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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.'"
I have a strong suspicion that Microsoft and Sony's next hardware is only going to be a modest step up from this current generation. Sony's taken about five billion dollars of losses on the PS3, and recently had their bond rating downgraded to junk territory, while Microsoft took substantial losses on the RROD debacle. Simply put, nobody can afford a repeat of the seventh generation of the console wars. Except for Nintendo, which, between the Wii and the DS, pretty much had a license to print money. Third party problems notwithstanding, Nintendo's lower-end hardware approach seems to be the only sustainable one, and I think Microsoft and Sony would have to be asleep at the wheel to fail to recognize that in time for the upcoming eighth generation.
Apart from the spin in either direction, is there any solid information? Some quick googling turns up wildly divergent performance rumors, ranging from "equivalent to a 1 GHz x86" to "equivalent to a 3.5 GHz x86".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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!
Because using a hard drive as memory is about as fast as chisling cuneiform into rock. Swapping 1Gb would be absolutely unacceptable.
Such bitching and whining from developers. No wonder some games look and play like crap these days on both pc and console from 3rd party some just don't care anymore. Look at the 80's and early 90's and why they had to work with and they pulled it off, now, a lot of dev's cry because their shitty unoptimized bloated engine that barely runs on an nvidia 300+ cuda cores or ati radeon 2000 streaming processors on the pc can't run on the wii u. Even today with all these processor streams and cuda cores the only thing these dev's could do is run games that don't even come close to realism at 60 fps@1080p.
They don't know how to code for the newer chip designs. Nvidia and AMD are already looking at or arguing for lowering chip cycles and increasing cpu cores. The Wii U almost certainly utilizes eDram to simplify multicore programming and give you increased performance if you use it correctly. If you can't code for this newer design but everyone else ether does or knows they will have to then learn then get out of the market while you can.
Well, when doing cross platform, you sometimes have to code for the lowest common denominator
Which is why PC gaming is force-fed shitty console ports that look and play like ass with mouse and keyboard. Good thing console sales have been on the decline every month this year, hopefully console gaming will die and we'll get decent PC games again.
Your hyperbole is as tired and rehashed as the blowjibbers your mother hands out like candy behind the local corner store. First and foremost we live in a glorious capitalistic society which we recently honored on Friday leaving no doubt as to our consumptional mores. Therefore it seems disingenuous to me that it is the existence of the console platform is what shackles you to your shitty ports, you and your PC gaming brethren could no doubt vote with your wallets? Or perhaps it just isn't as big a deal as your vitriol fueled post here would lead us to believe? Or perhaps the PC gaming market just isn't that valuable to those that create mainstream games.... Hmmmm. Of course I wouldn't expect a person like you to look at the world in anything other than the immediate, let alone over the course of decades where you would see console sales always slipping this far into a life cycle. But who knows? Hopefully I'm wrong and you can get back to that glorious rose-tinted yesteryear of Grus and ASCII graphics. That is the hey-day you'r referring to isn't it? Or is the glorious era of FMV? Or isometric pseudo-3d? Obviously it doesn't matter as any era of PC gaming was glorious and absolutely head and shoulders above our current console induced catastrophe of gaming we now weather. That fee bro.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
... is that this time, it's three GameCubes duct-taped together?
My phone has a 4 core CPU, so does my desktop. However just one core of my desktop destroys my phone performance wise. A quad core processor doesn't mean performance, it means that to get the max performance it is capable of, you have to have a minimum of 4 threads that all work concurrently to their full capacity.
I can build you a slow quad core CPU.
Also you misunderstand how hyperthreading works. It doesn't only give X% of the CPU to a given process. It simply allows for more threads in hardware, and thus less context switching (which is expensive). My desktop CPU is hyperthreaded, however a single thread can use 100% of one core no problem. If I load two threads, both demanding as much time as they can get, on one core each gets 50% of the core.
That aside, MOAR THREADS!!111 isn't always the way to go. With games, there is only so much you can divide tasks down and still have the threads working efficiently. Not all problems are infinitely divisible.
PepsiCo is hugely profitable and really doesn't need to "win the long term war" against Coca-Cola.
This space available.
Good thing console sales have been on the decline every month this year, hopefully console gaming will die and we'll get decent PC games again.
Uh, it's much more likely that it's because the current generation's achieving market saturation than because console gaming is dying.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Offloading stuff to the GPU isn't the panacea you think it is. They fill a niche by solving problems that are inherently massively parallel i.e. the next computation doesn't have a dependency on the results of the previous computation. By making their architecture very specific GPUs can eliminate inefficiencies that a general purpose unit such as a conventional CPU would face to do the same task. The cost is that they are a one trick pony, no good at doing anything else.
GPUs are truly great at doing what they do, but the areas where that they can do better than a CPU all lie in that very limited problem space. Some more general examples of compute-intensive game-related tasks that offloading to the GPU fails badly would be NPC AI, level loading, etc
Stop pretending the Wii U has anything to do with POWER7. It doesn't. The console would melt instantly if it did, and it would cost 10 times as much.
The Wii U has a PowerPC-based CPU, just like the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3. Later generation than those two admittedly, but apparently a design with comparably few transistors. CPU design has not progressed enough in 6 years to offset a significant loss of transistors.
The Wii was underpowered at the time it launched, but the Wii U appears to be even further behind.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?