu-Ray like in all mechanical, optical, and electrical ways. But the encoding skirts patents.
An upcoming console is supposed to be more powerful than 5 year old hardware?
I'm shocked!!!!!!111eleventyone
It doesn't say the drive doesn't use DVD or BluRay technology.
It says the machine won't do DVD or BluRay movie playback.
At 25 GB per disc, it's probably a single-layer BluRay disc. They're just not paying the license fees for the software to play back BR movies.
My understanding is that DVD player and BR player license fees are roughly ten bucks each, so if your console plays DVDs and BRs, it costs $20 per unit more to ship.
they were DVDs but did not adhere to the standard data frame format (more info here: http://hitmen.c02.at/files/docs/gc/Ingenieria-Inversa-Understanding_WII_Gamecube_Optical_Disks.html - awesome reverse engineering done by hacker xt5). However, modchips enabled standard DVD functionality back.
I bet they went with a proprietary optical disk format in order to prevent piracy. If no one can burn the disks, then piracy will (hopefully for them) be less rampant.
That is, of course, until someone figures out how to run disks from whatever disk or flash drives they support, which is much more convenient anyways ;)
Also, they don't seem to be targetting the disc format for anything except delivering it's own games to it's own platform.
It's not much different from the incompatible-with-anything-else game cartridges used in the past.
If you don't care for compatibility, why pay license fees to be compatible?
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The disc format is probably almost identical to BluRay, but just different enough to not require licensing the patents. Also different enough that the discs won't get recognized by a standard BluRay drive.
From here, the royalty fee for a BluRay player is $9/unit. Each data disc has a $0.0725 royalty fee. You're looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in royalty fees over the life of the system, even if it only sells at the level the GameCube did. If the system is a Wii level success, you're in the ballpark of a billion dollars. Oh, and tack on another few dollars/unit for DVD royalty fees as well.
Not a new player, just a firmware tweak to the cheapest single-layer bluray-type drive mechanism they can source.
Likewise, no new pressing plants - any existing plant that can press a single-layer BluRay disk will be able to press these...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
I have 10+ devices that could play a DVD and several that can play Blu-Ray. I didn't "intentionally" buy any of them with that express intent. If it *actually* lowers the price on the thing, I am all for this. I do not have the desire to pay for functionality which I do not need.
I hope that all the naysayers that said nay about the Wii (myself among them) have finally grokked that there's - demonstrably - a huge market for a small, relatively cheap games console that:
Rail against it if you like, but you'll have to shout: Nintendo are way down there at the deep end of their Olympic sized pool full of cash, blow and hookers.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Even if the Wii U was able to play movies, most people wouldn't know about it anyway. Ars Technica did a survey back in 2007 where they found most people owning a PS3 don't know it plays Blu-Ray. I doubt that has changed much.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Didn't Microsoft do that with their first Xbox? Punters could enable dvd playback by purchasing the separate remote and IR receiver, which acted as a dongle to unlock the dvd playback facilities. The royalties for dvd playback were included in the price of the remote, not the console itself. However, many people blamed MS for just looking for an excuse to squeeze more money out of its customers, because the remote was a bit expensive. People might think the same if Nintendo would do the same, charging $10-$15 for a 10KB file that enables their console to do what every other bit of equipment with an optical drive could do since the dawn of time.
Sure worked for Sega with the draemcast and GDROM. /rolls eyes. When will they learn.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
And yet PC gamers still end up with shitty half-assed console ports.
I read it neither as "We want a new disc format to compete against Bluray" or "We can keep construction costs down".
Instead I read it as, "We want a non-standard format like we had on the Gamecube which was impossible to copy, and was not cracked by pirates for four years." It makes sense to me. Were I Nintendo I'd probably do the same.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I had a lovely big comment but hit reload instead of new-tab when going to check something, so you'll get a much rougher version now. All FLOPS are single precision.
Theoretical Cell: 25.6 GFLOPS (PPE) + 179.2GFLOPS (Cell SPU) + 400 GFLOPS (RSX, not general purpose).
Theoretical Wii U: 1300 GFLOPS (GPU) + unknown GFLOPS (CPU)
So what's the unknown? I am going to assume a 3.2GHz dual-core variant of Power 7 (the architecture can go significantly faster, I'm presuming a lower clock speed for power consumption reasons; full Power 7 has eight cores). That would get 51.2 DP GFLOPS (http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1363413&postcount=2946), hence 102.4 SP GFLOPS. It can also run 8 threads, compared to 2 on the PPE.
So four times the CPU FLOPS and 2.5x the GPU/Computation FLOPS (although a modern GPU will probably be far more efficient).
Somehow I think we will see a new security approach this time around.
Who knows, it might even work
If no one can burn the disks, then piracy will (hopefully for them) be less rampant.
People will just figure out how to make it load games off of a USB hard drive.
Again.
The Wii could read DVDs from the beginning. The SDK even had DVD functions and the graphics chip has the requisite Macrovision crap to legally enable DVD playback. The system firmware has a flag for enabling DVD mode. They could've released a "DVD Channel" on the WiiWare store to enable DVD playback. If they didn't, it was a business decision, not a technical one.
Newer Wii hardware nixed DVD playback because it was being used to pirate games (if you can read DVDs, you can read DVD-Rs; if you can read DVD-Rs, you can patch system firmware to make games transparently read DVD-Rs as if they were originals).
Why write a game that runs well on one platform when you can write one that runs badly on all of them?
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Why would you think that? The Wii is the only console of the current generation not able to play movies without hacking, yet it's also the best selling one. Clearly people buy these devices because of their gaming capabilities, not because of their other functions.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
>>>Sega GDROM
The 90s is a long time ago but if my memory recollects, it took pirates *3 years* to crack the GD-ROM and figure out how to squeeze the 1000 MB games onto a 700MB CD. I consider that a success, since it prevented Dreamcast piracy for most of its lifespan.
Ditto for the Gamecube. Eventually it was cracked, but it protected the unit from piracy for four years. That's why Nintendo continued using the proprietary GC-ROM for its Wii (with modifications). It achieved its goal.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Besides patents for various hardware inventions incorporated into DVD's, you'd also have to pay for software decoding licences (e.g. MPEG licenses).
Quite often, both types are charged depending on the number of devices you intend to sell. A 10,000 run of a cheap DVD player won't be subject to the same fee as a 10,000,000 run of a big-selling console. And, yes, they basically make those fees and sliding scales up as they see fit.
That said, even 10 Euros per unit is a hefty chunk of a "fee" on a multi-billion dollar console (basically, 5% of Wii U income - NOT profit - would be sent to a licensing authority and patent holders).
Nintendo could have a license if it wanted - I think it's just proved with the Wii that it's really not necessary (for every person WITH the DVD hack - when it used to work on the drive firmware - I can name 100 who have a Wii and *don't* have the hack) and thus that 5% can be put into, say, licensing decent displays, touch-screen patents, motion-control patents or whatever else instead.
It's a games console. It doesn't need to play MP3 (proven by its removal from Wii's Photo Channel), doesn't need to play DVD's or Blu-Ray (proven by the absence and later "blocking" of DVD capabilities on the Wii drives), etc. It just needs to load and play a game. Too many other devices let you do everything like that if you really want, and to worry about a new one not supporting it is silly. Take out the gimmicks, you take out the patent licensing and instantly get less hassle and more profit that you can use to make the GAMES side of the device better.
Sony sold the PS3 with the promise for a superior blueray player
But how many people buy a PS3 to play blu-ray? You can get a very capable blu-ray player for half the cost if blu-ray is all you want. And the blu-ray only device is much easier to use for playing blu-ray than a PS3 with a regular sony PS3 controller.
and they won the war agains toshiba for this next gen format
It is open to debate whether or not the PS3 had any impact on the blu-ray/hd-dvd battle...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
No, translation: "Try to pirate THIS, motherfuckers!"
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"The reason for that is that we feel that enough people already have devices that are capable of playing DVDs and Blu-ray, such that it didn't warrant the cost involved to build that functionality into the Wii U console"
I was expecting to whine about the fact that they left out this feature again, but this is a damn good point.
Most people at this point either have a way to play discs or don't care.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Has process become the new megahertz? I can appreciate the advantage 45nm might allow, but on it's own it's meaningless.
And Intel already offers i3s and i5s with 32nm process. So what's the big deal?
As it stands 45nm means nothing to me.
As is the case with every console introduction, a few numbers are thrown around in an attempt to impress us. They show us a few impressive looking demos where the consoles are doing nothing but rendering a scene. Then the console hits the market and it turns out to not be as impressive as promised, from a graphical standpoint anyway.
I guess all that's called marketing.
>>>Dreamcast was killed by Piracy
A common myth but a false one. It took a few years for pirates to figure-out how to copy the 1GB disc onto a file, since no CD drive could read it directly. (Same with the Gamecube disc.) Besides the most heavily-pirated console, the PS2, wasn't hurt at all by piracy so that negates the argument.
>>>most early PS2 games would have fit on a GD-Rom
Oh definitely. Most early games fit on a CD and were sold that way, to reduce costs.
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Not out of the box it can't: DVDX