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.'"

Comments

Better get used to it, THQ

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Better get used to it, THQ

[Pinhedd]

DDR DIMMs are cheap yes, but extra capacity adds cost and complexity. PC motherboards have DIMM sockets and motherboards with 4 DIMM sockets cost more than motherboards with 2, motherboards with 8 cost more than 4. On consoles this cost is still present in the form of motherboard design and it's multiplied by millions of consoles which are often sold below cost.

Re:Better get used to it, THQ

[rolfwind]

Consoles traditionally were single purpose devices. The OS consumed next to nothing and the game could have most of it. Plus, games were supposed to be tweaked to come in as low in resouce usage as possible.

Obviously, some of that has changed with them able to stream netflix/browse/online gaming. Even the Wii U, which has 2GB ram, 1/2 of that is dedicated to the games and GPU and the other half to the OS, which is pretty damn disgusting, if you think about it.

Re:Better get used to it, THQ

[bigdavex]

I've never understood why consoles don't simply have more RAM. Even in 2006, it was cheap enough to put in more than what the PS3 and 360 have. Right now, you can get 16GB of DDR3 RAM for $50 from Newegg, which is obviously higher than what manufacturers pay. Will it make the system cost a bit more to produce? Yes. Would it cost that much more to produce? Probably not.

$25 x 70 million units = $1.75 billion

Re:Better get used to it, THQ

[drinkypoo]

Consoles traditionally were single purpose devices. The OS consumed next to nothing and the game could have most of it

How traditional are we getting? Traditionally, consoles didn't even have an OS...

Re:Better get used to it, THQ

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Better get used to it, THQ

[Belial6]

Sounds like a design failure on the part of the console manufacturers to me.

Re:Better get used to it, THQ

[Bram Stolk]

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.

Re:Better get used to it, THQ

[vux984]

I haven't used my 360 or Wii for years, because there aren't any exclusive games out for them that really interest me.

I've got 2 kids under 10, the Wii never goes 2 days in a row without being turned on.

I've got a PC hooked up to the TV, steam with 100 titles, MAME, another dozen classics from GoG, and some humble bundles. Wireless xbox controller, keyboard, mouse, and joystick.

They barely touch it in comparison.

The 'hardcore' consoles are facing stiff competition from the PC, due to the fact that the advance of technology has somewhat levelled off and you can get a VERY competent PC inexpensively and it will last years without needing upgrades. And its fine for single player games, does the internet, and is overall a lot more flexible. Games tend to be cheaper, with free mods, etc, etc.

But the Wii ... and WiiU... they're really in a different market entirely. My kids aren't getting a smartphone anytime soon either. They each have a 3DS. Nintendo is safe for the near future.

Re:Better get used to it, THQ

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Better get used to it, THQ

[gl4ss]

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)

Re:Better get used to it, THQ

[Endymion]

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.

Return of the SNES

[Vegan Pagan]

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!

Re:Return of the SNES

[Dwedit]

SNES wasn't slower than Genesis. While the clock speeds in MHZ may say one thing, the 65c816 runs most instructions in fewer cycles than the 68000.

Re:Return of the SNES

[JimCanuck]

IBM's PowerPC are similar, plenty of instructions that offer one cycle completion as the old 65C816 did. Or better, look at the z196 that IBM has developed, its capable of 5 operations per clock cycle as IBM is a fan of one core, multiple sub-processing units.

The Cell processor used in the PS3 is one PPE "core" with 8 SPE's (processing units), one is locked from the factory, one is dedicated to the OS, and 6 are for the game itself. While the newer IBM PowerXCell 8i, at a mere 2.8Ghz, it is capable of 179.2 GFlops (SP). Because it can process 64 single precision floating point math instructions per clock cycle.

Verses the x86 (and many others from that period such as the Z80) which is actually designed as a 3 cycle per operation machine, especially when fetching data, it took 3 clock cycles to access or write the new data. The 68C816 is 1 cycle for a read or write operation.

More then likely its not a issue of the processor in the Wii, and more of a issue of how much time/money investment the Wii market is really worth to them to recompile a dedicated Wii capable binary.

Re:Return of the SNES

[SilenceBE]

There is only one small problem. With the SNES is was possible to equip the cartridges with extra chips to speed up the system. With the WiiU this is virtually impossible to do.

As part of the overall plan for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, rather than include an expensive CPU that would still become obsolete in a few years, the hardware designers made it easy to interface special coprocessor chips to the console. Rather than require a console upgrade, these enhancement chips were included inside the plug-in game cartridges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips

Re:In Other Words

[Luckyo]

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.

Re:any objective numbers?

[Smallpond]

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.

Re:any objective numbers?

[darkain]

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)

So, what you're saying...

[Man On Pink Corner]

... is that this time, it's three GameCubes duct-taped together?

Re:Damage control by THQ...

[Jafafa Hots]

PepsiCo is hugely profitable and really doesn't need to "win the long term war" against Coca-Cola.