Should Nintendo be worried?

[pedrocasilva]

Is it weak compared to the Wii or Xbox 360?

 

And how do you rate Wii's inner workings, and of course the 360's?

I can't compare them directly when two of the 3 consoles aren't even out yet, Wii's chip's details are scarce and knowing Nintendo specific features are protected by strong NDA's, and Sony's numbers are not to be trusted.

 

There's quite a bit documentation on Cell though, released mostly by IBM.

 

All in all... I'll not make real projections; CPU wise... Wii's CPU might reach and even outpace one X360 core in general purpose, note that Xenon has 3 cores. but when X360 launched all games were using only one core. It won't come close in GFlops though. I'd expect ~4 Gflops out of Broadway.

 

As for PS3... Cell will have more fill-rate than Xenon, but when Xenon has 3 PPE cores (also simplified) PS3 has one PPE core, and 7 SPE's (the ones who run microcode) it could be a beast if well used, but it's bound to have a low performance on other fields, not to mention dificult.

 

Then we have the efficiency issues, if Broadway is anything like gekko... we should be talking about 5/7 stages, Xenon and Cell are over the 26/30 stages number.

 

The more stages the more frequency speed you can get, and theoretically faster, but since you have a longer pipeline the information takes more time to reach it's destination, and could be lost along the way... Xenon may have a 5% cache miss, with a high penalization of having to wait X cycles to clear the pipeline... it's said that Cell could be even worse.

 

Think Pentium 4 and AMD64, Pentium 4 was netburst architecture meaning P4 prescott had something like 32 stages, AMD 64 who had 17 stages (iirc) outpaced it with less MHz. Pentium 4 had a branch prediction thingy to avoid cache misses though (Cell and Xenon don't).

 

It'll be a long time (and a lot of reading) until I can't compare them side by side realistically, right now knowing something of their architectures I'm only able to know their strenghts and weaknesses.

 

There's no question that Cell will be the most powerful cpu, if well used, I've heard as much as of a overall 20% benefit over Xenon, but bare in mind that there is a reason why PS3/Cell wasn't released last christmas nor this spring, it wasn't produced then, X360 was, of course it'll be more powerful, coming out a full year after it.

[DCK]

Bottom line is that the PS3's hardware is inefficient for its use. It has its power for games, but the Cell is not a gaming processor. Games need general purpose code, and the Cell is only 1/8th general purpose, making it very difficult for code to use its full potential. The Xenon is quite likely to be as fast as the Cell for games (20% difference means little), and it's likely to have big advantages (being entirely general purpose) over the PS3.

 

Also, the 500 MHz RSX is unlikely to be any faster than the Xenos GPU in the 360. In the end, the power difference between the two systems will be marginal, only one costs 400 euros and the other 600.

 

At any rate, the 3.2 GHz of both CPUs make it seem as though they seem they are far more powerful than the Wii, but benchmarks have shown that single thread performance of the 360 (first titles used single thread) could easily be matched by an overclocked GameCube CPU, which is the worst case scenario for the Wii. Of course the Wii won't be able to get to the multithreaded performances of both CPUs, but the Wii processor has such a level of optimization for games that it's still very feasible as a game processor, and combined with a decent graphics chip it can handle 'next-gen' games.

[Dilli Gee]

I know this is asked a lot, but you guys seem to be able to give clear answers:

 

At optimum performance from all three systems, can the Wii compete graphically with the Xbox 360 or the PS3? And is it easy for made-for-360 titles to be ported down to a Wii?

 

If most Xbox 360 games are only using one out of the three Xenon cores, I guess then when it uses all three it'll be explosive.

[pedrocasilva]

I know this is asked a lot, but you guys seem to be able to give clear answers:

 

At optimum performance from all three systems, can the Wii compete graphically with the Xbox 360 or the PS3? And is it easy for made-for-360 titles to be ported down to a Wii?

 

If most Xbox 360 games are only using one out of the three Xenon cores, I guess then when it uses all three it'll be explosive.

To put it bluntly... Wii can't be directly compared with Xbox 360 ou PS3 in RAW muscle, and never will, what wii can do is being a affordable platform that can do great graphics on SD.

 

CPU-wise:

At optimum performance don't count on titles being ported over "easily" from any next gen console, specially PS3:

He mentioned that the process of porting Final Fantasy XI to XBOX360 format was relatively simple since it shares many similarities with Windows. He mentioned that the process would take much longer, probably around two through three years to port the game into PS3 format, so more then likely FFXI will not be a launch title for the PS3. Tanaka preferred that the resources that it would take to develop FFXI for the PS3 should be spent in developing new games and hardware.

Source: http://www.ffantasy.com/2006/04/20/square-enix-working-on-ps3-and-windows-vista-mmorpg/

 

Even porting from PS3 to X360 will be dificult, this might bring developers into dropping PS3 if things go bad, since they can support at least X360 and the home PC on the cheap (since X360 uses directX) and perhaps Wii, if things go the other way around you might end up with a lot of exclusive PS3 titles, since they are so hard to port, like it happened with PS2, although I hate that architecture... porting a MGS2 prooved dificult (since it used CPU fillrate, the particle effects lagged on Xbox), porting a FFXII a god of war or a GT4 would be like writing the game from scratch.

 

This also leaded to a lot of multiplatform titles not using vectors in Ps2, using only 40% of the "total performance", even exclusive games such as Rachet and Clank did this. This is bound to be even worse in PS3's scenario.

 

This might lead for some multiplatform games (at least at the beggining) that, in order to be ported over for the two consoles only use one PPE core (since PS3 only has one, leaving the other two X360 cores and the 7 Cell SPE's unused, this is just a hinch, though.

 

Porting code from Wii to X360 or PS3 will probably be relatively easy, and it might be easy to port a first generation X360 game if it doesn't use too much directX (same for a port from X360 to PS3), but CPU-wise it won't be that easy to port a game that uses the three cores, and is assembling one of them for... physics, for example. you'll have to tone it down on wii.

 

Wii's best chance is ending up as the lowest supported spec available, just like PS2 did, no matter how weak it was it would get a version, to achieve this it needs to sell a lot, and since it's where the money is it'll get supported.

 

You have another problem though, the control scheme, it'll always need a major overhaul to use the wiimote, thus there are no easy ports, from wii to other systems, nor the other way around.

 

^ We are talking about CPU's here, not GPU's.

 

GPU's are another story, and then again they don't really compare, since one will be doing SD and the others HD still if you must... of course they won't compare on paper. They say wii's loadings will be even shorter than gamecube ones, even considering more 1T-SRAM, so even if the GPU is weaker you can load new areas seemingly real fast.

 

Also Xbox with all three cores used to 100% is still no match in general purpose next to a computer home CPU, not that explosive, it can be pretty effective though, since you can give CPU priority to each cpu to do one thing, and one thing alone.

[Dilli Gee]

To be honest, I haven't noticed my Xbox 360 loading that much, but then it probably does during FMV vids and stuff.

 

Good write-up though, you know your stuff.

[pedrocasilva]

To be honest, I haven't noticed my Xbox 360 loading that much, but then it probably does during FMV vids and stuff.

 

Good write-up though, you know your stuff.

Thanks , the thing with loadings is fetching; for example, remember Ocarina of time? that corridor to the deku tree didn't have visible loadings but when you crossed it, it actually erased/cleaned all the scenario of kokiri forest, N64 only had 4 MB of ram after all. In the best case scenario... you had about 5 thousand polygons per frame, some current gen games reach 2 million polygons per frame.

 

This allowed you to "waste" 5 thousand polygons on a room alone, giving off better graphics. because it had instant loadings, when you opened a door to another room it would automatically clean all the data about that room the moment the door closed. That's why while emulating OoT on collectors edition the disc won't stop spinning.

 

There are places in OoT where if you put the camera right... (ice cavern corridor) one step to the right will load the upcoming room, and one step back will load the last room you were in, instantly, like on and off switches.

 

GC actually can't keep up, that's why it shutters in Majora Mask collectors disc, whenever that happens, it's usually loadings, caching would be needed.

 

loadings with X360 are not bad, specially considering that it's loading it from DVD's, PS3 is bound to be slower, streaming data at 9 MB/s from a bluray. more data, at a slower pace. (DVD's have limited space when it comes to HD).

 

Think White Knight that Sony shown, actually doing a game like that on Wii should be piece of cake, first the models are Zelda like (noses and all), with the hair being a little more detailed, and better textures all around... You seem to follow a road, so you just need trees at the side, and then you have hills, if you climb a hill you won't see what's behind it anymore... on wii you can load that next upcoming hill and eventually erasing from ram the previous ones, giving off pretty detailed graphics and textures aswell as variety in a open scenario. loading that with HD textures at 9 MB is pretty much impossible, unless they use the hard drive for caching.

 

Metroid Prime games are similar, it pushes 15 million polygons per second, and it has loads of local detail, with doors blocking the path, notice how when you shoot one sometimes they take a while to open, that's because it's loading that area. Zelda Wind waker does the same thing with sailing, you might see a building far away in grey tones, that's because it doesn't have textures loaded, yest when you close up on them they make a fade in with the textures, this is good design.

 

Wii is said to load stuff faster than that even when the discs are bigger (mini-dvd's were to reduce loadings) and it has more RAM, meaning it will load bigger chunks. GC/Wii's RAM, 1t-SRAM is very important in this process aswell.

 

X360 can't do this, they can fetch load stuff, but Wii was build from ground for it, arguabily it would be impossible to do without Wii's architecture, and specially not with detailed HD textures considering it's streaming data from disc.

 

Wii uses 256x256 textures and it's perfect to the eye, HD console recomendations for Unreal Engine 3 is 2048x2048 textures recomended, and 1024x1024 minimum, otherwise it'll look blurry. that's a lot more data to stream.