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Rumor: Wii U final specs

A

Absinthe

Member
Pachinko said:
I'm still thinking many people are jumping the gun on this , neogaf has pretty much become intolerably awful lately - full disclosure I have a wii U on the way and I don't really give 2 craps how powerful the thing is , it's a nintendo console that outputs in HD and thus it's the only place I'll be playing nintendo games in HD. That is the only reason I bought it.

For the last 2 years there's been thread after thread concerned more with the systems power levels then the games themselves and this past week we've had a new thread every time the system farts a different letter in the alphabet. Now it's out so we've got, by my count, about 6 threads (some of them resurrected old ones) that are ranting about how "underpowered and terrible" the system is.

Really people ? It's been out barely 24 hours and well, I'm sure many of us realized that most if not all of the port jobs would only be aiming for , at best, parity with the 360/ps3 versions. In many cases we're talking games that spent 2 years getting hammered out for PS3/360 , the last 6 months of which , if the developer was lucky- they had to cram it onto a completely different architecture. It's not as though these guys can just take the game and slap it on a wii U and bam it runs - it needs a bit of finessing and some custom coding just like putting a 360 game on a ps3 does. For many developers I'm sure the goal was simply to get it running "good enough". Now I've heard all the horror stories about arkham city armoured and mass effect apparently just not quite up to snuff with the other 2 systems and again, I think it's because they DID slap the code on there and had a few weeks to get it working "good enough" and instead of cleaning that up to the point of perfect parity they had to shoehorn in controller streaming technology and gimmicky nonsense to use that gamepad for otherwise.

Optimization is usually the last thing to be done for any game and it's part of the polishing phase that games never seem to quite get enough of. For 6/7 years now developers have been tweaking their engines, middleware, communication with hardware manufacturers to perfection. Outside of exclusive content the wii U versions of all these games have only had a few months. The consequence of trying to have a ton of games ready day 1 - half of them will be kicked to the curb.

If we still see multiplatform games running worse on the wii U , say 6 months from now, when the next big wave of new titles hits then perhaps I'll be a bit more concerned for the systems long term viability beyond the nintendo fans but for now I hardly think it's worth pulling a chicken little.
Click to expand...

Thank you. This thread (among others) needed a little bit of positivity. This actually cheered me up a bit. I agree.
 
A

Apophis2036

Banned
Just read the memory is clocked at 800MHz, so it has 1GB for games, roughly twice the amount as PS360 but the memory is almost half the speed...

WiiU was always for first party / exclusives for me so im not too bothered, it's the guys buying WiiU as their only next gen console i feel for.
 
A

Absinthe

Member
Apophis2036 said:
Unoptimized, quick, cheap, third party ports don't look / run quite as well as the systems they were built for, shock horror !!!.

Seriously if you are the sort of gamer that posts on Neogaf then chances are you already own a PS3, 360, gaming PC, or all three, buy the third party games for those, they are also in most cases cheaper.

Kind of funny Van Owen hasn't been banned yet, not seen someone troll this hard and survive for months...

So back to hardware, would i be right in saying the WiiU defo has 2GB's of Ram but it runs slightly slower than the Ram found inside PS360 ?.

Keep the faith guys and don't let this wave of launch day negativity put you off the system, we know it's based on a GPGPU set up (totally different to PS360's architecture, the reason some of the ports don't run aswell), the GPU has a 2011 feature set, it has a seperate Audio chip, 32MB's of eDRAM and it has 1488MB's of Ram more than PS360, it will be fine esp when there are more patches to speed up the UI / OS.

Also lots of exclusive, big name first party games built from the ground up on the system to look forward too next year after exclusives like Pikmin 3, Lego City, Wario Ware, Rayman Legends, MH Ultimate, Bayonetta 2 and Wonderful 101 !.

People quickly forget the fun times of the 360 / PS3 launches, those systems have had 6 years of patches to run like they do now and in PS3's case it's still slow, clunky and prone to crashing ;).

Ideaman, let us know in this thread if you find out any more about the CPU / GPU, cheers.
Click to expand...

Another voice of reason. Enough doom and gloom for the day. Thank you. Well said.
 
G

gamergirly

Member
Apophis2036 said:
Unoptimized, quick, cheap, third party ports don't look / run quite as well as the systems they were built for, shock horror !!!.

Seriously if you are the sort of gamer that posts on Neogaf then chances are you already own a PS3, 360, gaming PC, or all three, buy the third party games for those, they are also in most cases cheaper.

Kind of funny Van Owen hasn't been banned yet, not seen someone troll this hard and survive for months...

So back to hardware, would i be right in saying the WiiU defo has 2GB's of Ram but it runs slightly slower than the Ram found inside PS360 ?.

Keep the faith guys and don't let this wave of launch day negativity put you off the system, we know it's based on a GPGPU set up (totally different to PS360's architecture, the reason some of the ports don't run aswell), the GPU has a 2011 feature set, it has a seperate Audio chip, 32MB's of eDRAM and it has 1488MB's of Ram more than PS360, it will be fine esp when there are more patches to speed up the UI / OS.

Also lots of exclusive, big name first party games built from the ground up on the system to look forward too next year after exclusives like Pikmin 3, Lego City, Wario Ware, Rayman Legends, MH Ultimate, Bayonetta 2 and Wonderful 101 !.

People quickly forget the fun times of the 360 / PS3 launches, those systems have had 6 years of patches to run like they do now and in PS3's case it's still slow, clunky and prone to crashing ;).

Ideaman, let us know in this thread if you find out any more about the CPU / GPU, cheers.
Click to expand...
Thank you. You should post it this in all of the 1,000 threads that are so concerned with Wii U's technical capabilities :)
 
D

Dynamite Ringo Matsuri

Member
Apophis2036 said:
Just read the memory is clocked at 800MHz, so it has 1GB for games, roughly twice the amount as PS360 but the memory is almost half the speed...

WiiU was always for first party / exclusives for me so im not too bothered, it's the guys buying WiiU as their only next gen console i feel for.
Click to expand...
Pretty sure Anand amended it to confirm 1600
 
A

Alcoholikaust

Member
Comparing the WiiU launch to the 360 launch is insane.

At least we had great third party games and a solid online experience day one with Call of Duty 2, Condemned and even forst party Kameo being awesome.
 
A

Apophis2036

Banned
Alcoholikaust said:
Comparing the WiiU launch to the 360 launch is insane.

At least we had great third party games and a solid online experience day one with Call of Duty 2, Condemned and even forst party Kameo being awesome.
Click to expand...

Black Ops 2 seems to be working fine online, many people think NSMB U, ZombiU and Nintendo Land are 'awesome'.
 
D

Dynamite Ringo Matsuri

Member
Apophis2036 said:
Ah, very cool if true, esp if it has 32MB's of eDRAM aswell.
Click to expand...

Yep. And I agree with Pachinko. It's pretty early to forecast gloom and doom just yet, even if things are looking a little grim. We don't know anything conclusive about the GPU nor the CPU, and furthermore, if my time on message forums have taught me anything, it's that no one can accurately predict the outcome of console history. If that was the case, there'd be some damned rich folks betting on the runaway success of the Wii 6 years prior, it'd be a feat that'd make Nate Silver blush. We do know that the system is finally HD, that it's finally compatible with the current architectures in place, and that it's currently poised for a successful holiday. From here on out, anything can happen. I'd think publishers would be foolish to turn a blind eye on Nintendo considering how much they're hurting at the moment. A lot can happen in the span of a year, and for all we know, although Nintendo may not garner favor among the Western devs, they look likely to take the East by storm.
 
A

Apophis2036

Banned
Dynamite Ringo Matsuri said:
Yep. And I agree with Pachinko. It's pretty early to forecast gloom and doom just yet, even if things are looking a little grim. We don't know anything conclusive about the GPU nor the CPU, and furthermore, if my time on message forums have taught me anything, it's that no one can accurately predict the outcome of console history. If that was the case, there'd be some damned rich folks betting on the runaway success of the Wii 6 years prior, it'd be a feat that'd make Nate Silver blush. We do know that the system is finally HD, that it's finally compatible with the current architectures in place, and that it's currently poised for a successful holiday. From here on out, anything can happen. I'd think publishers would be foolish to turn a blind eye on Nintendo considering how much they're hurting at the moment. A lot can happen in the span of a year, and for all we know, although Nintendo may not garner favor among the Western devs, they look likely to take the East by storm.
Click to expand...

I also love how the WiiU hardware (we still don't have a clue about the CPU / GPU !) is being compared to PS4 / 720 specs that could for all we know be 100% BS.

Sure Sony and MS's console will be more powerful than WiiU but i think a lot of people are going to be disappointed when they see a 5x power leap over PS360 rather than the 10x leap PS360 were over PS2.

I think a lot of the PS3 / 720 launch games will also available for PS360 / WiiU until at least the start of 2015 also, which makes PS4 / 720 much less of a big deal imo.
 
F

Fourth Storm

Member
So with the bomb that the RAM runs at or under 800 Mhz, it puts the other clocks in perspective as well. Using a slight variation of the GCN/Wii config, a 532 Mhz GPU and 1596 Mhz CPU seem likely. The RAM would technically run at 798 Mhz or 1.5 times the GPU clock. I thought 1064 Mhz RAM for 2x the GPU was likely, but this day has just been full of surprises!
 
A

Apophis2036

Banned
Fourth Storm said:
So with the bomb that the RAM runs at or under 800 Mhz, it puts the other clocks in perspective as well. Using a slight variation of the GCN/Wii config, a 532 Mhz GPU and 1596 Mhz CPU seem likely. The RAM would technically run at 798 Mhz or 1.5 times the GPU clock. I thought 1064 Mhz RAM for 2x the GPU was likely, but this day has just been full of surprises!
Click to expand...

Back to 800 now, thought it was 1600 MHz lol...

How many GFLOPs would a 532 Mhz GPU be able to push roughly ?.

Cheers.
 
F

Fourth Storm

Member
Apophis2036 said:
Back to 800 now, thought it was 1600 MHz lol...

How many GFLOPs would a 532 Mhz GPU be able to push roughly ?.

Cheers.
Click to expand...

Well DDR3 1600 actually runs at 800 Mhz. That's where I believe we've settled. As for GFLOPs, if they even matter still, for 320 shaders, the clocks I proposed get you about 340 GFLOPS.
 
D

Dynamite Ringo Matsuri

Member
Apophis2036 said:
I also love how the WiiU hardware (we still don't have a clue about the CPU / GPU !) is being compared to PS4 / 720 specs that could for all we know be 100% BS.

Sure Sony and MS's console will be more powerful than WiiU but i think a lot of people are going to be disappointed when they see a 5x power leap over PS360 rather than the 10x leap PS360 were over PS2.

I think a lot of the PS3 / 720 launch games will also available for PS360 / WiiU until at least the start of 2015 also, which makes PS4 / 720 much less of a big deal imo.
Click to expand...

Depending on when those consoles launch, if it's 2013, I think the specs will err much closer to the baseline provided by the "leaked" specs. I follow the PS4 thread too just cause I've got a vested interest in them and it's gotten a little freaky in there. Lots of crazy pie in the sky musing. Even with a loss leader strategy in effect, a 6x jump over this gen coupled with new shader model support would provide for a noticeable improvement over this gen's visuals. Seeing how everything is being programmed for systems that are nearing 7 years old and still have the capability of wowing (Halo 4, UC3, Beyond, GoW Ascension etc.)... I dunno, it's gotten to a point where IQ aside, things are honestly good enough for me. I'd rather devs focus on things that actually matter, like... I dunno, actual good gameplay that isn't a rehash of what came before with a fresh coat of paint. Despite all the amazing visuals this gen, gaming has left me completely jaded and cynical due to this misguided focus on press A to win gameplay. Once you've seen one hilariously self serious Michael Bay-esque chase scene wherein everything and everyone fucking blows up, you've kinda seen 'em all. Give me something that feels fresh and you can happily take my money
 
D

Dynamite Ringo Matsuri

Member
DonMigs85 said:
Amazing that it consumes less than 40 watts, that's less than half what the latest PS3 and 360 models eat up.
Click to expand...

My friend was telling me that the presence of an X-clamp meant that the system would fail and overheat in the long term due to buckling under heat. I argued that at 40 watts under normal load, it wouldn't generate enough heat where this would be an issue. Can someone more knowledgeable about this issue weigh in?
 
DonMigs85

DonMigs85

Member
Dynamite Ringo Matsuri said:
My friend was telling me that the presence of an X-clamp meant that the system would fail and overheat in the long term due to buckling under heat. I argued that at 40 watts under normal load, it wouldn't generate enough heat where this would be an issue. Can someone more knowledgeable about this issue weigh in?
Click to expand...

Seems unlikely unless there's a TON of pressure from the X-clamp or the cooling is insufficient (hopefully, unlike the Wii on WiiConnect24, it never keeps the GPU on without the fan running.)
 
G

G-Unit

Member
Aight, Its been a fun but annoying day(Thank you hardware nostradamuses?)

I wonder what we will learn tomorrow about the console
 
DonMigs85

DonMigs85

Member
What I don't quite understand is how a laptop with a pair of DDR3-1333MHz modules actually has more bandwidth available than Wii U's main RAM.
Is it because Wii U lacks dual channel support?
 
A

AlStrong

Member
DonMigs85 said:
They SHOULD be made to the same specs and timings, even if the label might say otherwise.
Click to expand...

Yeah, they'd be following the JEDEC standard; that pretty much specifies latency timings & clocks, so that's about as strict as it can get for performance. Any real differences will come from the methodology of speed binning between manufacturers.
 
D

DeuceGamer

Member
Despite the "Nintendo is Doomed" posts, I think there are some really intriguing things built into Wii U. I bought the Wii U for the Nintendo Games, Exclusives, and Gamepad (perfect for my daughters who love my iPad and anything Mario). After setting it up and playing with it for a while, I have to say that there are some really cool features I could see myself using a lot. Miiverse has a ton of potential, from scoping games you are interested in, discussing strategies in games you have, etc... Disappointing that TVii wasn't ready, but throwing away 3 remotes will be nice as will access to multiple content in one app. Last, the news about the eShop may be where Nintendo surprises some people with the amount of indie's that jump on board.

The games look good enough for the avg gamer, IMO. If you want great graphics you should probably be looking at a PC with whichever console/s offer your favorite exclusives/franchises. I still plan on building a new PC and pick up a PS4/Xbox720...

The only semi-negative thing I will say is that I wish the OS loaded faster, but I expect that to change with a system update. IdeaMan has already hinted that there may have been an issue with the update. Either way, it seems fixable and if not it's not a deal breaker anyway. I guess we'll see, but so far I'm happy with my purchase.
 
K

Kaworu

Member
Apophis2036 said:
Keep the faith guys and don't let this wave of launch day negativity put you off the system, we know it's based on a GPGPU set up (totally different to PS360's architecture, the reason some of the ports don't run aswell), the GPU has a 2011 feature set, it has a seperate Audio chip, 32MB's of eDRAM and it has 1488MB's of Ram more than PS360, it will be fine esp when there are more patches to speed up the UI / OS.
Click to expand...

I don't think that you understand what GPGPU really means or the amount of extra effort needed to make it work as is supposed to.
 
T

The Abominable Snowman

Member
Fourth Storm said:
So with the bomb that the RAM runs at or under 800 Mhz, it puts the other clocks in perspective as well. Using a slight variation of the GCN/Wii config, a 532 Mhz GPU and 1596 Mhz CPU seem likely. The RAM would technically run at 798 Mhz or 1.5 times the GPU clock. I thought 1064 Mhz RAM for 2x the GPU was likely, but this day has just been full of surprises!
Click to expand...

Radeon 4550-level GPU Confirmed.
 
T

The Abominable Snowman

Member
Fourth Storm said:
Except it's not a PC part. The various ways of using the eDRAM and low latency setup are potentially major factors in the system design. It's not something we can really measure without more developer insight.
Click to expand...

Was a joke. Based on what you said.

Jeez everyone's so uptight in defending the damn thing. Its a system not a family member!

Also, eDRAM is the new Benghazi.
 
S

Smurfman256

Member
The Abominable Snowman said:
Was a joke. Based on what you said.

Jeez everyone's so uptight in defending the damn thing. Its a system not a family member!

Also, eDRAM is the new Benghazi.
Click to expand...


...Is there some kind of Internet debate rule that states that if you bring up current-events politics into an Internet discussion, you get a penalty (like Godwin's law)?
 
J

jett

D-Member
eDRAM! GPGPU! Magical multicolored unicorns shot straight out of Reggie's ass! With this shit the Wii U got nothing to worry about.
 
W

wcw

Neo Member
So now that the system is out can anyone give me an idea of the specs? How much more powerful than the 360/ps3?
 
T

The Abominable Snowman

Member
So, back on topic: Does the I/O reside on the GPU? It's somewhere on the MCM, but the GPU is the only logical place where you could sit a north bridge. Assuming 40nm, here's what we know

Die Sizes

RV770: @55nm - 256mm^2, @40 roughly 186mm^2
RV740: @40nm - 137mm^2
RV730: @55nm - 146mm^2, @40 ~106mm^2

Wii u: ..@40nm - 156.21mm2
 
E

elsk

Banned
wcw said:
So now that the system is out can anyone give me an idea of the specs? How much more powerful than the 360/ps3?
Click to expand...

KuGsj.gif


Good luck with that
 
O

Oblivion

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery
So am I correct in saying that the smaller you make your console, the more expensive it'll be to manufacture?

I ask this cause if Nintendo could have made a more powerful or cheaper console by making the Wii bigger, then I really don't get why they want to make things more difficult on themselves, developers and gamers by going with a much smaller design.
 
T

The Abominable Snowman

Member
Oblivion said:
So am I correct in saying that the smaller you make your console, the more expensive it'll be to manufacture?

I ask this cause if Nintendo could have made a more powerful or cheaper console by making the Wii bigger, then I really don't get why they want to make things more difficult on themselves, developers and gamers by going with a much smaller design.
Click to expand...

In the case of Wii U, miniturization includes the combining of what would otherwise be separate chips into customized packages. That decreases the size and increases the cost. They're basically brand new chips, even if they existed in other forms before.

But if you were talking about taking a chip from 65nm to 40nm there would be an increase in yield equaling a decrease in price. and having less chips on motherboard does also save the cost in other ways.

I'm open to correction, but yeah, you can't really say smaller size = larger cost. Its how you go about miniturization.
 
O

Oblivion

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery
Popstar said:
No.

The Xbox 360 slim is probably cheaper to manufacture than the original Xbox 360 as an example.
Click to expand...

Well yeah, but that's after several revisions going on after several years.

I'm referring to new consoles at launch.
 
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