Dvader said:

SteelAttack said:

You're also horrible.

I cant hear you over the sound of me making money.

SteelAttack said:

ZombiU sounds like sex over a freshly baked pizza.

Yeah this one looks to be the best launch title, I'm gonna get  it and Rayman and Pikman when they are available, going to be very careful and only get games I can't play anywhere else. That will make sure I enjoy my Wii U. Or at least the best version of a Multi platfrom.

_Bear said:

Your're right sorry, was being an ass.

Thanks, I appreciate that.

Why?

What if ZombiU is better than RE6. That would be crazy and so sad for us RE fans.

If you did not see the Euro Wii U conference there was some good Zombi U footage there, new stuff with narration by Shibata.

Click the cog to watch it in HD

Aspro further info relative to this post which you might have missed in my price equation blog

gamingeek said:

The real question will be how the GPGPU handles post DX10.1 improvements and whether it has the rumoured tesselation unit and how effective that is. I read that DX11 has some pretty important performance improvements over DX10 which made tesselation much more efficient and feasible. But the chattering is that the Wii U GPU was modernised to have DX11 like features, but the system may still be hampered by its CPU.



The clause is that it's an OoO processor which devs are still getting to grips with and it has other features which offload tasks from the CPU.



According to most devs I had read impressions from graphically there will not be a problem, but if the cpu is low then things like AI and physics may be effected. But the games can still (look) great in terms of shaders, textures etc. If you look at this gen the games which actually pushed AI and physics is relatively low.

Dynasty Warriors producer on Wii U's power
"the CPU power is a little bit less" but has "much better" graphics capability

Please read this article with the different nature of Wii U's architecture in mind.

Dynasty Warriors like Tekken TT2 is a cross platform game where they are trying to port over 360/PS3 code made for In Order CPUs to a Wii U Out of Order CPU. Also Wii U has other hardware enhancements deliberately made to offload work from the CPU, so a lower clocked CPU should not be a huge problem for ground up games.

Akihiro Suzuki, producer of the Dynasty Warriors Wii U Eurogamer story

We know the Wii U's IBM-made CPU, made up of three Power PC cores, is one of its weaknesses, at least compared to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. But how will this impact the performance of Wii U games?



At the Tokyo Game Show earlier today Eurogamer spoke with the developer of one of the biggest Wii U launch games, Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper, to find out.



The playable version of the game on the Tokyo Game Show floor is not up to the performance levels of past Dynasty Warriors games in terms of frame rate and number of enemies on screen, and is shown up considerably by Dynasty Warriors 7 Empires, the PS3 exclusive also playable on publisher Tecmo Koei's stand.



Akihiro Suzuki, producer of the Dynasty Warriors franchise, admitted this was the case when quizzed by Eurogamer, and pointed to the Wii U's CPU by way of explanation.

"One of the weaknesses of the Wii U compared to PS3 and Xbox 360 is the CPU power is a little bit less," he said. "So for games in the Warriors series, including Dynasty Warriors and Warriors Orochi, when you have a lot of enemies coming at you at once, the performance tends to be affected because of the CPU.



"Dealing with that is a challenge."



The exact specifications of the CPU, including clock speed, remain undisclosed for now, but developers, including those Eurogamer spoke to for an investigation into the power of the Wii U, have confirmed it's slower than the CPU inside both the PS3 and Xbox 360.



But one of its strengths is said to be its custom AMD 7 series GPU, and the 1GB of RAM available to games: double that of the PS3 and Xbox 360.



This, Suzuki said, means the Orochi development team had the opportunity to create visuals better than those possible on PS3 and Xbox 360.



"Developing on new hardware in itself was a challenge, and also making that launch date was a challenge," he said. "But from a visual standpoint, based on the performance of the Wii U, we knew the game had the capability of having much better graphics than games on PS3 and Xbox 360. Make no mistake, from a visual standpoint, it is able to produce better graphics. So our challenge was to make a higher quality graphics. We were able to meet that."

Suzuki vowed that the performance of the game will be improved before release. He better get his skates on: Warriors Orochi 3 launches alongside the Wii U on 30th November.



"While the visuals are great, as is being able to improve them, we had to deal with the lower CPU power and how we can get around that issue," he said.



"Actually, we're still working on that. If you see the demo on the show floor and you try it, you'll probably feel it's not up to the PS3 level. But we're working on it!"

As part of Eurogamer's investigation into the power of the Wii U, Digital Foundry boss Richard Leadbetter expressed concern about the Nintendo console. "It'll be interesting to see how future Face-Offs work out," he pondered. "I expect that GPU focused games will benefit from smoother frame-rates and lower levels of screen-tear, but cross-platform titles highly dependent on CPU power could end up noticeably worse off."



According to Suzuki, the main issue is that developers are still wrapping their head around the CPU, and so are yet to work out how best to use it.



"For the PS3 it has multiple CPUs and an SPU, so you can calculate the various motions of the characters on the CPU so overall it runs smoothly," Suzuki explained. "The Xbox 360 CPUs are formulated so they can spread out the processing power so things run efficiently.

"With the Wii U being new hardware, we're still getting used to developing for it, so there are still a lot of things we don't know yet to bring out the most of the processing power. There's a lot that still needs to be explored in that area."

They are most probably talking about the out of order nature of the CPU, for the clueless:

gamingeek said:

Wikipedia said:

The key concept of OoO processing is to allow the processor to avoid a class of stalls that occur when the data needed to perform an operation are unavailable. In the outline above, the OoO processor avoids the stall that occurs in step (2) of the in-order processor when the instruction is not completely ready to be processed due to missing data.




OoO processors fill these "slots" in time with other instructions that are ready, then re-order the results at the end to make it appear that the instructions were processed as normal. The way the instructions are ordered in the original computer code is known as program order, in the processor they are handled in data order, the order in which the data, operands, become available in the processor's registers. Fairly complex circuitry is needed to convert from one ordering to the other and maintain a logical ordering of the output; the processor itself runs the instructions in seemingly random order.

The benefit of OoO processing grows as the instruction pipeline deepens and the speed difference between main memory (or cache memory) and the processor widens. On modern machines, the processor runs many times faster than the memory, so during the time an in-order processor spends waiting for data to arrive, it could have processed a large number of instructions.

So in laymans terms from what I understand, in order processors waste a lot ot time processing instructions and stalls where out of order deals with everything in a more efficient and logical way, no wastage. Potentially, despite a lower clock speed, programming in OoO language can make your CPU run just as well as a higher clocked In Order CPU.

Regardless of the CPU Suzuki said:

"But from a visual standpoint, based on the performance of the Wii U, we knew the game had the capability of having much better graphics than games on PS3 and Xbox 360. Make no mistake, from a visual standpoint, it is able to produce better graphics. So our challenge was to make a higher quality graphics. We were able to meet that."

There's a story up, I wasn't sure whether to mark it a rumour till I read it more carefully.

Wii U's GPGPU Squashes Xbox 360, PS3

Capable Of DirectX 11 Equivalent Graphics?

Basically in a pre-Unity press briefing this site asked:

Whether developers would be able to make use of all of Unity's latest high-end technology on Wii U, including the ability to make use of Unity 4's DirectX 11 equivalent features and shaders. Helgason replied with the following:

"Yeah. We'll do a -- we'll make it potentially possible to do."

So he knows more or less the capability of Wii U given the huge licence agreement recentely unveiled and he wouldn't have said that if the system was not capable of doing DX11 features in some form. The site followed up with: "In fact, if what Helgason says coincides with the actual specs of the Wii U, that could put the graphics card at least two generations ahead of the Xbox 360 and PS3 in terms of shader capabilities, shadowing and lighting effects, since neither current gen console is capable of producing DirectX 11 equivalent graphic effects. Perhaps the $350 price tag isn't so high after all?"

Their definition of 'generation' is PS3/360 being DX9 and Wii U being DX11. We know for a fact that Wii U is bare minimum DX10.1 equivalancy with enhanced features.

_Bear said:

Rumors ans speculation, I will not comment on.

Well the Suzuki "much better graphics than PS3/360, make no mistake, but lower CPU" story is not rumor or speculation, but the CinemaBlend article has a hefty dose of speculation after the fact. But the base story is this, they asked the Unity boss whether developers could use Unity's DX11 equivalent features on Wii U and the Unity boss replied: "Yes, we'll make it potentially possible to do so."

So although the article is written in a waffling way, the base info there, is not rumour or speculation, Unity on Wii U will allow devs to use DX11 equivalent features "in some form"

So Walmart.com still has white Wii U bundles available for pre-order ($409). Why did Nintendo even bother making the crappy white Wii U?  Nobody wants it.