Topic: Wii U Must Support An Equivalent of Direct X 11/Open GL 4.2

[MegaByte]

But they can't. GameCube was cutting edge -- yes, it didn't have completely programmable shaders, but those were a new concept that probably couldn't have been added to the design in time. Also, the GameCube graphics chip was designed by those involved with the N64 design -- Nintendo so far behind now that it's highly improbably that they're in a position to dictate graphics hardware improvements, especially as graphics hardware has been advancing at a faster rate than the rest of the computer industry. Designs have gotten much more complex, so it's not like they can just come up with magical new designs to pop in. What they're trying to do is come up with cheaper designs with "good enough" technology, not cutting edge functionality. It will come down to whether Nintendo's vision of "good enough" is good enough for everyone else.

The other custom part of the chip might just be a bit of circuitry to do things like translate TEV unit commands into modern shaders for Wii BC (or knowing Nintendo, just include all of the original circuitry too).

[ThePerm]

Well, Nintendo has pretty good ties with the ATI folks over at AMD, and negotiating pretty good prices is something they can manage in ways other companies can't. Its why Sharp gives Nintendo better prices for their screens. They have a good relationship, and while Wii had a kinda half-assed gpu, its not like it wasn't AMD's most successful GPU ever. Selling 80 million GPUs was good for business. Those same people were the team of people who worked for Silicon Graphics on n64. Its a long relationship, and Nintendo has helped them keep careers. There is a sweetheart relationship that gets them good prices. The thing that makes them pick a cheaper old GPU is more likely an accounting trick so that it justifies the cheaper price.

[MegaByte]

The thing that makes them pick a cheaper old GPU is more likely an accounting trick so that it justifies the cheaper price.

Uhh, okay, believe that if you want, but there's utterly no basis for that. These companies never reveal prices anyway, so it wouldn't make sense. If they're actually using newer tech, then its in both companies best interests to advertise the case.

Its why Sharp gives Nintendo better prices for their screens.

Probably a bad example since Sharp was fined for price-fixing those screens

[ThePerm]

but Nintendo never advertises specs either, it works better for Nintendo that people be confused out of the specs. We'll never know exactly how powerful the system really is unless we're a developer.

Heres how I see it going down
1 E3 2012: many games are announced, some of them new ips, but many more ports of xbox games, some ports of ps3 games. Excitement is greater this year than it was last year. Theres a combination of excitement between innovative titles, and your typical excitement over the pulp games that are so popular now actually being on the system. Possible announcements of Xbox 3 and Ps4 steal some thunder though, though its possible Sony and Microsoft stick to their consoles and just release add-ons. After all the graphics of Wii U are "marginally better"

2. Release fall 2012 : The system is released, with a combination of excitement and the usual doubt. It has some solid games at launch and manages to sell well. The graphical distance between Wii U and the current systems are marginal and there are some criticism of this, but some newer games have been shown off by some Japanese 3rd parties with some amazing graphics. Sales start to spike towards the end of Christmas. Specifically around November there is a shortage and this creates media attention. People wait in line on black friday. Gamers start to enjoy features they weren't really anticipating as Nintendo releases some things through the internet.

3. Spring 2013 Sales are doing well, and better than expected by most analyst. Theres a couple games being released in March, around the 27th-28thish that didn't make it to launch but got pushed back a couple of times.
These do pretty well in sales, 3rd parties start announcing games for the fall. Many of these third parties were not originally not on board.

4 E3 is in full force and so is the marketing for Xbox 3 and ps4, they will be much more powerful then Wii U, by a lot. They will be very expensive though. Wii U games are being shown off with ultra-realistic graphics. The graphical gap between ps3 and xbox360 and Wii U has grown from marginal to significant, as developers get into the second and third generation of Wii U engines. More games are announced at e3, but overall for Nintendo its a pretty dull year as far as announcements go. Most of the e3 press conference was spent on how well 3ds was doing now that they altered its appearance last fall with a new model.

5 Summer: No games are really released in the summer, some analyst start to put 2 and 2 together that Summer is movie time.

6. Fall-Winter 2013 the other systems are released and Xbox 4 starts to do really well in numbers in America while ps3 does better in Japan, microsoft has managed to once again do what Sony doesn't. Nintendo has market dominance and while it sees a dip in sells when the other consoles are released its still doing a hell of a lot better then it was in 2010.

7 Spring 2014. Iphone games are getting better, but they still have shitty input. What once was an Angry Birds game type market is now flooded with indy clones, and other casual games. It suffers from the same problems the Atari 2600 had. Nintendo enjoys some late march releases like it does every single year since Pokemon Colosseum came out. Developers start to bitch that they didn't sell enough copies of the Nintendo games they clones, citing only Nintendo does really well on Nintendo systems, a key developer on Wii U jumps ship to ps4 citing Wii U's lack of power.

8 at e3 Nintendo announced some games you really don't care about that will come out in the fall. Some better games are coming out in the spring the next year, and a killer ap Zelda style game is coming out the next fall from then. At this point though 3rd parties are confused. Some of them re having pretty good sales, and others are not. The Wii U is confusing. However, theres an abundant amount of games on the system. Studies show that people watch as much tv on their Wii U as people do not. Turns out Wii U's sells are doing pretty good for people who just want to watch TV and don't want to deal with bullshit companies like dish network. Sales for Wii U are pretty good, not as good as the ones for Wii were, but still very positive, not at all as negative as the ones for Gamecube.

9 summer 2014 another draught, fans wine about it, but the movie sections of the Nintendo forums are filled with many more reviews.

10 fall 2014, the games you don't care about come out in fall 2014, only diehard Nintendo fans buy them. Also, xbox and playstation do very well this year. However, Sony has some financial trouble and people are starting to doubt if they are going to stay in the console business. Sony starts releasing more games on the PC, which at this point produces ridiculous graphics. The Ps4 still continues to be a popular home theater item, but games sales are down considerably. an unseen force is making waves in the industry and it wasn't expected at all. Except right here.

11 Spring 2015, with the power vacuum left by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo start to pick up on some of its properties. Microsoft however manages to have some sort of edge as it has better graphics. Ports however are made for Wii U despite it being inferior. It has enough market share and sales that it can still get ports despite not being future proof.

12. e3 Nintendo announces the successor to 3ds, some more games you don't care about, but one you end up loving. 3rd party support grows actually as the market flux has managed to counteract the abandonment rate of 3rd parties. Nintendo has lost its kiddy image at this point, but still releases mario games.

13 summer is still bone dry, and really nothing good but Zelda is coming out this year

14 Fall 2015 Zelda is released for Wii  U, the game is received mixed. Not everyone is pleased by the graphic style whether it is realistic or cartooney, there is still a divide. People who were 14 when Twilight Princess love it, but others still say Oot or alttp, or WW is better. Nintendo can't please everyone.

15 spring 2016 A moderately good game is released in the spring, some decent 3rd party games, but support has swayed over to xbox 3, Nintendo focuses on ds3 with another big title coming out in the fall. Other then that it becomes a draught year again for Nintendo.

16 e3 Nintendo pulls a rabbit out of its hat and decides to do something that reinvigorates the Wii U just a tad

17 fall 2016 aside from the big release there is some moderate fanfare for the fad that Nintendo has created

18 Summer 2017 Nintendo announces the successor of the Wii U, people talk about its resemblance to the holodeck on Star Trek.

so worse case scenario Wii U wont get some PC ports starting 2.5 years after the release, though you could switch Microsoft and Sony, but one of them will probably have to bow out.

[Stogi]

It will come down to whether Nintendo's vision of "good enough" is good enough for everyone else.

I think you hit the nail on the head with this. Though through Nintendo's eyes, their vision isn't is it good enough, rather is it Nintendo enough?

Nintendo's policy to make profit off of hardware is one that will never change. These companies that sell at a loss do it because profit isn't the point; market placement is. They want their systems to be sitting next to your TV so they can eventually take over your living room. Sony and Microsoft want to be synonymous with "Home Entertainment".

Nintendo does not want to do that. They instead want you to use your machine everyday; they want to provide content that will entice you to play everyday. They want to be synonymous with "Fun".

Does "Fun" need "cutting edge functionality"? Of course, but where? Iwata, like any new President, has placed a new focus for his company and it is not graphics. He placed it on innovation. So yes "cutting edge functionality" is needed, but to make two screens work in tandem, and not creating shrubs that react realistically to rain.

So must Nintendo support an equivalent of Direct X 11? No, and they may suffer from a lack of third party efforts. But the cost of their system will be affordable, the innovation new and exciting, and their own software will be brilliant and irresistible.

[MegaByte]

but Nintendo never advertises specs either, it works better for Nintendo that people be confused out of the specs.

They only stopped advertising specs when they fell behind and went in a different direction. Back when they were ahead, they pushed them like crazy.


@Stogi, agreed, but they've been talking a lot about catering to what the devs want, and I'm not sure they'll be futureproofed. e.g. It should not be up to one guy who says, "oh, I don't need that," and then suddenly you don't have digital output like the Wii. Also, a lot of these new graphics chip capabilities actually have nothing to do with graphics, they have to do with parallel processing. I expect we'll see more impressive use of non-graphics processing that can have a real effect on gameplay (physics, AI, etc.), but it's going to be a lot harder on Nintendo systems if they're missing some of the new features. That's the kind of innovation that I hope Nintendo doesn't overlook. There are still unexplored innovations out there that don't require changing up the control system. The developers probably don't even know everything they will want yet.

[BlackNMild2k1]

Like I said, if they were going to add that stuff, then they would have based the chip off the newer designs, not the HD4000 series.

Why? if the 5000 & 6000 are both based off the 4000 but for reasons due to their build have much more power consumption and features that Nintendo don't need and don't want, then why wouldn't they just start from the basic building blocks that the 4000 provides and then build up to an HD6000 minus all the unnecessary stuff that doesn't benefit the system as a whole?

When I hear custom 4000 series where the dev kits started off with a 4770 (or something like that) with reports that the newer dev kits are even more powerful than the last revision, then I think building up from the basics is exactly what they are doing.

As you said, there are lots of things in the newer designs that have nothing to do with gaming, and those designs are being built up from the design previous. There are probably millions of transistors dedicated to just making the damn chip DX11 compliant which isn't even necessary when they make the chip "a la carte" with just the major features of newer designs thrown in (ie. Advanced Tesselation & Global Illumination). So to me it makes sense that Nintendo would go back to the bottom (4000) and work its way up to a much more custom, streamlined and efficient version of the HD5000/6000.

[Stogi]

Nintendo would go back to the bottom (4000) and work its way up to a much more custom, streamlined and efficient version of the HD5000/6000.

I bet that wasn't even Nintendo's idea. They probably had a list of criteria that had to be fulfilled, so ATI took that and ran with it.

[MegaByte]

Chip design is a significant, significant effort. It would be easier (cheaper) to just strip out the unwanted items rather than redo them from the ground up. I don't think AMD has found big ways to make your specific desired modern features more efficient, or they'd already be using them in their regular chips. When I hear that the dev kits have gotten more powerful, all that tells me is that they went from a 4770 to a 48x0 -- they just added more stream units.

[Ymeegod]

DX11 has shader model 5 as well though. 

And we really don't know what's under the hood of the WII U yet but it might be able to do opengl 4.2 which supports Shader Model 5.  The bad news is how much an hit it's going take--I have an ATI's card and their opengl performance is awful. 

But the good news is people might not care, depending on costs.  For example if all three systems used the same type of API then the difference is peformance and looks for the most part.  Some people might be happy to play the game at a lower resolution or 30 fps vs 1080P and 60fps.   

 

[MegaByte]

We don't know, but the discussion was based on supposedly leaked information. This isn't simply about resolutions and framerate, graphics systems are much more complicated than that.

[Hyawatta]

Chip design is a significant, significant effort. It would be easier (cheaper) to just strip out the unwanted items rather than redo them from the ground up. I don't think AMD has found big ways to make your specific desired modern features more efficient, or they'd already be using them in their regular chips. When I hear that the dev kits have gotten more powerful, all that tells me is that they went from a 4770 to a 48x0 -- they just added more stream units.

Even though it seems more likely that the newer dev kits went from 4770 to 48x0, do you think that there is any decent chance that Nintendo has opted to move to an HD5000 or HD6000 base instead of just adding more stream units?

[MegaByte]

It's possible, if they can keep the prices down.

[BlackNMild2k1]

I don't know if AMD does fabrication for Nintendo or not, but they did just get their 28nm in place and will be shipping laptops using it next month.

So if they did push for a beefier GPU, the 28nm process should keep the heat down and hopefully the cost too. That's assuming they are aiming to use 28nm for Nintendo's GPU that is.

[MegaByte]

I mentioned in the other thread why that might not happen. Aside from that, the cost of the new process is going to be higher at the beginning. Globalfoundries and TSMC do manufacturing for AMD (the latter for the 28nm process), and thus Nintendo. This kind of tech isn't something that can be picked up and placed just anywhere; due to the manufacturing complexities, they have to co-develop the process along with the design.

[BlackNMild2k1]

Since we have no idea what Nintendo has been developing, I'm holding out hope that they were planning for 28nm all along.

And also that IBM isn't actually the one fabbing all the chips for Wii U since they are not (publicly) on the 28nm process yet and have already announced the CPU at 40 or 45nm.

[Ymeegod]

Actually Mega this is what I was talking about:

:The Xenos is a custom graphics processing unit (GPU) designed by ATI, used in the Xbox 360 video game console. Developed under the codename "C1,"[1] it is in many ways related to the R520 architecture and therefore very similar to an ATI Radeon X1900/X1950 series of PC graphics cards as far as features and performance are concerned. However, the Xenos introduced new design ideas that were later adopted in the R600 series, such as the unified shader architectur

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Just because it's being based on the 4800 series doesn't mean they won't add to it. 

[MegaByte]

Ah, but the difference there is that the Xenos was cutting edge, so they pretty much had to have features somewhere in between generations.

[MorbidGod]

If the Wii U is based on the R700 series of chips as reports have suggested, that would indicate support for DirectX 10.1 SM 4.1 (only Microsoft actually uses DirectX)/OpenGL 3.3 - several revisions back. Still, supporting OpenGL and programmable shaders is already a huge leap from what they have now. They'd have to make big changes to silicon to support new features (with any reasonable speed), and trying to tack those on defeats the cost benefit of going with older tech in the first place.

The R700 is what the newer generation cards are based off of. And the Wii U started development probably right before the Wii was released. How can Nintendo support the newest tech when the cards were started back when R700 was the newest? Easy, by starting with that card and going from there. Thats why the dev kits are changing so much right now because AMD is still working on the GPU giving it the support for newer technology.

Don't worry about Nintendo graphics too much, guys. PS4 and Xbox 720 is being released in 2013 maybe late 2013. I don't think they are waiting till 2014 or 2015. And if they release in 2013, they all will be able to support same technology and engines, with the newer ones being faster but not anything noticeable.

And the reason the Wii didn't have advance graphics is because Nintendo had to make a choice, graphics or Wiimote. They didn't have the money for both. They choose Wiimote. Was it really a bad choice? Can you deny they are the winner of last generation? They were able to REUSE the same specs of the GCN Generation and sell an extra 80 or 90 million units. So they have TONS of money to spend of R&D for both control interfaces such as Wii U tablet and advanced tech inside. I mean the rumor spec is impressive. a IMB Power7 based off the Watson CPU which is very powerful. A GPU based off of R700 which is the same base for AMD's modern GPU's. So as you can see, Wii U rumored spec list is impressive.