Wii A Wii Bit Underpowered ?

[Shikaku]

wow......... until now i thought the wii was powered by a 1.8ghz power pc cpu, similar to the xbox360, just lower clockspeed and 1 core... that 700 something mhz really is a bit low.. and gfx chip faster gc version... wow... nonetheless the wii will rock.

Mircosoft and Sony and shooting themselves in the foot, Sony before they even release their console...

 

[iignotus]

wow......... until now i thought the wii was powered by a 1.8ghz power pc cpu, similar to the xbox360, just lower clockspeed and 1 core... that 700 something mhz really is a bit low.. and gfx chip faster gc version... wow... nonetheless the wii will rock.

Mircosoft and Sony and shooting themselves in the foot, Sony before they even release their console...

Microsoft's actually in quite a comfortable seat, though they would be with any venture. Sony is going to get killed with the PS3. Nintendo will do better than even out with the Wii, but they won't be significantly ahead of Microsoft when all is said and done.

 

[Aninhumer]

I was going to buy a Wii, probably not at release because I'm a cheapskate, but if it's only £20 less than an XBOX 360...
I don't want a wavy wand that much.

EDIT: Actually to be fair I wouldn't be paying for it anyhow.

 

[Ganepark32]

From what I have seen, ste_167, I believe the 'Top' player plays with a mirrored image. As for HDMI, I don't think that many people will be bothered. Peoples TV's will be good enough to play it with the best picture it can give without having to go out and buy a HD tv. And if you've got a HD tv at the mo then thats ur problem. Ok, xbox360 games use it and PS3 will, but other than that only 3 or 4 sky digital channels will output in it. HD is to big a gamble right now and way too expensive.

And Aninhumer, u sound like you seriously underestimate the Wii-mote. But then most people will because graphics are everything. Not. Just look at DS and you should see how well the Wii will do. Ok it might not sell on that scale but it'll be close enough to it.

 

[Vollgasasi]

what concernes me is that the wii (and ps3,x360) has a life cycle of around 5 years... the wii's hardware will be very outdated in 5 years, the ps3 and xbox360 will be even better positioned then (gfx wise) as the game developer will have adopted those multicores and unified shader in the 360 more whereas the wii is at it's limit already with it's gfx processor which should already be pretty much fully explored by the developers...

ahh well i'm still getting the wii cause it looks the coolest (blue led's ....yea) and the controls! oh yea baby and retro of course.

 

[pantera6]

just saw this
pretty good
http://thisiswaiting.com/
damed funny infact.
if the wii gets 480p output i will be happy. if it doesnt i will be rather mad.
will be getting an xbox 360 aswell once thats cheaper and stuff because i dont think ill be able to give up video gaming with a pad. but who knows...

 

[Epicenter]

The Wii's hardware is very beefy. It has an advantage that is hardware is very GameCube-similar, so original SDKs stay compatible. This eases development costs for smaller studios that can't afford to shell out exorbitant fees to MS or Sony to develop shovelware for their machines (I'm looking at you, EA). Developers like Treasure rejoice. The hardware is well-understood and simple, so it can be taken full advantage of right out of the gate.

It is a power PC based CPU. Because of that the MHz doesn't compare directly.

The primary core of the "Cell" processor is a PowerPC core, and the XBox 360's cores are all PowerPC units. But they are some of IBM's slowest, least-efficient, hottest-running, and most power-hungry cores. They run at so high a clockrate because their performance per clock tick is terrible. The biggest problem is that game engines parallelize across multiple CPUs very poorly, so the other 2 cores end up getting very little done, just tiny helper tasks that only take miniscule burden off the primary core.

The situation with the PS3's CPU is much worse. Sony likes to call it 'rivalling that of supercomputers'. Well, that's sort of true; except that a SuperComputer would only be such because it has many, many, MANY processors. You can have a supercomputer made from thousands of 486DX2-66 processors. The "Cell" is effectively a backwards-designed vector processor. The PowerPC core divvies out instructions to an array of Vector units. What Sony would like you to believe is that this is a well-trained lean mean Processor Army ready to tear into today's latest games. What they don't tell you is that Vector Processing is designed primarily for performing a uniform task across a massive data set, again and again and again.

Suppose you need to take a set of 512,000,000 numbers and square them all. You'd get a vector processor to do it, and it'd be unbelievably fast at it, due to the repetitive workload and giant data set. They're best for 'set it and forget it' tasks, like cryptography, compression, scientific applications, perhaps code-breaking. Does this sound like something you'd do in a console? No. In a console game, you do a lot of dynamic work. Decisions of the player and dynamic and often random actions in the game dictate new instructions every frame. Putting such a workload on a Vector processor makes it run around like a chicken with its head cut off, accomplishing next to nothing. The main PowerPC core is as weak as one of the XBox 360's, so it's in need of all the help it can get.

But that's not the worst part. To feed the screaming little birds that are the Vector units, the main PowerPC core must interrupt its work. Then right away, they will need more instructions, and more, reporting back with tiny bits of completed work that do extremely little good. In the end, it's usually faster to do the work on the main PowerPC core than have it stop everything it is doing to babysit the 'mighty processor army'. To make matters worse, the Vector processors have extremely limited memory access, as well. You thought the GP2X's 940T was bad!

World-renowned 3D game programmer and father of the Quake I/II/III Doom/Doom 3 and Wolfenstein 3D engines reported the XBox 360 and PS3 had roughly the CPU processing power of a Pentium 4 at 1.4 GHz in a real-world scenario. That's much weaker than anything a 729 MHz PowerPC chip can do. (I find it odd the article does not even MENTION the larger SRAM as well-- 1T SRAM is extremely fast, and will provide even more performance gains. The extremely fast GDDR3 memory will also be usable by the CPU-- that's a massive performance boost right there. No desktop PC processor is even capable of using GDDR3 yet.)

The CPU sounds weak clockrate-wise-- but when you take these factors into account, the Wii has the CPU advantage. Graphically? It's not as powerful, certainly. But XBox 360 games and PS3 games, despite a lot of deceptive press filled with workstation-rendered fake videos that hooked lots of buyers, fail to impress visually, falling short of the performance of even the LAST generation of PC 3D accelerators. The Wii's graphical prowess may not be quite as high as the XBox 360 or PS3 in an ideal environment, but until the developers for the other 2 systems are able to make sense of the ridiculous hardware in front of them, it won't matter.

Also things that don't seem to be really making the impact they should-- the GPU will recieve a big performance boost from the enormous memory bandwidth of all that onboard VRAM-- the XBox 360's GPU has a piteously small amount, much too little to actually do much good. As for it being the 'exact same'? With the support and features listed, this cannot be the case. The GPU has clearly been redesigned. I question the validity of this article again ...

And at the end of the day, what really matters-- how many polygons your football player in NFL Roster Update 2009 has, or actual gameplay? ... That's what boils down to for me. I don't see myself buying any of the consoles in the near future, but if I got one, it'd end up being the Wii. It'll be the only machine with interesting and innovative titles from creative and revered game studios-- while the other two machines are teeming with sequels and more rehashes of already-stale formulaic game licenses. No thanks. And there's always the little bonus of the 'virtual console' emulators. Nintendo's hardware has always been strange and hard to emulate. Now that the company that designed it is taking the reins on emulating it, we should see some fantastically accurate emulators for the system that will outclass the experience of playing these games on a PC.

I haven't thought positively of a home game console since the Dreamcast, so I must give the Wii credit for rousing some of my attention. It's not very easy to do in this industry.

To those of you who actually read my insanely long post, if you don't wish to hear my views on the age-old MD vs. SNES debate, you may stop reading here.

The SNES only had something like 3.5MHz cpu, that's true, but as Vimacs said... it had some nifty hardware that meant the slow cpu didn't matter. Overall it was a more powerful system.
(sound and graphical quality were much better on the snes. Most games looked better on the snes)
</offtopic>

It ran at 2.68 MHz in 99% of games. It had more colors possible onscreen at once but most games didn't take advantage of it. It had a lower resolution than the MD/Genesis (it could use resolutions higher than the MD's, but it would run abysmally because the CPU was too slow to arrange the tiles). The slow CPU still had to move all the sprites around, it had no help with that, so most sprites stayed very small, composed of very few tiles, compared to MD games. Most SNES games experienced very bad 'bullet time' when things got stressful-- the Megaman X series lagged awfully, Sparkster lags badly, the Star Wars games are all lagapaloozas. Lots of people thought Super R-Type had an automatic slowdown function to help you out when things got intense onscreen-- that was just the slowdown.

Now, SNES games that used the hardware right could look damn awesome, and sound good too-- using a lot of PCM audio. I prefer the sound of realtime sampled FM from the MD personally; the MD didn't do PCM that well in most cases (a few games did a great job) while the SNES did horribly shitty FM, but great PCM. (The downside being that a lot of PCM made ROM sizes large and cartridges expensive.)

Overall it was a matter of MD games being much faster and responsive, for more reflex-testing gameplay, while SNES games had prettier graphics and fancier effects and sound, but laggy or less-responsive gameplay. It's a real toss-up. I prefer the MD since I'm less about graphics and more about quick, snappy gameplay. But everyone's got their own opinion on that matter ...

 

[daclassicgamingmaster]

Fact is while most of the time being less powerfully Nintendo systems always tend to be more fun.

lol vimacs you always say the darndest things! Fact? Definitly not. I happen to think my ds is a load of baby crap, with of course the exception of Castlevania, and im sure the zelda title, because zelda just plain rocks.

I like my psp, call me a fanboy I really couldnt care less. Nintendo died to me with the release of the gamecube. Perhaps I saw some rigor mortis with Resident Evil 4, but in all honesty I prefer my ps2 and psp over the DS and cube. With that said, I DO play my snes more than both combined .



I dont find touching wario, peach, and yoshi fun. I dont like cutting people open with a stylus. I think Nintendo's game idea suck recently.


So perhaps edit your post so it no longer says "fact is", but "IMO"....and im sure Im not alone on this.

edit: the rigor mortis comment would be pretty ironic if RE4 were based on zombies and not alien-esque creatures like all the other titles lmao

 

[fluffyhamster]

The Wii's hardware is very beefy. It has an advantage that is hardware is very GameCube-similar, so original SDKs stay compatible. This eases development costs for smaller studios that can't afford to shell out exorbitant fees to MS or Sony to develop shovelware for their machines (I'm looking at you, EA). Developers like Treasure rejoice. The hardware is well-understood and simple, so it can be taken full advantage of right out of the gate.

It is a power PC based CPU. Because of that the MHz doesn't compare directly.

The primary core of the "Cell" processor is a PowerPC core, and the XBox 360's cores are all PowerPC units. But they are some of IBM's slowest, least-efficient, hottest-running, and most power-hungry cores. They run at so high a clockrate because their performance per clock tick is terrible. The biggest problem is that game engines parallelize across multiple CPUs very poorly, so the other 2 cores end up getting very little done, just tiny helper tasks that only take miniscule burden off the primary core.

The situation with the PS3's CPU is much worse. Sony likes to call it 'rivalling that of supercomputers'. Well, that's sort of true; except that a SuperComputer would only be such because it has many, many, MANY processors. You can have a supercomputer made from thousands of 486DX2-66 processors. The "Cell" is effectively a backwards-designed vector processor. The PowerPC core divvies out instructions to an array of Vector units. What Sony would like you to believe is that this is a well-trained lean mean Processor Army ready to tear into today's latest games. What they don't tell you is that Vector Processing is designed primarily for performing a uniform task across a massive data set, again and again and again.

Suppose you need to take a set of 512,000,000 numbers and square them all. You'd get a vector processor to do it, and it'd be unbelievably fast at it, due to the repetitive workload and giant data set. They're best for 'set it and forget it' tasks, like cryptography, compression, scientific applications, perhaps code-breaking. Does this sound like something you'd do in a console? No. In a console game, you do a lot of dynamic work. Decisions of the player and dynamic and often random actions in the game dictate new instructions every frame. Putting such a workload on a Vector processor makes it run around like a chicken with its head cut off, accomplishing next to nothing. The main PowerPC core is as weak as one of the XBox 360's, so it's in need of all the help it can get.

But that's not the worst part. To feed the screaming little birds that are the Vector units, the main PowerPC core must interrupt its work. Then right away, they will need more instructions, and more, reporting back with tiny bits of completed work that do extremely little good. In the end, it's usually faster to do the work on the main PowerPC core than have it stop everything it is doing to babysit the 'mighty processor army'. To make matters worse, the Vector processors have extremely limited memory access, as well. You thought the GP2X's 940T was bad!

World-renowned 3D game programmer and father of the Quake I/II/III Doom/Doom 3 and Wolfenstein 3D engines reported the XBox 360 and PS3 had roughly the CPU processing power of a Pentium 4 at 1.4 GHz in a real-world scenario. That's much weaker than anything a 729 MHz PowerPC chip can do. (I find it odd the article does not even MENTION the larger SRAM as well-- 1T SRAM is extremely fast, and will provide even more performance gains. The extremely fast GDDR3 memory will also be usable by the CPU-- that's a massive performance boost right there. No desktop PC processor is even capable of using GDDR3 yet.)

The CPU sounds weak clockrate-wise-- but when you take these factors into account, the Wii has the CPU advantage. Graphically? It's not as powerful, certainly. But XBox 360 games and PS3 games, despite a lot of deceptive press filled with workstation-rendered fake videos that hooked lots of buyers, fail to impress visually, falling short of the performance of even the LAST generation of PC 3D accelerators. The Wii's graphical prowess may not be quite as high as the XBox 360 or PS3 in an ideal environment, but until the developers for the other 2 systems are able to make sense of the ridiculous hardware in front of them, it won't matter.

Also things that don't seem to be really making the impact they should-- the GPU will recieve a big performance boost from the enormous memory bandwidth of all that onboard VRAM-- the XBox 360's GPU has a piteously small amount, much too little to actually do much good. As for it being the 'exact same'? With the support and features listed, this cannot be the case. The GPU has clearly been redesigned. I question the validity of this article again ...

And at the end of the day, what really matters-- how many polygons your football player in NFL Roster Update 2009 has, or actual gameplay? ... That's what boils down to for me. I don't see myself buying any of the consoles in the near future, but if I got one, it'd end up being the Wii. It'll be the only machine with interesting and innovative titles from creative and revered game studios-- while the other two machines are teeming with sequels and more rehashes of already-stale formulaic game licenses. No thanks. And there's always the little bonus of the 'virtual console' emulators. Nintendo's hardware has always been strange and hard to emulate. Now that the company that designed it is taking the reins on emulating it, we should see some fantastically accurate emulators for the system that will outclass the experience of playing these games on a PC.

I haven't thought positively of a home game console since the Dreamcast, so I must give the Wii credit for rousing some of my attention. It's not very easy to do in this industry.

To those of you who actually read my insanely long post, if you don't wish to hear my views on the age-old MD vs. SNES debate, you may stop reading here.

The SNES only had something like 3.5MHz cpu, that's true, but as Vimacs said... it had some nifty hardware that meant the slow cpu didn't matter. Overall it was a more powerful system.
(sound and graphical quality were much better on the snes. Most games looked better on the snes)
</offtopic>

It ran at 2.68 MHz in 99% of games. It had more colors possible onscreen at once but most games didn't take advantage of it. It had a lower resolution than the MD/Genesis (it could use resolutions higher than the MD's, but it would run abysmally because the CPU was too slow to arrange the tiles). The slow CPU still had to move all the sprites around, it had no help with that, so most sprites stayed very small, composed of very few tiles, compared to MD games. Most SNES games experienced very bad 'bullet time' when things got stressful-- the Megaman X series lagged awfully, Sparkster lags badly, the Star Wars games are all lagapaloozas. Lots of people thought Super R-Type had an automatic slowdown function to help you out when things got intense onscreen-- that was just the slowdown.

Now, SNES games that used the hardware right could look damn awesome, and sound good too-- using a lot of PCM audio. I prefer the sound of realtime sampled FM from the MD personally; the MD didn't do PCM that well in most cases (a few games did a great job) while the SNES did horribly shitty FM, but great PCM. (The downside being that a lot of PCM made ROM sizes large and cartridges expensive.)

Overall it was a matter of MD games being much faster and responsive, for more reflex-testing gameplay, while SNES games had prettier graphics and fancier effects and sound, but laggy or less-responsive gameplay. It's a real toss-up. I prefer the MD since I'm less about graphics and more about quick, snappy gameplay. But everyone's got their own opinion on that matter ...

that actuelly made sense, GO WII!

 

[dockthepod]

The CPU sounds weak clockrate-wise-- but when you take these factors into account, the Wii has the CPU advantage.

I'm sorry, but this is just silly. I don't know much about the Xbox360, but there's a PS3 devkit a few feet away from me. The Cell is not a weak processor equivalent to a 1.4 P4. That's absurd. It might take a little more work (ok, a lot more) to get top performance out of it, but you need to be realistic here. Granted, it's not as good of a general purpose CPU as what you'd find in a desktop, but when developers utilize it correctly it has an amazing amount of power.

There is no way whatsoever that the the Wii will have the CPU advantage this generation. The only plus that the Wii has going for it (hardware wise, don't get me wrong on the fun-factor) is that devs will already be familiar with the system. The downside of this is that we won't see as much of an improvement in titles later on in the lifespan like we currently see.

 

[Epicenter]

I'm sorry, but this is just silly. I don't know much about the Xbox360, but there's a PS3 devkit a few feet away from me. The Cell is not a weak processor equivalent to a 1.4 P4. That's absurd. It might take a little more work (ok, a lot more) to get top performance out of it, but you need to be realistic here. Granted, it's not as good of a general purpose CPU as what you'd find in a desktop, but when developers utilize it correctly it has an amazing amount of power.

What the processor is technically capable of is wholly irrelevant. An array of Vector processing units has no place in a game console, period. It isn't able to be effectively utilized by a game engine, so most games will simply rely on the main processor core, which is exceedingly weak. The PS2 has vector units as well, and as I recall, only two games ever utilized them. This is not a coincidence, and it's part of the reason the PS2 will never reach its 'true potential'.

A great example is the Sega 32X. It had all the right hardware-- 2 high-end Hitachi SH-2 32-bit microprocessors at ~21 MHz apiece, enhanced audio capabilities, multiple additional graphical layers and the ability to operate concurrently with the MegaDrive's existing 68000 and Z80 coprocessor. It was a powerhouse in every regard. But, nothing was able to effectively utilize it! Most games ran on the Master processor and never touched the Slave SH-2, leaving half the system's processing power completely unutilized. The exact same held true with the Saturn, as its design was extremely similar to the 32X-- except it was an even bigger waste because the SH-2s were now ~28 MHz parts! So in the end, even though its hardware was technically superior to what the Playstation offered, it was unable to be effectively utilized and ended up at a disadvantage. One single fast SH-3 chip instead of 2 SH-2s could've fixed the whole mess, but it seemed to be a marketing ploy reinforcing the decision (Remember Sega's ad where they drop a PS1 out a window, saying it can't handle NiGHTS because it is too weak with only one processor?)

Clockrate, in this day and age, means nothing unless you are comparing processors of the same microarchitecture and core revision. Take a look at the '2.8 GHz Celeron' that performs worse than the '1.4 GHz Celeron' because the former is of the less powerful Northwood architecture, and the latter the superior Dothan architecture.

I'm not entirely clear why your having a PS3 development kit in close proximity to your person makes you more able to assert why programmers will be able to make a processor that is grossly mis-suited for its application and suffers from numerous engineering flaws operate entirely out of its environment to provide superior perofrmance than a cycle-efficent, power-efficient, heat-efficient processor that doesn't rely on big numbers to compensate for meager performance.

You do realize why the Cell Processor is in use, right? It was used as a marketing ploy and nothing else. An 'army of processors' was Sony's marketing dept's newest buzz-word to make their machine out to be something truly revolutionary and unprecedented. Just like the Emotion Engine before it, which Sony hyped to be able to 'render Toy Story in realtime' (modern high-end workstation PCs with 8+ processors and 4 specialized high-performance GPUs, using loads of rendering shortcuts, still cannot do) .. or that it was so powerful it was a weapon of mass destruction ... only to reveal another supercharged MIPS core that cost a fortune and delivered on none of its promises.

In this industry, it's not the era of the C64 demo, it's not about games like Gunstar Heroes or Sonic the Hedgehog or Ecco the Dolphin that squeeze every drop of possible performance from the hardware with custom airtight ASM code. It's not about producing the most glorious artful piece of software engineering mastery that is your final product by any means necessary. It's about taking what you had 2 years ago, putting a fresh coat of paint and polygons on it, and throwing it at the market with an incremented version number for as much money as possible, followed by as many generic sequels as possible to compensate for your massive licensing and SDK fees from Sony and Microsoft. The Bottom Line is king, not innovation or creativity, and developers will always squeeze by with what's easy because there is no time to fight with the hardware.

In an industry like that, what matters isn't 'what's possible' on the hardware. It's what you get. And when you rush your titles to market, you won't see nearly as much raw performance from the complex, overengineered messes like the Cell Processor you will from efficient tried-and-true logical designs like the Wii's CPU selection.

 

[dockthepod]

What the processor is technically capable of is wholly irrelevant. An array of Vector processing units has no place in a game console, period. It isn't able to be effectively utilized by a game engine, so most games will simply rely on the main processor core, which is exceedingly weak. The PS2 has vector units as well, and as I recall, only two games ever utilized them. This is not a coincidence, and it's part of the reason the PS2 will never reach its 'true potential'.

Um, I'm sorry to tell you but that is total and absolute bullshit. If those two games happen to be the two PS2 game that I worked on then sure, maybe you are right. But I seriously doubt that The PS2 was a tricky piece of kit to program for (VUs had to be programmed with ASM, 4 megs texture memory, etc) but it managed to hold its own fairly well against the other more powerful consoles of its generation. Why? Those vector units and the very fast texture memory.

A great example is the Sega 32X. ... Saturn

I don't know much about Sega hardware, but from the bit that I've read about the Saturn it had a whole bunch of different kinds of processors in it. The Cell isn't like that. You have two classes of processor. The PPE and the SPU. The PPE is the general purpose processor of the cell. It is a PPC chip, stripped of some important stuff like OOP and all that. But it's a capable chip. Basically the same as each of the 3 cores on the 360. But... the real power is in the SPUs. They are not simply "vector units". They are real processors. And we have 6 of them to play with. (There are 8 total in the normal cell, but in the PS3 one is disabled for yield reasons and one is reserved for the OS). You can program them in C (or C++, but the C++ compiler is garbage at this point). Their big drawback is no branch prediction. However, they are VERY FAST! Why? They only have access to their 256K of local memory. There are no "misses". Everything is predicable and very fast. Programming this way requires a change of mindset, but developers are ok with this because the payoff is immense.

Clockrate, in this day and age, means nothing unless you are comparing processors of the same microarchitecture and core revision. Take a look at the '2.8 GHz Celeron' that performs worse than the '1.4 GHz Celeron' because the former is of the less powerful Northwood architecture, and the latter the superior Dothan architecture.

Do you seriously think that I'm basing this on clockrate alone?

I'm not entirely clear why your having a PS3 development kit in close proximity to your person makes you more able to assert why programmers will be able to make a processor that is grossly mis-suited for its application and suffers from numerous engineering flaws operate entirely out of its environment to provide superior perofrmance than a cycle-efficent, power-efficient, heat-efficient processor that doesn't rely on big numbers to compensate for meager performance.

I only mentioned it so that you didn't think I was some fanboy troll who has no idea what I'm talking about. OMFGZ PS3 IZ 3.2 GHZ TIME 9 PROSESORS SO DATS LIKE 28.8 GHZ. LOL Wii IZ 4 HOMOZ.

You do realize why the Cell Processor is in use, right? It was used as a marketing ploy and nothing else. An 'army of processors' was Sony's marketing dept's newest buzz-word to make their machine out to be something truly revolutionary and unprecedented.

A ) I don't think I've seen any official Sony press hyping up the multi-core aspect of the processor. On the website I belive they simply refer to it as Cell Processor, not even mentioning the clock.

B ) The design of the processor is such to get maximum performance out of minimal die space. No, it wouldn't run windows very well, but for embedded software that is written to take advantage of it's architecture there's not much that can touch it at the moment.

Just like the Emotion Engine before it, which Sony hyped to be able to 'render Toy Story in realtime' (modern high-end workstation PCs with 8+ processors and 4 specialized high-performance GPUs, using loads of rendering shortcuts, still cannot do) .. or that it was so powerful it was a weapon of mass destruction ... only to reveal another supercharged MIPS core that cost a fortune and delivered on none of its promises.

Yes, that quote has been battered around for years and I've seen it attributed to both Sony and Microsoft. I haven't looked into it for myself.

In this industry, it's not the era of the C64 demo, it's not about games like Gunstar Heroes or Sonic the Hedgehog or Ecco the Dolphin that squeeze every drop of possible performance from the hardware with custom airtight ASM code. It's not about producing the most glorious artful piece of software engineering mastery that is your final product by any means necessary. It's about taking what you had 2 years ago, putting a fresh coat of paint and polygons on it, and throwing it at the market with an incremented version number for as much money as possible, followed by as many generic sequels as possible to compensate for your massive licensing and SDK fees from Sony and Microsoft. The Bottom Line is king, not innovation or creativity, and developers will always squeeze by with what's easy because there is no time to fight with the hardware.

Sure, there's a lot of tripe out there. But guess what? There's a lot of good stuff as well. If people aren't willing to put in the time to make a good game, it probably won't turn out so hot. So what? Don't buy those games.

In an industry like that, what matters isn't 'what's possible' on the hardware. It's what you get. And when you rush your titles to market, you won't see nearly as much raw performance from the complex, overengineered messes like the Cell Processor you will from efficient tried-and-true logical designs like the Wii's CPU selection.

What I'm most excited in this next generation is physics. It really brings a lot to the table as far as gameplay is concerned. This is something that the Cell absolutely excells at. Please watch some of the recent clips from TGS and try to convince me that the Wii could pull it off. Everything that I've seen so far tells me GCx2, which is pretty much what these specs are.

I'm not saying the Wii isn't going to be a lot of fun , but when someone tries to tell me that it is going to best the PS3 in CPU power I've got to call bullshit. I don't normally do this sort of thing but you were wrong on so many points that I needed to correct you.

 

[DaveC]

I don't care how good or bad the CPU in the Wii is. The fact that you play games by flailing your arms around like a fag, on a low res flickery NTSC TV is enough to keep me away from it.

@ epicenter you go on to say how great the Wii's CPU power will be and how weak the X360 CPU is because it is a power PC. The Wii has a power PC too but runs even slower so that doesn't make much sense.

 

[Epicenter]

Dockthepod- I was going to reply to all of your points, but you seem to have misinterpreted me on just about every one. The rest of your arguments fail to stack up in any coherent fashion such that this would be quite the painful reply to pound out. I think 2 long-winded discussions with 2 page posts is enough for one day so I'll just leave it here. There's nothing less fun than an argument about nonexistant hardware, especially 'next-gen consoles'. I'll just leave it here though: You missed my entire main point. Capability is one thing. Feasibility is another. Developers rarely use any hardware to capacity these days-- if it's not easy to achieve its full potential out of the box, you won't see its full potential but on a small handful of titles, probably around the end of the system's lifespan, and they'll be the overlooked titles in a sea of rubbish that doesn't come close to maxing out the machine. I view that as a problem. All the potential in the world is nice, but we need to be realistic. If the PS3 could actually deliver on all of its promises in a real-world game environment, companies would be throwing out supercomputers like Blue Gene in favor of one $599 PS3.

epicenter you go on to say how great the Wii's CPU power will be and how weak the X360 CPU is because it is a power PC. The Wii has a power PC too but runs even slower so that doesn't make much sense.

The point is that there's quite a variety of PowerPC processors, dating back to the mid 1990s-- the design powering the XBox 360 and the main processor in 'Cell' are much different from the single processor in the Wii. My criticism was that the XBox 360, instead of using 1 very powerful and efficient, PowerPC core, uses 3 inefficient cores that can't be utilized as effectively as one. They're more ammunition for marketing against all the PS3 hype that's been circulating for ages now regarding the Cell processor's design.

I don't care how good or bad the CPU in the Wii is. The fact that you play games by flailing your arms around like a fag, on a low res flickery NTSC TV is enough to keep me away from it.

What does the resolution have to do with the TV being 'flickery'? It sounds like you need a TV that's just made better-- I don't have any 480-line displays that 'flicker'. That's not an issue with NTSC, either. Frankly, as far as consoles are concerned for me, HD be damned entirely. When I want to see HD I'll use my PC, which has been displaying 1024 lines of vertical resolution for damn near a decade now.

 

[dockthepod]

The rest of your arguments fail to stack up in any coherent fashion such that this would be quite the painful reply to pound out.

Whatever. I'll fine with ending this here, but you obviously know nothing about the PS3 besides some FUD. I'm not the best person in the world to explain this stuff because I'm not really a low level programmer (do mostly network and UI programming) but when your arguments are based on facts that I know to be 100% false I have to step in.

From everything that I know about the PS3 (unless Sony lies to us devs in the docs and all of the game play that I've seen is just some cleverly done FMV) and every thing I've seen from the Wii so far (unless the Wii programmers have just been holding back for some crazy surprise on release) the Wii is not going to have some wiz bang processor that is going to be more powerful than the Cell. I'm sorry, it isn't, and you are the first person that I've heard say that for many, many months.

You seem like an intelligent guy, and I'm hoping to try out your game at some point, but don't go spreading around BS. Take a look at the playable titles right now and try to imagine what sort of gains they will see over the years. They are already doing a pretty good job of showing off the hardware on this "impossible to program for 1.4 ghz P4 equivalent".

 

[Epicenter]

Don't bend my words, now. I never said it was impossible to program for. I said the main processor was underpowered without its helpers, and that it was difficult to get everything in working in concert-- that most developers just won't bother trying. Impossible, no. But to pay more for a chip that most developers will never take advantage of, when they COULD take easy advantage of one simpler, more powerful single processor that is better tailored to the job at hand, a chip that had to be engineered from the ground up, cost a fortune and has miserable yields .. that's just a bad idea right there.

You should take a look at Anandtech's analysis of the PS3 and XB360 hardware, many of my points are corroborated there. If some of the hardware's operation has changed since then, which wasn't very long ago, I'd be quite surprised really.

As for the 'gameplay you've seen', how old was it? Anything older than about 6 months probably WAS FMV. So was the crap the consumers were fed about the XBox 360. The games look nothing like their 'target renders' despite ridiculous claims like that the games would probably look better than the videos made on renderfarms :rolleyes: ... If it's pretty recent, it's probably real. But there's so much horseshit flying around, it's pretty much impossible to say anything for sure until a real system is in your hands and real games running on it.

At any rate, even if the CPU does get the performance level of a 1.4 GHz Pentium 4, that sort of processor can handle high end graphics because it's not concerned with nearly any part of it, the graphics subsystem is. Physics-- you can get away with a good bit on a chip like that. But its potential is nowhere near tapped, because it's just not a good choice for the machine. I don't personally feel more than 1 CPU will ever make sense on a console until the technology has advanced to the point where one game thread can be split into many to run on independent cores, abstracted at the hardware level so the software doesn't need to know about it. Otherwise, we'll just have a generation of rushed shoddy games that don't use a third of the hardware's capability, a generation that comes out after a long long time and does come close to using the full potential, but now looks outdated becaue it took so long coming out, or game projects being cancelled en masse a la Saturn, paving the way for more shovelware from companies that can afford to just produce drivel and not even worry if they make a profit.

 

[ste_167]

Where did you get that P4 1.4Ghz info from, Epicenter? Do you have a link? It's not that I don't believe you, I just want to read more about it, as it interests me.

Here's a great bit PS3 PR to enjoy


The computational power of the system itself sports the equivalent of 2 teraflops, meaning that entirely new graphical expressions that have never been seen before will become possible. In games, not only will movement of characters and objects be far more refined and realistic, but landscapes and virtual worlds can also be rendered in real-time, thereby elevating the freedom of graphics expression to levels not experienced in the past. Gamers will literally be able to dive into the realistic world seen in large screen movies and experience the excitement in real-time. If you saw the E3 video - real time game engines now look about as good as the Final Fantasy movie.

 

[Vimacs]

The developers dont even need to mess much with the spu's, did you ever hear of middleware?
Lets take speedtree or ageia physx, you can just throw them ion thair own spu and have fun, without messing with it yourself.
Or you just license the unreal engine 3, even less work for you and allready good optimized to take advantage of the spu's.

 

[Ganepark32]

So true Epicenter. As soon as you said Treasure fans rejoice, it made me think of all the small companies out there that will be able to make games for the wii at affordable prices unlike if they were to develop for the PS3 and Xbox360. Heres hoping Treasure makes a sequel to Ikaruga for Wii and brings out the rumoured NiGHTS.

 

[dockthepod]

You obviously underestimate console game developers. They will take advantage of it. They already ARE taking advantage of it. Read some interviews with launch title PS3 developers. Also, look at the PS2. Could you ever imagine when that thing launched that we'd see something like Shadow of the Colossus? On a 300 mhz processor with 32 megs of ram?

Here's a big hint regarding what's gameplay and not... if people are playing the games at a public gameshow (TGS last weekend) it's probably not FMV, unless maybe they got everybody really really stoned and confused the hell out of them. Sure, they don't look just like the promo vids from a year and a half ago, but they are looking damn amazing. Go watch some gameplay from MotorStorm. Look at the complex physics that the gameplay is based around. Look at the animation in Heavenly Sword. Look at all the crazy stuff happening on screen in Resistance.

No, the PPE isn't the most powerful core in the world, but that's not the Cell. It's a combination of the PPE and the SPUs. I'd still be willing to bet that the PPE alone is more powerful than what we see in the Wii (not overwhelmingly so though). From what I've read about the GC, its processor is roughly G3 class. We don't know for sure what's going to happen in the Wii, but all signs point to beefed up GC. Clock for clock, sure the Wii proc will be more efficient. But quit insisting that it is something that it isn't. I've got a GC. It's a fantastic machine and nintendo makes great games. But I'm concerned that a machine 2x that isn't going to cut the mustard for the next 4-6 years.

And yes, like Vimacs said, there's middleware which will probably play a larger part this gen due to complexity and ever rising consumer expectations.

And - for Treasure-type games... you don't need to tap into the SPUs. Those are only required if you really want to push things forward and make something that requires a lot of non-graphics computations (buzzword "next-gen"). Take those away and you've got a very easy programming setup because the GPU is a pretty standard and powerful nVidia PC part with some cool stuff added (flexio which opens up some cool posibilities of using the cell to supplement the GPU in rendering). Sony is going to have a download service, basically a rip off of Live Arcade, that will allow smaller developers to get smaller, cheaper games out there. I'm really excited to see what happens here. I'm in love with geometry wars on the 360.

This is going to be my final post on the subject.