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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.
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!
They are arguing for it because they are both completely failing to compete on performance per core with intel, while they beat intel's GPU offerings with their own.
You essentially have someone who owns a fleet of mopeds arguing that fleet of mopeds is a better way of transporting goods from harbor to the stores. In some cases, they may be right. In many others, they will be wrong. Arguing this as a universal truth is disinformation, and actually believing in these arguments is ignorance of the subject at hand.
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.
You realise that lower scores are better with SunSpider, right? That would make it 2 and a half times slower than the iPhone 5. Of course, a large part of that will be down to the browser.
For reference, a 2.4Ghz Core i7 scores 252 in Safari, so it would appear to be a *lot* slower than a 3.6Ghz current x86 CPU.
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
Seriously guys, mod parent up. Every report that I've seen that seems close to "official" states a quad-core processor with some level of hyperthreading. If this is indeed true, it explains quite a bit why some say it is "horribly slow"... it is only a matter of single-thread vs multi-thread performance.
If this is true that there is 4x hyperthreading per core, that would give 1/4th the CPU processing power to each thread, putting it at 750MHz per thread (assuming no HT Combine). This would very quickly and easily explain why things like JavaScript benchmarking would be slower, as that generally runs in a single thread within the browser.
The software mentioned in the article is most likely not designed for multi-threading that well either, since it is designed for the PS3 (single-core PowerPC) and XBox 360 (3-core PowerPC). Their statement even suggests that the Wii U is capable of running the game just fine, if they "changed" something (which would be to make their game engine more optimized for multi-threading)
... is that this time, it's three GameCubes duct-taped together?
" that would give 1/4th the CPU" - 4x multi-threading doesn't limit a single threaded workload to go at 1/4th the speed of the processor. Multi-threading just allows the processor to do useful work when that single thread would otherwise be waiting on other resources (e.g. memory), but it doesn't slow down a single thread running by itself.
PepsiCo is hugely profitable and really doesn't need to "win the long term war" against Coca-Cola.
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