AMD to power Wii U

[jiffylube1024]

They may be better off with a 5750/5770 class of GPU as it would enable them to use the more advanced technologies while keeping power draw quite low, especially if it was on 32nm.

Idle power draw is a virtual non-factor on consoles, where they are rendering graphics pretty much constantly.

Actually there are three:

Cost
Power
Lead time

My nephew stayed with me last week and brought his Xbox 360 with him. You could hear the blower on the thing throughout the house. Heck, it was louder than the games most of the time.

That was probably an original "Xenos" or "Zephyr" Xbox 360; those consume ~200W when gaming. The new, slim Xbox 360's on 45nm run much quieter and cooler.

You don't really get a huge advantage of using a 5xxx or 6xxx series GPU over a 4xxx series GPU at the same manufacturing node like 40nm or 32nm when the specs are the same, like a 640SP 800 MHz 40nm 4770 vs a fictional 640sp 800 MHz 40nm "5770".

 

[Red Hawk]

The main advantage the 5000 and 6000 series have over the 4000 series aside from manufacturing technology is the rendering technology it's compatible with, namely DirectX 11. But that's proprietary Microsoft technology, so Nintendo would have to use a form of OpenGL or its own custom API. Which AMD can simply adapt its 4000 series GPU around.

 

[Mopetar]

The main advantage the 5000 and 6000 series have over the 4000 series aside from manufacturing technology is the rendering technology it's compatible with, namely DirectX 11. But that's proprietary Microsoft technology, so Nintendo would have to use a form of OpenGL or its own custom API. Which AMD can simply adapt its 4000 series GPU around.

I think Nintendo uses something similar to OpenGL, but it's not exactly OpenGL. It do believe they are fairly similar, though. The 4000 series has OpenGL 3.2 support, whereas the 5000 series and on supports 4.1. Although I'm not familiar with major feature differences between the two, believe the differences are fairly similar to those between DirectX 10 and 11. The biggest one that comes to mind is hardware tessellation.

 

[Red Hawk]

Actually, the 5000 series is only compliant with OpenGL 3.2, while the 4000 series is only compliant with OpenGL 2.1.

 

[BFG10K]

In the Diamond Monster 3dII (which I had from mid 98 till early 2001) control panel there was a checkbox for forcing trilinear filtering IIRC (didn't it halve texel fillrate?).

Everything up to the Voodoo 3 only supported approximated trilinear (I think the VSA-100 was the same). It wasn’t true per-pixel based trilinear.

I certainly don't remember rough texture stage transitions or texture aliasing on any game I played on it.

Games back then just used basic rasterization. You can’t compare the output of a Voodoo in those games to a modern card filtering new games. And again, the Voodoo didn’t even support AF.

 

[Mopetar]

Actually, the 5000 series is only compliant with OpenGL 3.2, while the 4000 series is only compliant with OpenGL 2.1.

I grabbed my information from Wikipedia, so it is very possible that it's wrong. Where did you get that information?

 

[Red Hawk]

GPUreview.com.