Is Nintendo About to go a Generation Down Already?

[Fused King]

E3 2011

 

@ 1:50

Still waiting Reggie, ....Still waiting.

Edited June 6, 2012 by Fused King

[Retro_Link]

 

@ 0:57

Still waiting Reggie, ....Still waiting.

 

@1:49... I think Geoff is owed some royalties! :p

[david.dakota]

And so would you, Dakota. So would you.

 

You're right. I'd actually have a lobotomy than those buggers.

[Dcubed]

I would rather have had Wii U Music instead of that SiNG SoNG game and Just Prance 4.

 

And so would you, Dakota. So would you.

 

I was so fucking pissed when I saw the Sing logo. I was totally expecting Wii Music U (the first one is probably the most underrated game on Wii)

 

Complete troll

[darkjak]

I was so fucking pissed when I saw the Sing logo. I was totally expecting Wii Music U (the first one is probably the most underrated game on Wii)

 

Complete troll

 

I was hoping that we'd get to see neither, and get Metroid, F-Zero, Starfox, 3D Mario, Mariokart, Smashbros, GTA 5, Nintendo GT or something worthwile instead.

[Fused King]

I just have the urge to answer this thread's question with another question:

 

Does Wayne Brady gonna have to choke a bitch?

[Retro_Link]

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2012/06/07/e3-2012-watch-dogs-coming-to-consoles-and-pc-could-hit-wii-u

 

E3 2012: Watch Dogs Coming to Consoles and PC, Could Hit Wii U

 

In an interview at E3 today, Ubisoft senior vice president of sales and marketing Tony Key confirmed to IGN that Watch Dogs is headed to consoles and PC and could even come to Wii U.

 

“PS3, 360 and PC,” Key told us when we asked him to confirm which systems we can expect Watch Dogs to be released on.

 

In addition, we also asked Key if the game could come to Wii U.

 

“Not at this time," he said. "We have so many titles in development for Wii U right now that we need to keep that team focused and this is a very very ambitious game. But it’s not out of the question.”

This is bullshit.

 

The point of the new console was to offer Nintendo consumers parity and those same experiences, and yet even with a console that may be more powerful that the competition... a specifically in this case, a game that seems almost custom built for the Game Pad... third parties are still unwilling to commit.

 

How about you ditch the vast majority of your Wii U game Ubisoft, and give us a game people actually want!

[Fused King]

How about you ditch the vast majority of your Wii U game Ubisoft, and give us a game people actually want!

 

 

I already proposed that, but this is what I got.

[Cube]

Are they saying that we may not get Watch_Dogs because we're getting Rayman, Rabbids, Sports Connection and ZombiU?

[Retro_Link]

Are they saying that we may not get Watch_Dogs because we're getting Rayman, Rabbids, Sports Connection and ZombiU?

Yep!

 

Poor Ubisoft are already working on a bunch of launch games for us, so they can't be distracted by porting a PC game that comes out over a year from now.

[dazzybee]

If the console is popular it'll come. But it' sort of true. There are 150 million 360 and ps3's in the market, you can rfelease 20 games and them all sell well. How many Wii U's will be sold before this christmas?! 5million?! TOo many games most of them won't sell. In a year from now, 20 million?! Still not loads but probably enough for Watch Dogs, it sort of depends on how "core" games sell but actually, if it's easy to develop for, why not port it across?!

[DiemetriX]

is it because Dev Kits came in too late to these developers?

 

I'm pretty sure this is the reason we see games looking the way they look. If you look at any systems launch lineup you will see that he developers has not yet gotten used to the new system. It takes time to learn the system. And I'm sure Nintendo sent out the latest version of their dev-kits way to late for developers to have time to impress us. I have read interviews where the developers say the kits are powerful but they have to think outside the box to pull of somethings that the 360 and PS3 does. Not because it lacks power, but due to underlying differences in architecture.

 

Another thing I have been thinking about is developmentcosts/sales. Is it smart to use a big budget on launch games when there's not that many consoles out? Isn't it smarter to use the budget on a game that will sell more copies when the Wii U has a gotten into more homes?

[darksnowman]

How about you ditch the vast majority of your Wii U game Ubisoft, and give us a game people actually want!

 

If they bring out Beyond Good & Evil 2 on the Wii U then all will be forgiven.

[Cube]

If they bring out Beyond Good & Evil 2 on the Wii U then all will be forgiven.

 

OMG! OMG!

 

Use the camera without having to enter 1st person view, just move the GamePad around!

 

Still, if they bring it out on anything it would be amazing.*

 

*except if it was exclusive for iOS for some strange reason. Then where would be some murders.

[Captain Falcon]

Watch Dogs does sound like a game made for the Wii U, especially given all the tablet features it's going to be incorpating and multiplayer modes via handheld devices, and that's before the possiblities of the benefits from using the touch screen in the single player.

 

I'm not going to lie, it was Game of the Show for me, but they've said it's a long way from release and anything could happen. I said in the Ubisoft conference thread at the time I don't see it coming to consoles this gen without either considerable cuts graphically or in terms of the scope of the gameplay and was a prime contender for a next gen game - an opinion shared by far more knowledgable people out there. Their vision of this GTA/Deus Ex style cross with seemingly endless solutions and complete free form gameplay sounds about as ambitious as anything I've heard for a console game. Apparently, the engine doesn't auto generate any of this stuff like say some of the quests in Skyrim, a lot of the donkey work is being done by the dev team to ensure it's interesting enough and fits in with the game.

 

If, by some miracle, this does turn out to be the game they promise it will be, regardless of nips and tucks here and there, it's going to have to be so tailored to the console that I'd imagine the porting process isn't going to be as simple as they would like, thought the extra power of the Wii U should help in that regard. But if the Wii U seels through the roof, to the right people (that's a big point right there, this isn't for the Wii Fit U crowd regardless of how many they shift), I certainly wouldn't be surprised if it did turn up.

 

It doesn't even have a target release date right now - they didn't even feel comfortable slapping a "2013" on the end of the trailer such is their expectation on when it should be finished by. A 2014 release date should give them enough time to get it running on Wii U hardware if there is a genuine market for it.

[Debug Mode]

Do we all at least agree on the fact that the Wii U we witnessed last year has been revised into weaker hardware?

 

I remember some of the reps commenting on a video about how the tech demo's were running in real time 1080p, we saw nothing in 1080p this E3.

[Dcubed]

Do we all at least agree on the fact that the Wii U we witnessed last year has been revised into weaker hardware?

 

I remember some of the reps commenting on a video about how the tech demo's were running in real time 1080p, we saw nothing in 1080p this E3.

 

There is one game that is seemingly running in 1080p... Ninja Gaiden 3 (screenshots were released in 1080p with no AA)

 

That matches up with what we know about how the Wii U's frame buffer setup works. With the 32MB of eDram in place, devs have the choice of either 720p with 4x AA for "free" or 1080p rendering with no AA.

 

Seems that Team Ninja are the only ones who have chosen to go with 1080p for some reason, but it does prove that it's capable of running PS360 games in 1080p (and that was one that ran in sub HD on those two consoles)

[madeinbeats]

Do we all at least agree on the fact that the Wii U we witnessed last year has been revised into weaker hardware?

 

I remember some of the reps commenting on a video about how the tech demo's were running in real time 1080p, we saw nothing in 1080p this E3.

 

 

No, perhaps, maybe. I would imagine the bird and Zelda demos weren't running on game engines, where as retail games will be. Game engines need optimising for their hardware and the 'official' WiiU hardware is not even 2 months old yet.

 

Zombie U is extra rough looking but that's because of the poor assets, the lighting and shadows look awesome though.

 

There is one game that is seemingly running in 1080p... Ninja Gaiden 3 (screenshots were released in 1080p with no AA)

 

That matches up with what we know about how the Wii U's frame buffer setup works. With the 32MB of eDram in place, devs have the choice of either 720p with 4x AA for "free" or 1080p rendering with no AA.

 

Seems that Team Ninja are the only ones who have chosen to go with 1080p for some reason, but it does prove that it's capable of running PS360 games in 1080p (and that was one that ran in sub HD on those two consoles)

 

Also, Nintendo is publishing this game so Gaiden fans are hoping Nintendo will fix the issues with it. I think it's already confirmed the U version will be harder and have more blood... nice...

Edited June 8, 2012 by madeinbeats
Automerged Doublepost

[Grazza]

Do we all at least agree on the fact that the Wii U we witnessed last year has been revised into weaker hardware?

 

In a nutshell, yes, like some of us predicted in the Wii U thread. There was certainly no proof the hardware is still as good as it was last year, put it like that.

 

Before this year's E3, I saw an article saying that last year's Zelda demo was 720p at 30fps. If something as simple as New Super Mario Bros is now only 720p, I can't see much more detailed graphics at that resolution (otherwise NSMB could easily be 1080p).

 

Nintendo at their worst, doing this sort of thing. Always happens with "Twilight Link" too...

[madeinbeats]

Here are some highlights from a tech discussion on Gaf.

 

Thraktor

I thought I'd chime in with a few of the things we know about the Wii U's hardware from the speculation threads (and by "know" I mean info which has been confirmed by multiple reliable sources).

 

CPU

 

The Wii U's CPU is a three-core, dual-threaded, out-of-order IBM Power ISA processor with 3MB of eDRAM L2 cache. Superficially it looks pretty similar to the Xenon CPU in the XBox 360, but it's a completely new CPU, and there are a number of important differences from Xenon:

 

- Firstly, it supports out-of-order execution. Roughly speaking, this means that the processor can alter the order it executes instructions to operate more efficiently. The benefit of this depends on the kind of code being run. Physics code, for example, wouldn't see much benefit from an out-of-order processor, whereas AI code should run significantly better. Out-of-order execution also generally improves the processor's ability to run poorly optimized code.

 

- Secondly, we have the larger cache (3MB vs 1MB). The Xenon's cache was actually pretty small for a processor running 6 threads at 3.2.GHz, causing a lot of wasted cycles as threads wait for data to be fetched from main memory. The Wii U CPU's larger cache should mean code runs much more efficiently in comparison, particularly when combined with the out-of-order execution.

 

- The Xenon processor used the VMX128 AltiVec unit (or SIMD unit), which was a modified version of IBM's then-standard VMX unit, with more gaming-specific instructions. It appears that the Wii U's CPU will feature a highly customized AltiVec unit itself, possibly based off the newer VSX unit. This should substantially increase the efficiency of a lot of gaming-specific code, but the important thing is that, unlike the out-of-order execution and large cache, developers have to actively make use of the new AltiVec unit, and they have to really get to know how it operates to get the most out of it.

 

- The Wii U has a dedicated DSP for audio and a dedicated I/O processor. These relieve the CPU of a lot of work, for instance there are XBox 360 games which require an entire core to handle audio.

 

The CPU should have quite a bit less raw power than the PS3's Cell, although the same will most likely be true for both the PS4 and next XBox. It will, however, be significantly easier to program for, and should be more effective at running a lot of code, for instance AI.

 

There aren't any reliable sources on the CPU's clock speed, but it's expected to be around 3.2Ghz or so.

 

GPU

 

The GPU is likely to be VLIW-based, with a pretty modern feature-set and 32MB of eDRAM. We don't have any reliable numbers on either SPU count or clock speed, but in bullshit multiplier comparisons to the Xenos (XBox 360's CPU), most indications are that it's closer to 2 or 3 times the raw power of Xenos, as opposed to the 1.5 times quoted in the OP. There are a few things we do know about the GPU though:

 

- The 32MB of eDRAM is the only hard number we have about the GPU. This is more than three times the size of the eDRAM framebuffer on Xenos, and should allow games to achieve either 720p with 4x AA or 1080p with no AA, without having to do tiling (the need to tile AA'd HD images on the Xenos's framebuffer made its "free" AA a lot less free). It's also possible (although unconfirmed) that the eDRAM is on-die with the GPU, as opposed to on-chip (and hence on another die). If true, this means that the eDRAM will have much lower latency and possibly much higher bandwidth than the XBox 360's set-up. Developers will have to actively make use of the eDRAM to get the most out of it, though.

 

- The GPU features a tesselator. However, we have no idea whether it's a 4000-series tesselator (ie not very good) or perhaps a more modern 6000-series tesselator (a lot better). Again, developers would have to actively make use of this in their game engines.

 

- The GPU is heavily customized and features some unique functionality. Although we don't have any reliable indications of what sort of functionality Nintendo has focused on, it's been speculated that it's related to lighting. Apparently games which make good use of this functionality should see substantial improvements in performance. More than any other feature of the console, though, developers really need to put in the effort to optimize their engines for the GPU's customizations to get the most out of them.

 

- The GPU has a customized API, based on OpenGL. Regular OpenGL code should run, but won't run very well and won't make any use of the GPU's custom features. Developers will need a good understanding of the GPU's API to get the most out of it.

 

RAM

 

It seems the console will have either 1.5GB or 2GB of unified RAM, with indications that Nintendo were targeting 1.5GB with earlier dev-kits and later increased that to 2GB. We don't know the kind of RAM being used, but most expect DDR3, probably with a 128-bit interface and clock speed somewhere in the 750MHz to 1Ghz range, resulting in a bandwidth somewhat, but not significantly, higher than the XBox360 and PS3. It's worth noting that the large CPU cache and GPU eDRAM somewhat mitigate the need for very high bandwidths. It's possible, but quite unlikely, that they're using GDDR5, which would mean a much higher bandwidth.

 

 

Going by what we know about the console's hardware, it should be able to produce games which noticeably out-perform what's available on XBox 360 and PS3, so long as everything's properly optimized. Of course, performance will still be far behind the PS4 and next XBox. What we're seeing at E3 is unlikely to be well optimized for a number of reasons:

 

- "Final" dev-kits, with actual production hardware, only started to arrive to developers a few weeks ago. This would be too late for the E3 demos to make any real use of any improvements this final hardware may have brought. We know that these dev-kits brought a slight improvement in performance, but we don't know if there were any changes in functionality (eg to the eDRAM, which could indicate why we're seeing so little AA).

 

- Nintendo don't seem to have locked down the clock speeds yet, which makes it difficult for developers to properly optimize games for the hardware. As Nintendo now has final production hardware to do thermal testing on, final clock speeds should come pretty soon.

 

- For third party multi-plats, the XBox360 and PS3 versions are going to sell the most (due to higher install-bases), so developers are going to put more resources towards those versions, and are likely to put the more talented team-members on XBox360 and PS3 development as well. Because they can get PS360-grade performance out of the Wii U with a quick, poorly optimized port, most aren't going to bother putting the time and money into substantially improving the Wii U version.

 

- We've only seen launch-window titles, and launch-window titles that are about five months from completion, at that. I can only think of a single case where a game for new hardware was actually well optimized at this point before the launch of the console (Rogue Leader for Gamecube).

 

- While third parties are unlikely to make good use of the hardware, Nintendo haven't shown any games from the first party studios most likely to really push the hardware (eg Retro, Monolith, EAD Tokyo, EAD Kyoto Group 3). These studios are the ones to watch for technically impressive games in the first couple of years of the Wii U's life.

 

 

Interestingly, the best-looking game that's been shown off thus far is probably Platinum's Project P-100. While people haven't been focusing on it from a technical perspective that much because of the art style, it's got great textures, good polygon detail, very nice lighting, good effects, a nice DoF effect, the IQ seems good and the framerate seems smooth. In some parts it also does nice 3D visuals on both the TV and controller screen. I wouldn't go so far as saying it looks substantially better than anything we've seen on PS360 (certainly not without seeing it in person), but it's definitely a nice looking game.

 

Thraktor

Originally Posted by methodman:

Great post thraktor. You think it will be able to hit that UE4 minimum?

 

In theory it should have the functionality for UE4. The question is whether Epic will go to the trouble of porting it over when, even heavily optimized, it'll look a lot worse than it does on PS4 and the next XBox. I think it also depends a bit on how the console does in its early life in terms of demographics. For instance, if games like Blops 2 and Colonial Marines sell really well on Wii U, publishers will start to think of bringing their future "core games" to the console, and hence will start requesting a Wii U port of UE4. Basically it'll come down to a business decision for Epic; if they think a Wii U version is a selling point, they'll port it over, if they don't, they won't.

 

Thraktor

Originally Posted by MDX:

Here is a question:

 

Current WiiU (launch) games, including Nintendo's,

all seem to be running at 720p.

Reggie said this console could handle 1080p.

But he tends to embellish a lot. He might have meant streaming

movies at 1080p, but hoped the audience assumed games.

 

So what I want to know is, if a developer is pretty far in

their development of their game targeting 720p,

how difficult would it be for them switch to 1080p?

 

Im just wondering if developers targeted 720p based on early

dev kits, but newer kits might indicate future games in 1080p.

The console is definitely capable of producing graphics at 1080p (so were the PS3 and XBox 360, though). The thing is that most developers will target 720p instead because it frees up the GPU to do a lot more on screen, and most people don't have 1080p TVs anyway (and many that do wouldn't be able to tell the difference). We'll see a few 1080p games in the console's lifetime, but expect 720p for the most part.

 

Originally Posted by Raide:

Thanks for the post Thraktor. One of my main troubles seems to be the amount of things within the Wii-U that require Developers to really learn them to get the best out of them. How many 3rd Party Developers are going to go through that effort to get stuff running on the console? We saw what happened with the PS3, where the gulf between Developer who sat down and learned the Hardware (Naughty Dog etc) and everyone else was pretty massive.

 

Well, Naughty Dog didn't just sit down and learn the hardware, they're an incredibly technically talented team. I wish Factor 5 was still around at the moment, to be honest, as they were another team that could do amazing things with hardware, and a HD Rogue Squadron game by them for the Wii U could look amazing.

 

Anyway, I do think that third parties will get better use out of the hardware over time, but like the XBox 360 and PS3, the best looking games will be the exclusives.

 

Thraktor

]Originally Posted by MDX:

Thats quite clear, but Im just wondering technically, can developers switch midstream from 720 to 1080 without much issue, or do they get locked in a particular resolution once they start development?

 

They can switch mid-development, but the problem is that if they were originally targeting 720p it'll require a hell of a lot of work to get the game running at a decent framerate at 1080p, so it's very unlikely that any games we've seen at E3 will switch, especially given the time constraints.

 

SnowDog171

Blimey, can't believe we're discussing this. Forgive me if someone else apart from my good self has already pointed this out but this article is nonsensical for the following reasons:

 

1) The U has a DSP, the 360 has 1 out of the 6 total threads exclusively reserved for dealing with sound. That's 16 percent more power for a start, assuming that developers aren't going to set aside more threads to deal with sound (and most of them have double that, 2 out of 6 threads, a third of the 360's power faffing about with sound).

 

2) The U has a CPU that uses OoOE, the Xenon uses IOE meaning that the former will be more efficient than the latter.

 

3) The dev kits have 3GB of RAM and no OS, the OS uses a large amount of RAM (512MB reserved according to IdeaMan's sources) so we're looking at 2GB in total with 3 times more RAM available to developers.

 

4) Sources here have told us that the U's CPU has 3MB of eDRAM on-die compared to the 1MB that the Xenon has. The same sources have told us that the U's GPU has 32MB of eDRAM on-die compared to the 10MB that the Xenos has.

 

5) The U's GPU is at least 2 generations ahead of the RSX and Xenos and will have a fuller feature-set as a result.

 

 

 

I'm filing this under B for bollocks myself. On paper we're looking at a system around 3 times more powerful than the 360 but imo, in real-world performance terms, the OoOE CPU, GPU feature-set and eDRAM should push that to around 4 times more powerful.

 

M3d10n

Originally Posted by Erethian:

The WiiU version of Trine 2 is going to have better graphics than the 360/PS3 versions, according to the developers. So there's that.

 

But it's going to take a while for developers to build up their tools and get familiar with the system, whereas they've had a whole generation to do that with the 360/PS3. It's why I wouldn't be expecting most PS4/720 games to look that much better from the start. People easily forget what launch 360 games looked like.

Trine 2 is mostly GPU grunt work, so it's no wonder it looks great. It also uses a deferred renderer, so the (rumored) 32MB EDRAM would help a lot.

 

Games like AC3 have large CPU workloads which are more complex to optimize. They're also various middleware which also need to be re-optimized for the new hardware. We don't know if the game is using dedicated audio DSP, which could free more than 10% of CPU resources depending on how much audio the game is doing as example.

 

I also suspect the Wii U CPU might have traded in-order performance for out-of-order performance. This requires a great deal of adjustments for PS360 engines to take most out of it.

 

For example of how important the architectural differences in a CPU are, just look at the CPU requirements for most console->PC ports. Some games require CPUs which are over than 5 times more powerful than the 360 CPU to run as well.

 

I'd really like to see a port of Rage. The extra RAM would do wonders for the pop-in.

 

SnowDog1971

Originally Posted by v1oz: That's very optimistic both of you and Thraktor. But we wont know for certain until we see the CPU and GPU clock rates. And how many Flops are on the GPU. What we have seen so far is not looking good.

 

You have to remember that Nintendo themselves don't know how many Flops the GPU will push or the clockspeeds of any of the other components. The individual components were probably only finalised last month and Nintendo will be tweaking clocks, power and cooling right up until a month or two before launch.

 

Developing launch or launch window is a bloomin nightmare because developers and publishers end up with a constant stream of dev kit and SDK revisions going back and forth with said revisions at this stage creating artifacts, resetting or even burning out dev kits if someone at Nintendo royally cocks up lol.

 

People are generally under the misapprehension that launch and launch window titles aren't up to snuff as far as 'looking next gen' goes because developers need time to get used to working with the hardware but the main cause of this is the fact that 90% of the development is done on underpowered dev kits.

 

 

I've noticed and commented here on the obvious early prowess of the U's hardware in the overall effects in p-100, the lighting and shadows in Zombi U and the texture comparison in AC3 with the PS3 version, and it's nice to have verified.

Edited June 8, 2012 by madeinbeats

[Dcubed]

I wonder if we might see the best example of the Wii U's capabilities at launch with Ninja Gaiden 3?

 

It's the portup with the most amount of effort being put into it by far (so much so that many people are saying that the added features make the PS360 version sound like a beta, what with the extra weapons/content/dismemberment etc and the fact that it has jumped from sub HD to full 1080p on Wii U)

 

And Nintendo do have a VERY close relationship with Tecmo Koei... (so much so that apparently Nintendo staff have been drafted in to actually help with development!)

 

Here's hoping that Team Ninja share some of their tech knowhow with Nintendo's 1st party studios!

Edited June 9, 2012 by Dcubed

[madeinbeats]

I wonder if we might see the best example of the Wii U's capabilities at launch with Ninja Gaiden 3?

 

It's the portup with the most amount of effort being put into it by far (so much so that many people are saying that the added features make the PS360 version sound like a beta, what with the extra weapons/content/dismemberment etc and the fact that it has jumped from sub HD to full 1080p on Wii U)

 

And Nintendo do have a VERY close relationship with Tecmo Koei... (so much so that apparently Nintendo staff have been drafted in to actually help with development!)

 

Here's hoping that Team Ninja share some of their tech knowhow with Nintendo's 1st party studios!

 

Aye, sounds brilliant, I'm sure the Nintendo staff will be leaening as much as they can and reporting back to HQ. Now, imagine they somehow squeeze some AA out of it as well, it would put all the tech speak to rest... for a while, anyway.

 

Funny how quickly Gearbox's comments are forgotten too after the arse E3. I think the U will be sound as a pound this gen; my spider sense is tingling.. It's just that it needs to show it with something quickly, lure ps3/xbox fans itching for new hardware over and bring 3rd party development over with them.

[DiemetriX]

I understand that Nintendo will downplay the importance of graphics. But the truth is that great graphics sell. And if Nintendo could prove the U is noticably better than 360/PS3 they would have way better sales. I think Nintendo should help the current developers to shine their products so that the games are #BestonwiiU. A system launch is an important time to impress both gamers and potential deveopers.

[madeinbeats]

I understand that Nintendo will downplay the importance of graphics. But the truth is that great graphics sell. And if Nintendo could prove the U is noticably better than 360/PS3 they would have way better sales. I think Nintendo should help the current developers to shine their products so that the games are #BestonwiiU. A system launch is an important time to impress both gamers and potential deveopers.

 

Not true. It helps sell to a relatively small portion of the market, but part of the market they say they want back. And I think it's Nintendo who needs help adding shine to their HD output seeing as they are very, very wet behind the ears in the area!

[Fierce_LiNk]

I wonder to myself if Nintendo could have stuck with the Wii longer, maybe for a year or two. Then, they could have had a machine that would be closer in line with the next versions of the Xbox and Playstation.

 

I thought I was ready for the next Nintendo machine, but after seeing what is likely to be available at launch, I could easily see myself sticking with the Wii for a while longer yet.