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All the Wii U needs is balance

Posted by × 5 December, 2012 at 12:05 pm

The Wii U is here ladies and gentlemen, Nintendo has claimed that the launch has been a success and that they can barley keep the system on the shelf. lets now look at what Nintendo can do to show that the Wii  u is truly a next generation console. As we all know some developers out there have claimed that the Wii U CPU is less impressive then what we thought it was going to be, some Developers have claimed that the Wii U CPU is weaker then the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 CPU. That means any games with massive crowds or enemies on screen can cause frame rate drops.

I refused to believe that Nintendo would put a system out there that is a next generation, with below current generation power. Lets look at the Wii U MCM architecture, and lets show the doubters why the sky is not falling. First of all the graphics card in the Wii U is a “GPGPU” this means that the Wii U graphics card handle computation applications that would usually be handle by the CPU. There also 2 gigs of ram with 32 MB embedded eDRAM, the eDRAM will help compensate for the DDR RAM speed which is not as fast as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, The Xbox 360 has 10 MB of eDram.

One thing I have seen through the years, is Nintendo knows how to get the most for there buck, when looking at the Wii U, you must think balance. That means the strong link in the system will help the weak links become stronger. So the CPU might not be able to do certain applications, but you can off load it to the GPGPU, the ram is not as fast, but you have that pool of eDRAM to help out. Developers will not be able to say, oh its next generation console, I can just take my Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 code and dump into the more powerful Wii U console, it wont work.  Balance is essential to writing game code for the Wii U, the Graphics card can do more so you have use the CPU and the GPCPU in tandem.  The eDRAM is super fast and there is more available ram, you have to use them in tandem.

The latest rumor is that Nintendo is having Retro studios Build a Wii U game engine, for first and third party developers.  This is what will show the Wii U graphical power. A console is nothing without software, the problem some developers have been having, is knowing how to distribute the task in a Wii U development environment.   You must balance your code to get the full potential of the Wii U.

With time folks we will see game engine that will take the strong points, to resolved the issue with the weak ones.  Balancing is going to be the key, this why retro studios will awaken the true potential of the Wii U.

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About Rickey Gibson

Rickey is a gamer to the core, He can remember at the early stages of his life playing pong, for every generation that has been, He has owned a console in that generation, He likes to study the architecture, the structure,and the software of every system that he has owned. From Atari, to Sega, to Nintendo,to Sony, and his favorite company Microsoft, he has been there gaming.

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  • Juan

    Only 1GB of RAM is usable to the games. Also, there’s no API for the GPGPU (CUDA/ATI Stream) and developers are not gonna write those API’s from scratch. People seem to forget that a game is not just graphics. It’s Physics, AI, Input/Output, Game Logic, Scripting, etc. The CPU is important and Nintendo skimped on it. Also, the 32MB DRAM is for use by the CPU. So, like the 360, you might get free Anti-Aliasing or upscaling out of that, but it won’t offset ANYTHING regarding system RAM speeds.

    • Juan

      Correction… 32MB eDRAM is for use by the GPU only.