Wii specs etc.

[ShadowV7]

I was just waiting for some of your tech talk pedro

[DCK]

Red Steel, Rayman Raving Rabbids, Mario Galaxy and probably Brawl too won't run at a chip identical to the Flipper. Seriously, any game we've seen that claims to be using the final hardware uses more shading than a Flipper, or 1.5 Flipper can handle. Comments have been made (Ubi Montreal, Retro and some more) that with the final hardware, much more is possible - there has been an update.

 

I also see nothing of the confirmed eDRAM. GDDR3 seems to be overkill for a system running at those clockspeeds - DDR2 should do just fine.

 

I'm not believing this. This seems like another version of the pre-E3 devkit.

[system_error]

Look at the size of this thing. If you take away the Gamecube controller and memory card slots, DVD drive, etc. you're left with an extremely small package.

 

 

Well my notebook is about the same size when you subtract the ports, DVD, LCD, ... and it is a lot more powerfull.

 

 

I just read at NeoGAF that someone said in a PDF from the Wii SDK (which is like the GC SDK) that those specs are true - again no real confirmation.

 

 

I can live with lower graphics but I will start to flame once I see the loading times are not really lower than those of the GC.

[goku21]

why should they call it gddr3? that´s just the try of some kid to hype with a popular word...

 

did you even check out maxconsole? It´s a site that is specialised on getting backups played on the consoles...you can download everything there...all the xbox softwares, a big tutorial forum to advise how to stream gc-isos directly from your pc to your gc . and all the adds are about chips to crack the console...

 

do you really think they have developers as friends? ridiculuos(the site)

[Hellfire]

Well my notebook is about the same size when you subtract the ports, DVD, LCD, ... and it is a lot more powerfull.

 

 

I just read at NeoGAF that someone said in a PDF from the Wii SDK (which is like the GC SDK) that those specs are true - again no real confirmation.

 

 

I can live with lower graphics but I will start to flame once I see the loading times are not really lower than those of the GC.

You can't compare consoles to to computers and good devs had basically no loading times on GC, I doubt Wii will be any different.

[SpinesN]

1T-SRAM can be applied to any Draw RAM (SD-RAM, DDR, etc) it's basically a fetch for refresh times, real SRAM can be refered to as 4T-SRAM (4T=4 Transistors), Draw RAM has refresh times where the data can't be acessed, the 1T just covers that up and keeps it accessable at all times.

 

back in 2001 it had a few drawbacks, being the main one that they had memory indexing limitations thus had to throw in two 12 MB chips to make a 24 MB bank in GC. also the space taken by the chip and final price is higher (under 15% for both). Other limitation is that it obviously have to go at the Draw RAM speed, (a pentium 4 3 GHz will have, 3 GHz cache/Sram).

 

GC tecnically had DDR 333, now... I don't know if this GDDR3 bank has 1T-SRAM applied (but it can be done), but how many chips would they need for a 64 MB bank? 6?, but just having that 24 MB bank for fetching is already pretty good, specially if we're talking about chips with more MHz.

As I understand it the 1T sram is a manufacturing proccess as well as a specific timing. GDDR3 is basically DDR2 while 1t sram is a small lower power high speed embedded ram solution. I fail to see how they could be the same. That said I can see how GDDR could be made to have similar timings as 1t sram however it would not be 1t sram but rather some kinda freaky fast access GDDR.

[Kazzahdrane]

I must agree, I've been playing Metroid Prime and aside from a pause (15 seconds perhaps) when you load your game from the main menu the loading times are almost non-existant (and where they do occur they are masked with short movie sequences).

 

I look forward to similar if not improved loading times with the Wii

[KingOfHyrule]

I really hope this is proved fake, because I don't like the sound of an analogue multi-out; how are we supposed to utilise the progressive scan mode without a digital out? I smell a rat.

[pedrocasilva]

I was just waiting for some of your tech talk pedro

Thanks for the compliment I really apreciate it.

As I understand it the 1T sram is a manufacturing proccess as well as a specific timing. GDDR3 is basically DDR2 while 1t sram is a small lower power high speed embedded ram solution. I fail to see how they could be the same. That said I can see how GDDR could be made to have similar timings as 1t sram however it would not be 1t sram but rather some kinda freaky fast access GDDR.

1T-SRAM is only a "standard", it's not a stand-alone memory type it's just applied to any existing DRAM designs, it calls itself SRAM when it really isn't. you wouldn't have real cache if you added 4 transistors to DRAM either (real SRAM is 4T-SRAM). So it's really just a fetching system... it keeps the data acessable while the real RAM refreshes.

 

Like you said you could reduce acess times by just having faster RAM, and since it operates faster the refresh cycle gets done faster. but you won't get rid of it. 1T-SRAM can get technically rid of refresh times, and if applied to any RAM at any speed will only give out better performance... basically it takes out the handycaps the memory has, giving the best possible outcome.

 

The energy consumption is not a point of concern, it obviously wastes a little more energy than normal SD-RAM/DDR when applied to a SD-RAM/DDR design, not significant though.

 

So you really could apply it to DDR2 and GDDR3 easily, the question is if it's worth it. Like I said it had problems with adressing big chunks of memory. If that didn't improved over the last 5 years you could be stuck into doing ~16 MB banks, when Nintendo is probably going for a single 64 MB GDDR3 chip design. you could do something similar to a "multiple-core" RAM chip with various banks but with ~16 MB banks... that would amount to needing 4 banks and 4 transistors, no performance loss involved, but it would really mean more space ocupated and a cost increase.

 

I'm just explaining how it's possible, if I had this problem I'd probably opt for having 24 MB of 1T-SRAM for quick execution and fetching and then slower RAM for storage giving acess to both of them for the CPU and GPU.

[James McGeachie]

I saw a guy at another forum claiming these specs were "100% confirmed" and from the "latest SDK's". Not sure how trustworthy he is but I really think they are real at this point. There's been multiple sources reporting it now, final dev kits ARE out there so it makes sense for us to have figures and from the games we've seen they do make sense.

 

Claiming games like Galaxy wont run on this hardware is silly really, I have a feeling if RE4 was just coming out for the first time now for Wii and people had these specs they'd be all "there's no way RE4 could run on this hardware". I expect a lot of tricks went into making Galaxy look as good as it does and I'm sure the fact it's only rendering fairly small planets and objects at a time makes things more plausible too.

 

These specs disappoint me because I was hoping at the very least the processing power might be bumped up to 1Ghz or so but I'm trying to get used to them now.

[SpinesN]

Hmmm. Guess I need to read up more on 1t sram. Until then I still disagree :p

Still think these specs are crap for the reasons stated earlier in this thread.

 

Edit:

Ars takes a crack at it

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060802-7407.html