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THQ Clarifies Claims of "Horrible, Slow" Wii U CPU
An anonymous reader writes "THQ has clarified comments made by 4A Games' chief technical officer, Oles Shishkovtsov, about why their upcoming first-person shooter, Metro, won't be available for Nintendo's new Wii U console. Shishkovtsov had told NowGamer, '[The] Wii U has a horrible, slow CPU,' by way of explaining why a Wii U version of Metro wasn't in the works. Now, THQ's Huw Beynon has provided a more thorough (and more diplomatic) explanation: 'It's a very CPU intensive game. I think it's been verified by plenty of other sources, including your own Digital Foundry guys, that the CPU on Wii U on the face of it isn't as fast as some of the other consoles out there. Lots of developers are finding ways to get around that because of other interesting parts of the platform. ... We genuinely looked at what it would take to bring the game to Wii U. It's certainly possible, and it's something we thought we'd like to do. The reality is that would mean a dedicated team, dedicated time and effort, and it would either result in a detriment to what we're trying to focus on or we probably wouldn't be able to do the Wii U version the justice that we'd want.'"
It sounds as if Nintendo's priorities when designing the Wii U's chipset in contrast to the Xbox 360 were similar to what they were when designing the SNES in contrast to the Sega Genesis: more RAM, more powerful GPU, slower CPU. Some SNES launch games either suffered slowdown and flicker (Gradius 3) or lacked a two-player modes and had fewer enemies onscreen (Final Fight) compared to similar Genesis or arcade games (Thunder Force 3 and Final Fight arcade). Most post-launch SNES games fared much better in these areas: Axelay, Space Megaforce, Turtles in Time, Final Fight 2, Smash TV. So far the Wii U is repeating the SNES's launch pains. Let's hope it repeats the payoff years!
This site claims its a 4-core 3GHz Power7 CPU with x4 hyperthreading, plus AMD GPU. I'm having a hard time figuring out how that's a "horrible, slow" CPU unless they have a lot of code that is optimized for x86.
Nowadays developers expect a console to be easy to develop for as well. That has harmed the PS3 a lot, when the 360 and Wii were relatively easy to get on with. The next generation will be even easier, which means more RAM and a bigger OS footprint to provide services like network connectivity and online profile management.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Sounds like a design failure on the part of the console manufacturers to me.
I've programmed both PS3 and iPad.
PS3 CPU is OK, the SPUs are insanely fast, however, the PS3 GPU is so incredibly slow, it is a joke.
I don't think there was ever a PS3 game that did 1920x1080/60Hz, simply because the fill rate is not there.
Every popular PS3 game renders at a VERY low resolution (often LOWER than 1024x720) and would scale it up to 1920x1080.
Even then it cannot do 60Hz.
The iPad GPU is blazingly fast, as it has a fill-rate to match the screen resolution. You can do 60Hz at native resolution on iPad, you can NEVER do that on PS3.
The PowerVR tile based rendering has a lot to do with this.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
My experience of newly graduated developers is that they understand the need to keep memory usage under control. They are not as anal about it as I am (embedded dev, 8k total RAM is luxury to me) but trade it off against getting complex and robust apps developed on time. Cost/benefit ratio etc.
I'll get off your lawn now. You are welcome on mine.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
still, the most limiting factor in xbox1 game design(even if you did use the memory smartly) was ram. not cpu, not gpu, but ram. morrowind on 64mbytes? of course it blew. ps2's 32mbyte was a joke on the day it launched - turn around 360 degrees in gta III and you'll have cars appear and disappear.
and now the most limiting factor in ps3 and xbox360 game design is ram. 720p graphics one could live with, but lack of ram makes games tunnel runs by making game designers design games that can stream content to that limited ram from disk. this has turned a sad number of releases into something that seem like 21st century philips cdi games.
but it's been like this for a loong time. 640kb vs. nes's ram(2kbyte? + whatever was in the cart). which pretty much made a lot of games that were on pc at that time (late 80's, beginning 90's) just downright impossible on nes. if either ps3 or xbox360 had even half a gig of memory that system would dominate(wii u has a gig for games)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
WipeoutHD renders many frames at the full 1080p60, but uses a trick for "complex" areas with too much overdraw, that, at least in my opinion, is quite clever. They start rendering at full resolution, but time how long each row is taking, and if it looks like they won't reach the 1/60s deadline, they start rending the frame in half resolution in the horizontal direction only. This way, they always maintain a solid 60Hz which is important for such a dexterity-based game, and only degrade the image in the frames that need it.
Because it maintains the framerate and the full 1080 rows, any slight blur is totally hidden. Even better: because the blur only engages on the frames with *lots* of stuff happening on the screen, it's pretty much guaranteed you will always be distracted by the crazy stuff happening to even notice any quality change.
I really wish more games used this (or similar) tricks - just keeping the framerate consisten (at the expense of quality) really helps - you don't have those stutters that end up just drawing attention to the problem areas.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.