Wii U Hardware Investigation

[lamedude]

Somewhere along the line people were saying the WiiU would have similar specs to the 360 and devs would be able to easily port games to it thus solving the no 3rd party games problem. We can see how that turned out.

 

[sm625]

Oh my god.... You realize that's because the games have less variation in the animations and speeds for the analog stick, which Mario 64 was a showcase for...? It's nothing to do with the analog sticks themselves.

That is not true. It has everything to do with the analog stick. Mario in mario 64 had more variations in speed than any walking character in any previous game, and its been all backwards since then. Here's another case in point:

On the original ocarina of time for N64, I was able to score well over 1500 points at horseback archery. (1500 gets you the quiver upgrade.) Recently my kid was playing ocarina of time on the wii, using the gamecube controller. I saw how badly he was doing on that same horseback archery track. When I tried it for myself I could understand why. I could barely even score 500 points. The analog stick on the gamecube controller is just so imprecise that there is no way to do that minigame. I doubt even that android from star trek could score 1500 using that thing. It is almost exactly the same design in the same for PS2 and Xbox, some sort of potentiometer based sensor. The N64 stick was optical, far more precise, but more costly, especially to replace. And it had to be calibrated/zeroed at startup. So, more cost, and more hassle for the player to set up. Sony just figured they could save a buck by going with the cheaper version which also requires no startup calibration. Everyone else, including nintendo, eventually followed suit. Horrible mistake imo. I dont know how or why no one ever raised a big stink over it, but it was a big deal to me ever since the original crapstation analog controller was launched.

 

[tipoo]

*Wii U's DDR3 RAM bandwidth has theoretical maximum of 51,2GBps since it has four 512MB chips and not one large 2GB chip so anyone thinking that its maximum bandwidth is mere 12.8GBps is a tech illiterate. Xbox 360 had theoretical maximum of 22.8Gbps though it has a bottleneck that turns it down to mere 10Gbps thanks to poor FSB.

Ahahahaha...Oh my word. The PS3 and 360 don't have a single RAM module either, they're several chips. The bandwidth numbers you see are already addressing all of them. Tech illiterate indeed. This is like the people who were saying it could be dual or quad channel, but we've already counted the bandwidth of every pin going to the MCM, so no, that would not increase it.

And do you know that most Nintendo consoles have overprovisioned their power supplies in such a way? People hoping for a clock speed bump with that extra wattage are deluding themselves. If it was available, Nintendo would have let developers struggling with 20FPS games use it. And their own games don't even push it past 33W. It probably uses half its power supplies peak for efficiency reasons.

I talked to Anand himself on twitter about this by the way, if you doubt the bandwidth ask him. We're already counting the bandwidth of every pin every module has, so there's no more adding them together past the 12.8GB/s.