The fuk? Americas going to nuke itself to death before iran gets the chance

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/new-book-reveals-secret-history-of--near-miss--accidents-with-h-bombs-092827045.html#DEOuRMV

I guess it's appropriate to say The Wonderful 101 will be to the Wii U what Little King's Story was to the Wii. Sad though, similar but --BETTER-- game!

Bio Shock Infinite for 10.87 or not hmmmmm???? I hated the first two mostly I can't see buying it at any price. Rather put the 11 bucks towards WW HD or GTA5.

Yeah I know it had many many fans. I was not one. It is on my list of games to go back to and give a second try. Not entirely sure I could find the game if I wanted to these days.

Amazon U games

FIFA Soccer 13 – $16.99
Need for Speed Most Wanted U – $16.99
Assassin’s Creed III – $19.99
Call of Duty: Black Ops II – $19.99
NBA 2K13 – $19.99
ZombiU – $21.99
Batman Arkham City: Armored Edition – $24.99

More games here.

Best Buy

Mass Effect 3: Special Edition – $11.99
Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper – $11.99
Madden NFL 13 – $11.99
Ben 10: Omniverse – $11.99
Game Party Champions – $11.99
ZombiU – $19.99
Call of Duty: Black Ops II – $19.99
Assassin’s Creed III – $19.99
NBA 2K13 – $19.99

More games here.

Related articles:

Manfred Linzner of Shin’en:

‘Wii U eDRAM usage is comparable to the eDRAM in the XBOX360, but on Wii U you have enough eDRAM to use it for 1080p rendering.

In comparison, on XBOX360 you usually had to render in sub 720p resolutions or in mutliple passes.

Even if you don’t use MSAA (MultiSample Anti-Aliasing) you already need around 16Mb just for a 1080p framebuffer (with double buffering). You simply don’t have that with XBOX360 eDRAM. As far as I know Microsoft corrected that issue and put also 32MB of Fast Ram into their new console.

We use the eDRAM in the Wii U for the actual framebuffers, intermediate framebuffer captures, as a fast scratch memory for some CPU intense work and for other GPU memory writes.

Using eDRAM properly is a simple way to get extra performance without any other optimizations.

In general, development for Wii U CPU+GPU is simple. You don’t need complicated setups or workarounds for things like HDR(High Dynamic Range)or linear RGB (Color Modeling). What we also like is that there are plenty of possibilities for speeding up your rendering and code, but you don’t have to dig deep for them to get proper performance.

For instance, all of our shaders used in ‘Nano Assault Neo’ are not really optimized. We just used the first iteration of them because they were already fast enough. We looked later through the shaders dis-assembly and noticed we can make them 30-40% faster by better pipeline usage or better hints for the shader compiler.

As ‘Nano Assault Neo’ never had a problem running at 60fps (including a 2nd screen rendering at 60fps on the GamePad) we didn’t have to do that kind of optimizations back then. For CPU usage ‘Nano Assault Neo’ only used the main CPU core. The two other cores were almost idle, beside a few percent used for our audio thread.

So all in all ‘Nano Assault Neo’ only used a fraction of the currently available resources on Wii U and looks and plays quite nice. And for the future, don’t forget that in many consoles, early in their life cycle, not all resources were already useable or accessible via the SDK (Software Development Kit). So we are sure the best is yet to come for Wii U.’

And

The PS4 has a super fast memory architecture in GDDR5 which is capable of 176GB/s bandwidth, however, Mark Cenry has mentioned that they had thought about an alternative memory architecture.

As you can see in the above image on the right, one of the so called memory architecture they had thought of was going with was GDDR5 memory with 88GB/s bandwidth which is slower than the one they finally went with, along with a small amount of eDRAM which provides a bandwidth of over 1000GB/s. That sounds great doesn’t it? But Cerny said that it would have been difficult to code for it in a straightforward way and developers had to come up with a separate technique to take full advantage of it.

The Xbox One features a small amount of eSRAM and offers the same functionality of high bandwidth to make up for the slow DDR3 RAM.

That’s the main reason Sony chose the memory architecture on the left of the image. The high bus and a unified memory at a 176GB/s would have made it really easy for developers to code for and it was their philosophy to provide a simple architecture with the PS4. Cerny said that the 256-bit bus GDDR5 bandwidth at 176GB/s  ”is quite a lot”.

He revealed that the third-parties had demanded a unified memory architecture with a powerful GPU. This is in complete contrast with the PS3 which had a fairly weak GPU in the RSX and a divided XDR memory. Sony had originally planned to go with just 4GB GDDR5 but certain third-party developers managed to convince them that it was a really bad idea.

He revealed this information at GameLab presentation in Barcelona which has just concluded now. However, you can catch up on it here.

What is cool?

""To vanquish without peril is to triumph without glory." Had 17th-century French playwright Pierre Corneille not suffered the misfortune of being born 400 or so years before Vanquish was released, I'm fairly sure he would have admired Shinji Mikami's excellent third-person shooter. Indeed, there's an echo of Corneille's words in the Mikami-directed remake of Resident Evil on GameCube: the more challenging difficulty setting, Mountain Climbing, points out that "beyond the hardships lies accomplishment". It's a maxim that has served one of the medium's best game designers well over his storied career, and particularly so here."

Here's your 3rd eDRAM / eSRAM article of the day where Microsoft explain the benefits of the setup in X1 and Wii U:

Microsoft X1 engineers said:

Both systems have 8GB of RAM, but Sony chose 8GB of wide, fast GDDR5 with 176MB/s of peak throughput while Microsoft opted for DDR3, with a maximum rated bandwidth of just 68GB/s - clearly significantly lower. However, this is supplemented by on-chip ESRAM, which tops out at 204GB/s. In theory then, while marshalling and dividing resources between the two memory pools will be a factor, Xbox One clearly has its own approach for ensuring adequate bandwidth across the system.

"Yeah, I think that's right. In terms of getting the best possible combination of performance, memory size, power, the GDDR5 takes you into a little bit of an uncomfortable place," says Nick Baker. "Having ESRAM costs very little power and has the opportunity to give you very high bandwidth. You can reduce the bandwidth on external memory - that saves a lot of power consumption and the commodity memory is cheaper as well so you can afford more. That's really a driving force behind that... if you want a high memory capacity, relatively low power and a lot of bandwidth there are not too many ways of solving that."

The controversy surrounding ESRAM has taken the design team very much by surprise. The notion that Xbox One is difficult to work with is perhaps quite hard to swallow for the same team that produced Xbox 360 - by far and away the easier console to develop for, especially so in the early years of the current console generation.

"This controversy is rather surprising to me, especially when you view as ESRAM as the evolution of eDRAM from the Xbox 360. No-one questions on the Xbox 360 whether we can get the eDRAM bandwidth concurrent with the bandwidth coming out of system memory. In fact, the system design required it," explains Andrew Goosen.

"We had to pull over all of our vertex buffers and all of our textures out of system memory concurrent with going on with render targets, colour, depth, stencil buffers that were in eDRAM. Of course with Xbox One we're going with a design where ESRAM has the same natural extension that we had with eDRAM on Xbox 360, to have both going concurrently. It's a nice evolution of the Xbox 360 in that we could clean up a lot of the limitations that we had with the eDRAM.

"The Xbox 360 was the easiest console platform to develop for, it wasn't that hard for our developers to adapt to eDRAM, but there were a number of places where we said, 'gosh, it would sure be nice if an entire render target didn't have to live in eDRAM' and so we fixed that on Xbox One where we have the ability to overflow from ESRAM into DDR3, so the ESRAM is fully integrated into our page tables and so you can kind of mix and match the ESRAM and the DDR memory as you go... From my perspective it's very much an evolution and improvement - a big improvement - over the design we had with the Xbox 360. I'm kind of surprised by all this, quite frankly."

Consider the Wii U is less powerful and yet it has the same if not more eDRAM and larger CPU cache than either of the next generation consoles. Also that the latency of ES and ED RAM is the same. Wii U should be able to do a lot more than 360 and PS3. Going by Sony's lead architect and Microsoft engineers who say the setup is "very much an evolution and improvement - a big improvement - over the design we had with the Xbox 360"

Tess...what a slut.