Nintendo DX GPU?

[BigDaveX]

As it stands I think porting to WiiU is not that hard which is why many games were announced for it and then cancelled.

Oh yes it is. One of my friends from university worked at a fairly major UK developer until last year, including on a Wii U project. And he confirmed what a lot of other devs have been saying; the Wii U's CPU is embarrassingly pathetic even compared to those of the PS3/360, to say nothing of the PS4/Xbone. Porting over games for last-gen systems is apparently pretty feasible so long as you can port some CPU code over to GPGPU and can cope with the lack of a hard drive, but current generation? Not a hope in hell.

As for developers hating Nintendo... eh, it seems to be pretty half-and-half. A lot of people at that particular developer wanted to publicly burn their bridges with them after they were done with that Wii U game (and a few lead developers actually did after they'd left), but they're also mindful that there's probably as much chance of Microsoft leaving the console business as Nintendo, and the last thing they want to do is leave themselves in a position where Sony can do whatever the hell they want.

 

[Exophase]

I think we can be reasonably certain that Nintendo's next console won't possess some incredible efficiency advantage over the state of the art we see in PCs today and that it won't have the incredible cost and heat premium necessary to put it in the league of a high-end PC. The kind of feats that may have been possible with consoles up to 10 years ago just aren't realistic today.

The statement given is hard to decipher. Technically all it says is that the dev kit includes a demo that runs at < 60fps on a high(ish) end PC (that could actually be just about anything). It never says that it runs better on the Nintendo hardware, and in fact it's entirely possible that the dev kit isn't running on Nintendo hardware at all - why else would they be running code on PCs in the first place? While it's implied that the Nintendo hardware runs it better it could be purely down to their assumptions of how demos should play.

 

[sxr7171]

Oh yes it is. One of my friends from university worked at a fairly major UK developer until last year, including on a Wii U project. And he confirmed what a lot of other devs have been saying; the Wii U's CPU is embarrassingly pathetic even compared to those of the PS3/360, to say nothing of the PS4/Xbone. Porting over games for last-gen systems is apparently pretty feasible so long as you can port some CPU code over to GPGPU and can cope with the lack of a hard drive, but current generation? Not a hope in hell.

As for developers hating Nintendo... eh, it seems to be pretty half-and-half. A lot of people at that particular developer wanted to publicly burn their bridges with them after they were done with that Wii U game (and a few lead developers actually did after they'd left), but they're also mindful that there's probably as much chance of Microsoft leaving the console business as Nintendo, and the last thing they want to do is leave themselves in a position where Sony can do whatever the hell they want.

I didn't know it was so hard.

 

[Madpacket]

I think we can be reasonably certain that Nintendo's next console won't possess some incredible efficiency advantage over the state of the art we see in PCs today and that it won't have the incredible cost and heat premium necessary to put it in the league of a high-end PC. The kind of feats that may have been possible with consoles up to 10 years ago just aren't realistic today.

The statement given is hard to decipher. Technically all it says is that the dev kit includes a demo that runs at < 60fps on a high(ish) end PC (that could actually be just about anything). It never says that it runs better on the Nintendo hardware, and in fact it's entirely possible that the dev kit isn't running on Nintendo hardware at all - why else would they be running code on PCs in the first place? While it's implied that the Nintendo hardware runs it better it could be purely down to their assumptions of how demos should play.

Depends on what Nintendo has secured from AMD. If they are waiting on some 20 or less nm HBM/APU to mature they will have a lot more flexibility on form factor and less issues with heat to deal with. This would put on them on par with a decent gaming PC *today* which would be much further ahead of the PS4 or XBOX One.

I think we both agree it's pretty obvious these Nintendo dev kits are just X86 PC's with target performance in mind. I believe the PS4 and XBOX "dev kits" used the same formula which is completely reasonable when you're waiting on a design to mature.

The NX is a puzzle though - from the rumors its' supposed to be gaming console first with a Wii-U like controller that can completely run independently of the gaming console.

So as an engineer how you would accomplish being able to take these same games on the go?

The only thing that makes sense to me is they must have some sort of scaled down APU stored inside the handheld in order to run the same code albeit at a reduced resolution and or framerate. So when you're away from the main console, streaming goes away and you continue with basically a new portable handheld unit with APU guts.

Yes it would make more sense from a cost / power / performance ratio to house some high end ARM tech in the handheld unit but that would require some sort of Java like JIT compiling nonsense that would probably hurt performance. It would also reduce performance on the main console as you now have to run portable code.

I don't see this as an option as it would introduce additional complexity in the porting of third party titles.

Anyways, should be interesting what they come out with. Nintendo is not in the position Sega was in when they launched the Dreamcast, they have a lot more valuable IP to leverage and large sums of money in the bank (a few years ago they were worth more than Sony!) so they can take risks but they need to win back third party publishers and clean up their online multiplayer gaming experience.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

The statement given is hard to decipher. Technically all it says is that the dev kit includes a demo that runs at < 60fps on a high(ish) end PC (that could actually be just about anything). It never says that it runs better on the Nintendo hardware, and in fact it's entirely possible that the dev kit isn't running on Nintendo hardware at all - why else would they be running code on PCs in the first place? While it's implied that the Nintendo hardware runs it better it could be purely down to their assumptions of how demos should play.

It could be that the dev kit demo is running slower on PCs than it's meant to run on the NX, but it could be that the reason isn't that the NX has more raw horsepower than the PCs -- it could just be that the NX has (will have) some communication latency advantages derived from the APU design that PCs with discrete cannot duplicate.

Also, as I pointed out earlier in this thread, a specific sentence used was "pushes more polygons than". This could mean anything, including the very literal interpretation that it can draw more polygons/second than current desktop cards. Since the polygons/second metric is currently not terribly critical for performance, it could well be that they have a design with much better triangle setup than current AMD desktop cards just because of newer GPU tech, giving them a ridiculous advantage in that particular metric even if the GPU as a whole isn't very powerful.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

So when you're away from the main console, streaming goes away and you continue with basically a new portable handheld unit with APU guts.

Yes it would make more sense from a cost / power / performance ratio to house some high end ARM tech in the handheld unit but that would require some sort of Java like JIT compiling nonsense that would probably hurt performance. It would also reduce performance on the main console as you now have to run portable code.

AMD has succesfully integrated ARM cores into their designs now, even if said designs are not very popular. I would not be terribly surprised if the NX had an AMD APU with ARM CPU cores, and the handheld would essentially have a miniature version of the same APU -- exactly the same GPU and CPU tech, just less CUs, cores and clockspeed.

 

[Exophase]

It could be that the dev kit demo is running slower on PCs than it's meant to run on the NX, but it could be that the reason isn't that the NX has more raw horsepower than the PCs -- it could just be that the NX has (will have) some communication latency advantages derived from the APU design that PCs with discrete cannot duplicate.

Also, as I pointed out earlier in this thread, a specific sentence used was "pushes more polygons than". This could mean anything, including the very literal interpretation that it can draw more polygons/second than current desktop cards. Since the polygons/second metric is currently not terribly critical for performance, it could well be that they have a design with much better triangle setup than current AMD desktop cards just because of newer GPU tech, giving them a ridiculous advantage in that particular metric even if the GPU as a whole isn't very powerful.

There's plenty of possible explanations for why a demo would perform worse on some PC than some console hardware, I just think it's important to note that at this point we don't even know that this is what's happening.

I doubt it's down to the hardware being much better at any one particular thing like triangle setup. Not so much because it can't be done but because I doubt they'd use this much of a custom design. Advantages due to memory hierarchy are more plausible but it'd be weird if this manifested in something like raw polygon throughput. If there really is a big discrepancy I'd consider software explanations to be more likely. Like the API being used in a way that's more pathologically bad, unusual overheads imposed by the devkit, etc.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

I doubt it's down to the hardware being much better at any one particular thing like triangle setup. Not so much because it can't be done but because I doubt they'd use this much of a custom design.

I'm not voting for custom design, I'm voting for it being developed for 16nm and thus based on the one GPU architecture that AMD already has for 16nm -- Arctic Islands. And as triangle setup is a sort of a limiting factor on some loads on current highest-end AMD cards, I expect that they will boost it somewhat and as this doesn't really require much more resources, it might translate to much more polygons/second on a same-level card.

Certainly agree with your point about how little we actually really know at this point.

 

[Exophase]

I'm not voting for custom design, I'm voting for it being developed for 16nm and thus based on the one GPU architecture that AMD already has for 16nm -- Arctic Islands. And as triangle setup is a sort of a limiting factor on some loads on current highest-end AMD cards, I expect that they will boost it somewhat and as this doesn't really require much more resources, it might translate to much more polygons/second on a same-level card.

Okay, that's a fair possibility I didn't really consider.

I'd be surprised if Arctic Islands raises the triangle rate enough to make it much higher than Volcanic Islands even with what will surely be a less than high end clock speed, but it's possible that a comparison was being made with something like Tahiti instead which has half the peak rate.

 

[jpiniero]

The NX is almost certainly 28 nm. Arctic Islands is even less likely... you have to remember that they have to have final hardware several months before launch and my understanding is that it will be released sometime in 2016. Plus I would have to think it would have to have HBM which is obviously way too expensive. I do think you will see a portion of the chip dedicated to custom hardware though.

 

[SlowSpyder]

I know it's fantasy, but wouldn't it be cool if it had four to six 2.0 - 2.4GHz Excavator cores with a PS4 level GPU portion of the APU and at least as much bandwidth as the PS4?

 

[Techhog]

NX is 28nm. The CPU is a quad-core Cortex-A15 at 2.1GHz for the console and 800MHz for the handheld. The console has 384 GCN 1.2 SPs, and the handheld has 64. They're aiming for $130 for the basic handheld, $160 for the XL version, and $200-230 for the console. RAM isn't finalized, but both will have DDR3 (LPDDR3 for the handheld, or maybe for both), probably 2GB for the handheld and 8GB for the console.

For reference, Wii U has 160 R700 cores for the GPU and three tiny fossils for a CPU.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

NX is 28nm. The CPU is a quad-core Cortex-A15 at 2.1GHz for the console and 800MHz for the handheld. The console has 384 GCN 1.2 SPs, and the handheld has 64. They're aiming for $130 for the basic handheld, $160 for the XL version, and $200-230 for the console. RAM isn't finalized, but both will have DDR3 (LPDDR3 for the handheld, or maybe for both), probably 2GB for the handheld and 8GB for the console.

For reference, Wii U has 160 R700 cores for the GPU and three tiny fossils for a CPU.

What kind of source do you have?

 

[jpiniero]

NX is 28nm. The CPU is a quad-core Cortex-A15 at 2.1GHz for the console and 800MHz for the handheld. The console has 384 GCN 1.2 SPs, and the handheld has 64. They're aiming for $130 for the basic handheld, $160 for the XL version, and $200-230 for the console. RAM isn't finalized, but both will have DDR3 (LPDDR3 for the handheld, or maybe for both), probably 2GB for the handheld and 8GB for the console.

Pretty reasonable, although pretty disappointing there isn't more GCN cores. You'd be pretty much limited to 720p.

 

[Silverforce11]

NX is 28nm. The CPU is a quad-core Cortex-A15 at 2.1GHz for the console and 800MHz for the handheld. The console has 384 GCN 1.2 SPs, and the handheld has 64. They're aiming for $130 for the basic handheld, $160 for the XL version, and $200-230 for the console. RAM isn't finalized, but both will have DDR3 (LPDDR3 for the handheld, or maybe for both), probably 2GB for the handheld and 8GB for the console.

For reference, Wii U has 160 R700 cores for the GPU and three tiny fossils for a CPU.

Extremely meh if true. Basically a glorified mobile.

 

[NTMBK]

What kind of source do you have?

His eternal hatred of Nintendo.

 

[lamedude]

three tiny fossils for a CPU.

MFW you realize the PPC 750 is older than the WiiU's target audience.

 

[Techhog]

MFW you realize the PPC 750 is older than the WiiU's target audience.

*ahem*

 

[tential]

*ahem*

Lol, I actually have played more and more "kids" games the older I get.

 

[sm625]

The problem is that their "old fanbase" has grown up and they don't have the time/money to spend big bucks on a console just for some NEStalgia gaming.

I dont know about that. I had played all the Zelda games but I was kind of ambivalent about Skyward Sword because I thought maybe I had just outgrown it. And the first hour or so playing it I still wasnt sure about it. But then it all came back to me. The game was awesome. I would buy the next console just to play that one franchise. The funny thing is that the kids these days are actually too lazy to even play through a game like that. They're so into mindless garbage smartphone shovelware that they literally do not possess the attention span to play a game like that. It's sad to say, but my kid watched more youtube videos of Skyward Sword gameplay than he had actual game time. He'd be telling me this and that about what was coming up or how to beat this boss or figure out that puzzle. He seemed really into the game, but really didnt actually play it. And I'm like... are you frickin serious?

 

[monstercameron]

Why not a carrizo and Mullins apu. They are more than powerful enough for Nintendo consoles, the only thing would be Mullins power draw at default clocks. A slight under clock to 800mhz cpu can 300mhz gpu could get it to sub 5w power draw.

 

[Techhog]

Why not a carrizo and Mullins apu. They are more than powerful enough for Nintendo consoles, the only thing would be Mullins power draw at default clocks. A slight under clock to 800mhz cpu can 300mhz gpu could get it to sub 5w power draw.

That's just ridiculous if you're not talking about the handheld. Would that level of GPU horsepower even match Wii U?

EDIT: I may have read this wrong/you may have worded it poorly. Anyway, Carrizo is too new and unproven for Nintendo, so they're going with what I said earlier.

on top of this, third parties are being encouraged to only make handheld games and then port them to the console at 1080p. By the way, the handheld will have 540p screens. I also only mentioned the low-end spec range for the GPUs. The handheld might get 128 SPs and the console might get 512. Don't hold your breath though.

 

[Madpacket]

That's just ridiculous if you're not talking about the handheld. Would that level of GPU horsepower even match Wii U?

EDIT: I may have read this wrong/you may have worded it poorly. Anyway, Carrizo is too new and unproven for Nintendo, so they're going with what I said earlier.

on top of this, third parties are being encouraged to only make handheld games and then port them to the console at 1080p. By the way, the handheld will have 540p screens. I also only mentioned the low-end spec range for the GPUs. The handheld might get 128 SPs and the console might get 512. Don't hold your breath though.

That makes sense from a cost perspective but that's about it. Do you have any sources for this info?

 

[jpiniero]

512 wouldn't be horrible considering it's GCN 1.2. I'm assuming it doesn't have any ESRAM like the XBone though.

That makes sense from a cost perspective but that's about it. Do you have any sources for this info?

I still don't know what you were really expecting. The PS4 recently got a price cut to $349, so it probably costs them a little bit more than that. To get down to $200 there is going to be... compromises. Nintendo of course doesn't like taking a loss on the console.

 

[Techhog]

512 wouldn't be horrible considering it's GCN 1.2. I'm assuming it doesn't have any ESRAM like the XBone though.



I still don't know what you were really expecting. The PS4 recently got a price cut to $349, so it probably costs them a little bit more than that. To get down to $200 there is going to be... compromises. Nintendo of course doesn't like taking a loss on the console.

I believe that PS4 is still profitable even with the cut.