Because we don't really collect opinions on companies, platforms and the like.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
I stewed on keeping it for a while, but finally got rid of it. Someone left behind specs that as of the 3.0.0 update, there's an "overclock" mode for the Wii U that basically doubles the CPU speed and adds 50% more speed to the GPU. Now given Nintendo's Black Box nature, I won't deny any possibility of it, but I'm very dubious of it being able to jump up to a 200% overclock even if only one core is active (nobody else can do this, and IBM doesn't have some magic sauce that makes a 20 year old design do this).
The GPU was also said to have enough horsepower to come close to the PS 4 and Xbox One in terms of performance. This is just bullcorn considering that developers have stated their dismay at the Wii U's lack of power and that people have found die shots that more or less confirm the GPU's specs.
But if you want to re-add those specs, that's coo. You just have to prove they can be done. I'm saying this because other websites have used this very page to start rumor mills.
EDIT: I also recall an edit war between me and someone on the 3DS page a while back. Let's not do that again please and stick to what That Other Wiki accepts.
Edited by 199.106.103.58 Hide / Show Replies
I'm locking the GPU specs down based on this link http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=511628
I'm inclined to believe them, plus AMD does have a chip that makes more sense for a lower power application that falls in line with the specs (the AMD Radeon HD6530D). Also, even if it did have up to 960 SP Us, it'd make it more in line with a Radeon HD 6950M which has more than enough power to catch up with the Xbox One, which again wouldn't make sense since devs were complaining about the lack of power.
"Latte" is 146.48mm² large with at least 85mm² available for GPU according to my own calculations that I have made by X and Y of entire picture to get total number of pixels then I marked one block at a time and multiply X and Y of pixels that were in marked area after that I divide total amount of pixels of picture with amount of pixels from marked area of that or that block thus then I enter size of the GPU which is then divided with the result.
I was able to spot which sections were not part of GPU its self, I looked what does not belong to a regular GPU. So 85mm^2 seems to be available space for GPU specific components.
Now specifications of the GPU will be hard to guess because we aren't computer engineers to know which is what and for what is that and what purpose it has thus we can only guess for now.
Best case scenario is that Wii U's GPU is 640 shaders with 16 texture units and 8 raster outputs and 4-6 compute units, Latte is fully custom GPU so don't expect standard architecture and Chipworks guy said that he can not identify which AMD's GPU is closest to Latte.
We don't know how much mm² each shader, ROP, TMU or CU... So if TMU takes couple of mm² then they could have removed couple of them and put more shaders, in a way its a trade off.
To me, it would make more sense that AMD would reuse something they already have or had to save costs. It may not be the same thing here, but historically:
- IBM recycled the PPE unit of the Cell BBE to make a core in the Xbox 360's CPU
- The Xbox 360's GPU was similar to an X1800 (but that's just speculation)
- The PS 3's GPU was a faster clocked GeForce 7800 GTX with half the ROPs
- The Xbox's GPU was the basis for the GeForce 3 (though spec wise it matches the GeForce 4, which is weird).
Plus AMD's current GPU architecture is built to be highly modular. It doesn't have to look exactly like something we've seen before but it could be more or less the same thing (I guess another way of putting is take PhoneBloks for GPUs).
To beat a dead horse though, if the GPU did have the supposed "1.33TFLOPS" or whatever it was, then it should be able to produce graphics comparable to the PS 4 and XB 1 with games to match. Often times the bottleneck of games is the GPU. You can find a lot of reports of people sporting "crappy" Pentiums and Core i3 processors getting 60FPS on Battlefield 3 on max settings because they have a high-end GPU. Actually on that note, the CPU in the PS 4 and XB 1 are Netbook class processors (the Jaguar is a decedent of Brazos, which was meant to compete with Intel's Atom)
Edited by 199.106.103.58
Wii U's CPU has 15 to 17 GFLOPS of processing power since it seems it is heavily customized PPC 750 design.
You are right, AMD's GPU's are highly modular after I found some die shots and other things...
Nintendo could balance the design of the GPU, they could remove some TMU's and place in their place some shaders. A lot of things are possible.
Xenol... If possible, could you send me your research at eyeofcore@gmail.com.
I am a part of a small team trying to uncover Wii U's hardware and any information that you can give us and that seems credible/correct then please send to my mail and I will discuss with my fellow colleague.
Most of my research is just recalling news tech articles and inferring information from what's available. I don't own a Wii U to hack apart (I probably wouldn't anyway out of self-paranoia).
I only really dig in when something looks odd or contradictory. Like for instance, while I'm still dubious of reported Vita's GPU performance (even though I fixed it up), considering that the PS Vita can produce visuals very similar to the PS3, I'm willing to believe those specs. But as I said before, since developers were complaining about the Wii U's lack of power, posting here it can go up to a performance level comparable to its competitors is very suspicious.
But hey, if you find anything, I can provide some insight. :D
Edited by 199.106.103.54
Why are the 30 cent promotion games included on this page? They aren't Wii U games, just ports of NES and SNES games. We don't list every game on the Wii's VC on the Wii page.
This really has more to do with the Wii U's TV Tropes page rather than the system itself, but I'm wondering if Battlefield 3 really should be listed. I believe DICE themselves have stated that they don't really plan on bringing that game specifically to the system, but that it's a possibility that Battlefield may come to the Wii U at a later date. I'm just trying to keep the information accurate.
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EA just confirmed they aren't going to bother porting Frostbite engine to the Wii U - effectively cancelling their entire Wii U games lineup.
Hi there.
While trying to update the notes and labelnotes, I seem to have accidentally broken Punch-Out!!'s labelnote (Firefox 21 beta 1 on Windows 8). Sorry about that, but I have no idea how to fix it. Thanks to whoever can help here.
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If two notes or two labelnotes have identical content, the bottom one(s) with that content will not open. I've added some words to it which made it unique, so it'll work now.
That was the amazing part. Things just keep going.
I think that the Tagline of "How U Will Play Next" would serve better as the page caption compared to "Together, Better.", as I'm seeing the former phrase (mostly in Wii U commercials and a slew of Nintendo's Wii U videos on YouTube) way more often than the latter (and to be honest, Main.Wii U was the first instance where I learned that "Together, Better" was even being used as a slogan for the Wii U).
Would anyone else like to weigh in on this issue? I'd hate to outright change the page caption without seeing input from other users... In any case, I've added both phrases to the Quotes.Wii U page, if it helps matters any.
Edited by fenyx4
Out of curiosity, why doesn't the Wii U have backwards compatibility with Gamecube games? I get why the GCN and Wii couldn't play N64 and previous games, due to discs vs cartridges and all, but if the wii could play GCN games, and the Wii U can play Wii games, why can't the Wii U also play GCN games?
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They're dropping out hardware GCN support from Wii already, like memory card and joystick slots. Also the original Wii's drive was worked on extensively to make it work with both kind of discs. Supporting 10+ year old games doesn't matter enough to not to drop all that.
Also, another and more cynical reason is that they're gonna sell GCN games on eShop.
We, it was mentioned that they would be porting a few games from the GCN digitally. That said, the method of delivery (be it Virtual Console or whatever the eShop for the Wii U is going to be called) is something to be questioned. That and the list of games, I would think that the GCN would do nicely under the VC banner but again I would not expect to hear anything until E3... at the earliest.
Some people over at 2ch that have worked on the Wii U did list out there specks (in fact, there US unit (the company is not listed due to a NDA) was the ones that told IGN, but over at 2ch, there were a bit more detailed) so to copy from whats over there (cant link to said site due to very NSFW ads), I will do so.
- CPU: Modded Power7 chip at 32nm (some of the more power hungry instruments were remove as there have no use for general use, this also made the chip smaller from 45nm to 32nm as well, also alot more cache).
- 8 cores running at 4.3 ghz (due to the tablet, other wise it will be at 6 cores running at 3.6 ghz)
- 2 MB of L1 cache per core, 32 MB of L2 cache per core (using S-RAM to cost less) and 1 GB of L3 cache shared (EDRAM, 128 MB per core is recommended).
- Everything has bin modded to use a 512 bit bus to last longer (and to think that PCs are just started to uses 384 bit buss)
- GPU: Modded ATI/AMD 5870 Eyefinity Edition at 28nm (due to the chip's age, they made it smaller), the chip is not just 2x more powerful (to match up to the AMD 7970) but is also duo cored (like a CPU) (for the tablets as that fixed it's issues with multiplayer, as before hand, it was having frame rate issues just doing 2, now it has no issues at all doing 4), running at 1.7 ghz.
- 64 bit color (16 R, 16 G, 16 B and 16 A).
- Polygon Count: 600 Billion polygons.
- Sprite Count (this chip's standers dose not have them): 1.2 trillion sprites, (no size limit).
- No limit towards background layers (this chip's standers dose not have them).
- Config Core: 3200:160:64.
- Pixel Fullrate: 54.4 Giga Pixels.
- Textures Fullrate: 136 Giga Textures (the Xbox 720 has this higher at around 20% at 153.6 Giga Textures as what Microsoft is using is 2x to 4x more powerful then the base chip (a 6670) depending on the area of the chip).
- Band Width: 307.2 GB a second.
- GPU Giga Flops: 28.94 Giga Flops.
- Double Pricision FP Rate: 1088 DPFP.
- Max Resolution and Frame rate: 5120 x 3200p at 240 fps but the resolution and or frame rate can go higher if the other gos lower, recommended resolution and frame fate is 1920 x 1080p at 60 or 120 fps (for TVs that can show a higher frame rate).
- Tablets are running at 960 x 540p at 60 fps ( a nice update to E3's 854 x 480p, the frame rate is the same however).
- Sound Chip (on the same die as the GPU): 4096 channels of ADPCM channels and 32 channels of LPCM at 96,000 khz under analog and 384,000 khz under digital.
- Starlet Chip: A 4 core ARM Cortex-A15 running at 2.5 ghz.
- 64 KB of L1 cache per core and 4 MB of L2 cache per core (using S-Ram).
- Ram.
- Main Ram: 16 GB of GDDR5 Ram running at 7.16 ghz.
- Extra Ram (for the bios and other minor things): 8 GB of GDDR5 Ram running at the same speed as the main ram.
- Video Ram (1st core): 8 GB of 1T-SRAM-Q (it has 3x the rate of GDDR5 Ram just like how XDR2 Ram has 2x the rate of GDDR5 Ram) running at 10 ghz, along side 1 GB of EDRAM.
- Video Ram (2th core): 4 GB of GDDR5 Ram (1 GB per each tablet in a way) running at the same speed as the main ram, along side 1 GB of EDRAM (256 MB per each tablet in a way).
- Sound Ram: 2 GB of GDDR5 Ram running at the same speed as the main ram.
- Bluetooth: 64 channels of Bluetooth 4.0 (because of it's high band width for the tablets).
- WiFi: running at b, g, n and (the newly made stander) ac.
- Disc Drive: 12x Blu Ray, 24x DVD and 72x CD; you can download a media play back key (for playing Blu Ray and DVD movies and ect., the Disc Drive can also play CLV discs as well as CAV discs (what Nintendo uses for it's disc format)) for a price that is as of right now is still TBA.
Some that have read the rumor did label this as not true but I just what to add more weight to it, and more back up to the rumor (if you do believe it); Me?, I can care less one way or the other about it, but it will be very nice if this was true.
Edited by MegaTacoVan86 Hide / Show Replies
I will be honest, there are a lot here in the specs that I would question... Like the Blu-ray drive, it would be EXTREMELY unlikely for Nintendo to willing to pay royalties to Sony for the use of the format (which from Nintendo's announcement E3 2011, uses something called iDisk [which if you ask me, sounds a lot like the HD-DVD format]) Or the GPU, which Nintendo simply refuses to talk about. Or the Wifi, the ac Standard is yet to be finalized.
I would be nice if something like that came at a low end price but I would doubt that.
They will do the same as they did two last generations.
They will copy the tech, but change it enough to not pay patent royalties and call it something like Nintendo Optical Disc yet again.
Of course they will lock DVD and Blu Ray capabilities, so they won't get sued. They already said Wii U won't support neither back then, so yeah.
And tech specs don't really matter that much. It's the games that make the system.
True, but tech does help that along... I think that most publishers this generation have understood the need and use of a graphical framework (Capcom's MT framework [from Dead Rising to Marvel 3 to RE:Revelations], Rockstar's RAGE[of GTA 4/L.A. Noire fame], Valve's Source, Epic's Unreal, etc.) for creation. It's important but to a point, and the point is content... the game itself. But moving forward a system spec's would have to measure up to said engines, not the other way around (in a round about way, this is how it works in the PC gaming world) due to the rather large investment that most publishers put into such resources. It's interesting to look at, since all reports on those matters seem to be gold. Quite a few are happy about system's ability to work on such engines... but this is all subject to rumour.
With that said, there is a lot that Nintendo is not saying spec wise. I don't expect to hear otherwise until about launch. My question with all of this still end up being... what games are we going to get? I think it would be rather sad if it was all ports, if no-one took a risk with new IP, etc.
Word is a former game journalist says that the system is at least twice as powerful as the 360.
The Final ECW Champion
Cider doesn't have confidence in this system. There was no reason not to keep making software for the Wii.
Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack Hide / Show Replies
The Wii was still doing well, people still wanted new Wii games. Tying up resources in this has slowed down on the amount of merchandise coming out for the Wii. Also, it isn't giving gamers anything else besides pretty graphics, despite history proving time and again that pretty graphics never put you head in sales.
Exhibit A:Dream Cast, Wonder Swan, Game Gear, Neo Geo, PSP, Game Cube, Xbox, PS 3, Xbox 360, 3DS.
Edited by Cider Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack
Someone mentioned in the article that the Wii U will not use friend codes. Is there a source I can see for this?
Remember, these idiots drive, fuck, and vote. Not always in that order. Hide / Show Replies
I have been searching on that one myself and the nearest that I get is that the online service is "alot like Xbox Live". That said, those words could mean almost anything and doesn't rule out that friend codes would not be used in some capacity (which is likely).
If I am to look at a crystal ball, I don't think that friend codes are leaving... but they are likely to be regulated to the background like it was done with the 3DS with system functions, only more so. For the moment, I think that there is alot that remains unknown with the Wii U and Online.
Edited by TheLeangle
OK, FINALLY... something solid on the network front. Wii call it Nintendo Network.... http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/120127/04.html
Still verifying if friend codes are dead due to the "Personalized user accounts", so my speculation still applies.
But here is a quick run down
- This is an on-line network service for both the 3DS and forthcoming Wii U
- This network will also be the DLC(or as they are calling it, downloadable add-on content) delivery system for both.
- This will also be the digital content delivery system for both.
- It will support Mario Kart 7-styled "Communities" as a platform function.
- On the Wii U, you will have Personal user accounts.
Is it just me, or does this remind anybody else of the N64 controller. In the sense of it requiring more hands than a human being actually has to utilize all of its features, I mean.
Not to mention its size making the infamously bulky X Box controller look small by comparison.
http://www.destructoid.com/rumor-wii-u-is-in-development-hell--210892.phtml
How we gonna add this? It'd be jarring if it was just inserted at the end - "Developers say Wii U is awesome - Developers also say its shit, impossible to worj with and a train wreck". Should we just replace the developer reaction since the new info supercedes the old?
Or do we treat it as rumour? Remember, these guys broke the 3DS analog stick, so they do have some reliability.
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A rumour is a rumour until it's confirmed. I would not say anything about it right not unless Nintendo does something like changes the release date (which is still the rather vague 2012), or there is another source that we can cross-check.
I've been seeing links to this article written as WiiU, and not with the free link markup, I assure you. Looking at the official site, it's not spelled CamelCase style. It's simply "Wii U".
Yes. This is real. Nintendo confirmed it at E3 2011.
Some of the confirmed games: Cave Story 3D HD. Another Zelda game. A new Kid Icarus game. Ninja Gaiden 3.
Edited by KingClark Hide / Show Replies
Why was the YMMV page removed? I assume some people were probably abusing it with editing wars, but could we not simply lock the page? It seems like a loss of information to just delete it...
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