Dvader said:When the new consoles hit Wii U will be left behind just like the wii was. That is what I mean.
Wii U is about twice as good as 360 which you think isn't a big deal. But then PS4 is suppossed to be about twice as good as Wii U, which somehow is a big deal?
Wii 1 was outpowered by about 20X by the HD consoles.
gamingeek said:Wii U is about twice as good as 360 which you think isn't a big deal. But then PS4 is suppossed to be about twice as good as Wii U, which somehow is a big deal?
Wii 1 was outpowered by about 20X by the HD consoles.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out once the games come out and what the publishers choose to do with the U (either port over current gen games for now and dumbed done games once the new xbox and ps come out).
I want to know if the U is a current gen or next gen console, or is it something in-between (a Dreamcast)?
A dev on GAF said it will be like between the DC and Xbox1.
But regardless of how it stacks up vs more powerful machines, the bottom line is that it can do games that look better than the best PS3/360 games and it's games will look beautiful.
It's not like past generations where the representation of 3D graphics was incomplete. It's not the PS1, it's not the Xbox 1. We have graphically polished, complete games this generation, we have reached that point. There wont be any HD scaling issues like Wii 1 had either and it has all the effects and shaders are a modern feature set. The real question will be how the GPGPU handles post DX10.1 improvements and whether it has the rumoured tesselation unit and how effective that is. I read that DX11 has some pretty important performance improvements over DX10 which made tesselation much more efficient and feasible. But the chattering is that the Wii U GPU was modernised to have DX11 like features, but the system may still be hampered by its CPU.
The clause is that it's an OoO processor which devs are still getting to grips with and it has other features which offload tasks from the CPU.
According to most devs I had read impressions from graphically there will not be a problem, but if the cpu is low then things like AI and physics may be effected. But the games can still (look) great. If you look at this gen the games which actually pushed AI and physics is relatively low.
I still say, look at Star wars 1313, Watch Dogs, MGS Zeros. All these games are for 360/ps3 and Wii U will be able to run them better.
Metroid Prime 3 had double the resolution of textures over Metroid Prime 2 and the difference between GC and Wii 1 was not that big. Wii U has 4 times the RAM of the other systems which means baseline, you can do higher detailed textures. If you owned an N64 memory expansion pak and saw the difference between Turok 2, Hybrid Heaven, Perfect Dark Zero vs playing those games without it you will know what more memory does.
Add to that a superior GPGPU, shader set, CPU etc and you have a better system, period.
So you put U into the next gen category. I'd say that was a valid point of view, but we don't know what the next xb and ps will be bringing (they have the luxury now of responding to the U).
Bottom line for me is, over the course of it's lifetime the U is a good value at $430 AUD. I want a new Paper Mario, SMG, Animal Crossing and pray for some good third party titles before the next ps and xb versions launch (at which time, using history as a guide, they will abandon Nintendo).
Would it kill Nintendo to creates a unifed online user account with some kind of achievement system though? I hope they pull that together pretty soon.
aspro said:So you put U into the next gen category.
I wouldn't say that it's a simple as that, it depends on the scale of the game. I think for normal scale games, not massive sprawling stuff with hundreds of characters and stuff, it should be fine. There will definetly be some more advanced designs that it cannot do. What I am saying is that it's like what devs said, it's like a Dreamcast compared to Xbox 1 (Durango). PS4 would be like the GC
aspro said:I'd say that was a valid point of view, but we don't know what the next xb and ps will be bringing (they have the luxury now of responding to the U).
We do roughly know as we've seen the spec sheets, a durango dev kit was even sold on ebay with details.
I think you guys should read what I posted about Wii U's architecture here in laymans terms. It's certainly got a modern architecture which means it will be easier to downport, it simply will not be in the same position as wii 1 which had an archaic architecture and lacked shader capabilities.
This is pretty much essential reading for anyone here:
Carmack: next-gen visuals "will be what we already have, but a lot better
Carmack said:"When people ask how tapped out is the current console generation, PCs are 10 times as powerful but you really are still not technically limited," he told GamesIndustry International at E3.
"Any creative vision that a designer could come up with, we can do a pretty good job representing on current generation and certainly on PC. In many ways I am not all that excited about the next generation. It will let us do everything we want to do now, with the knobs turned up."
Amid leaked Xbox 720 strategy documents and rumoured tech specs one thing is certain: the next-generation will bring with it improved visuals. But just how improved?
Developers Eurogamer has spoken with indicate graphics achieved on high-end PCs using the DirectX 11 standard provide a good indication of what we'll see on the next consoles from Microsoft and Sony.
One improvement many gamers are hoping for is games running at 60 frames per second in 1080p natively. But Carmack, whose programming smarts helped make last year's FPS Rage achieve a super smooth 60fps throughout, cast doubt on this becoming a reality.
"If you take a current game like Halo which is a 30 hertz game at 720p; if you run that at 1080p, 60 frames with high dynamic frame buffers, all of a sudden you've sucked up all the power you have in the next-generation," he said.
"It will be what we already have, but a lot better. You will be able to redesign with a focus on D11, but it will not really change anyone's world. It will look a lot better, it will move towards the movie rendering experience and that is better and better, but it's not like the first time you've ever played an FPS. It won't be like putting yourself in the virtual world. All the little things you can do on that, such as playing an audio cue over here, and turning your attention to that. That will be more of the discontinuous step like we've had with first going to 3D or first using a mouse."
"Sony and Microsoft are going to fight over gigaflops and teraflops and GPUs and all this," he said. "In the end, it won't make that much difference. When you get to this, it makes a really big difference in the experience. Nintendo went and brought motion into the gaming sphere and while only having a tenth of the processing power was able to outsell all of them in all of these ways. I think someone has an opportunity to do this here. It takes a whole ecosystem though, but it is almost perfect."
This is from John Carmack. Graphics Guy. So if PCs are already 10X more powerful and game design is not constrained how is PS4 being twice as powerful as Wii U going to matter? All the stuff we see in UE4 is the same stuff we already have only better, normal maps, HDR, particle effects, lighting, tesselation, filters etc.
3rd party support is the key question and as with all modern Nintendo consoles, I predict it will suck and might not even have anything to do with the hardware. Wii U can run Cryengine 3 "beautifully" yet Crytek scoffed at the "fat chance" that they would make a Wii U version because of the Nintendo audience. Wii U can do RE6, Dead Space 3 etc, but publishers don't want to do it. So you will probably see it like Wii 1 with great 1st party games and a small number of great exclusives but lacking in multiplatform support.
Typical console gamer running away like the coward they are!