Reggie and insiders talk Wii U power, issues, UE4 capabil...

[kdognumba1]

Meh I couldn't care less about UE4 either way tbh. While I see the importance of having it, the system can run older engines still and has a much improved online. This alone will keep people developing games for it.

[LegendofSantiago]

@ddddd so having more power is equal to more support? Somebody needs to talk to the ps1, the ps2, the gameboy, and the DS because they werent following the rules! I also dont get your "all signs pointing to another wii generation". It already has a lot more support from 3rd parties, the main form of control isnt something developers have to learn how to use, and it's launching first, something that gave the 360 dominance this generation. Seeing this nintendo has at least a year headstart which gives developers a year headstart of getting used to the hardware. Also the hardware is not weaker than the 360, stop being such a pessimist.

[KingJames7]

Dumb article, it just looks like it was recycled from before the Wii game out or when the 3DS came out. So you'll have to buy a couple consoles, it's been like that since the mid '90s

[Maxram0]

1cpu with 3 cores, but only one of them has 2 threads . Nintendo did the impossible, make hardware that is weaker than 7 year old consoles.

only ONE of the cores has double threads?...damn it! that's disappointing, at least it has 2gb of RAM as opposed to 512mb for the 360 and 256 for the PS3, but still, if only all 3 cores were double threads, if only

[FireFoxMcCloud]

@ddddd so having more power is equal to more support? Somebody needs to talk to the ps1, the ps2, the gameboy, and the DS because they werent following the rules! I also dont get your "all signs pointing to another wii generation". It already has a lot more support from 3rd parties, the main form of control isnt something developers have to learn how to use, and it's launching first, something that gave the 360 dominance this generation. Seeing this nintendo has at least a year headstart which gives developers a year headstart of getting used to the hardware. Also the hardware is not weaker than the 360, stop being such a pessimist.

What was out during the Gameboy era for people not to develop for Nintendo?
PS1 had the disks, which was less costly I'm sure, and held more space I think. Same with the Gamecube. So there's that.
PS2 support carried over from the PS1 I'd assume, just as it did for the PS3, and xbox.
Don't have anything on the DS. But, I suppose support carried over from the GBA? I dunno. I always figured Nintendo was the top choice for handhelds. PSP was useless to me.

Just some assumptions. I guess it all boils down to how accessible it is for the developers. N64/Gamecube may have been more powerful than the PS1/2, but the accessibility wasn't there. Needs to be a balance of both. Likely, maybe, possibly, perhaps.

[grcpan]

I don't really care about 3rd party support.
I buy Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games, for the rest I have my PC.

Still having UE4 support is a must since all game companies that work with UE3 will jump to UE4 when it releases.

[FireFoxMcCloud]

I don't really care about 3rd party support.
I buy Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games, for the rest I have my PC.

Still having UE4 support is a must since all game companies that work with UE3 will jump to UE4 when it releases.

Pretty true statement, although the Nintendo games seem to be hiding.

[stealth]

reggie is right

[Devil_Rising]

I seriously, SERIOUSLY doubt that the either the next Xbox or Playstation are going to be much more than "4 times as powerful as the 360". I've been calling it all along, but I REALLY don't think even the PS4 is going to be THAT big a leap from the PS3, in terms of raw horsepower or graphics capability. Will it be better? Of course. But will it be the futuristic high end PC that people seem to be expecting it will be? Absolutely not. Why? Because Sony already lost megatons of cash on that strategy with PS3 in the first two-three years or more of selling PS3. Even now, the PS3 hasn't even caught up to the sales of the 360. And if the Vita is any indication, it isn't THAT much more powerful than the PSP. Yes, it is considerably more powerful, naturally, but many people acting before it launched like it was going to be a portable PS3, were fools.

If the Wii U is indeed "4 times as powerful as the 360", that's plenty impressive for me, and more than enough, I would think. Will the Wii U get EVERY game that comes along? Of course not. But it's going to do a lot better in that field than many of the naysayers (including the chronic ones on here), seem to think.

[LegendofZelda1996]

If the Wii U is indeed "4 times as powerful as the 360", that's plenty impressive for me, and more than enough, I would think. Will the Wii U get EVERY game that comes along? Of course not. But it's going to do a lot better in that field than many of the naysayers (including the chronic ones on here), seem to think.

The statement of the Wii U being 4 times as powerful as the XBOX 360 is only refering to the RAM capacity of the Wii U compared to the RAM capacity of the XBOX 360/PlayStation 3.

Judged by its RAM, the Wii U could be viewed as up to four times as powerful as the Xbox 360, boasting as much as 2GB of RAM to the 360's 512

http://kotaku.com/5920931/the-wii-us-power-problem

[LegendofSantiago]

@FireFoxMcCloud gamegear.
Also, my point still stands despite your excuses. They still where the weakest. Look at PSP vs DS the PSP was vastly superior in terms of power and storage yet it suffered. My point was that power really doesn't matter as much as you guys think. One last point, videogame development is costing enough as is, if the Wii u does well and you guys buy all of your third party games on it I can easily see devs taking to the system and developing their games around the weaker console and porting them up to the other ones. Also, if this source is to be trusted the power difference is minimal.

[chris_the_wing]

1cpu with 3 cores, but only one of them has 2 threads . Nintendo did the impossible, make hardware that is weaker than 7 year old consoles.

Do you have a link to your information pertaining to the CPU only having 4 threads total, or is that a rumor? And your second statement of the Wii U being weaker then the 360 is out right untrue.

[FireFoxMcCloud]

@FireFoxMcCloud gamegear.
Also, my point still stands despite your excuses. They still where the weakest. Look at PSP vs DS the PSP was vastly superior in terms of power and storage yet it suffered. My point was that power really doesn't matter as much as you guys think. One last point, videogame development is costing enough as is, if the Wii u does well and you guys buy all of your third party games on it I can easily see devs taking to the system and developing their games around the weaker console and porting them up to the other ones. Also, if this source is to be trusted the power difference is minimal.

Who really bought the gamegear? With it's 6 batteries and never having enough to actually play the sonic game and it being the prehistoric Wii U and.. yeah.

The PSP was also costly, like the PS3. shovel was expensive, especially the storage, and the DS doesn't/didn't need much storage cause of the saves being on the carts right? What really sold with the psp was the multimedia, not games.

If power really doesn't matter, then go try playing Crysis on one of those yellowing white gateways that used to be in classrooms.

...I thought that was funny so I said it, but power is definitely an issue to some, otherwise this would be a non-issue right? ad it's not just power. everything has to be balanced spec wise. I'd say PS1 had that, since the disk space [more to work with], along with it's "power", and it was probably easy to develop for as well. EVEN THOUGH N64 WAS THE BETTER SYSTEM ANYWAY.

But think about it. If Sony or Microsoft didn't have 3rd parties.. then.. what? Nintendo sells cause they make most of their own games, having better knowledge about the hardware, on the system they made. So of course they know what's up. Why pick the game with less features?

[RacattackForce]

Part of me does hope that the Wii U will be able to handle at least a slightly modified version of UE4, but regardless of that, I feel Nintendo currently has a good two years of time on the market before the other next-gen systems come in. The only thing I wonder is how powerful those consoles will be. Barely any difference, or an insane graphical leap?

[LegendofZelda1996]

1cpu with 3 cores, but only one of them has 2 threads . Nintendo did the impossible, make hardware that is weaker than 7 year old consoles.

Do you have a link to your information pertaining to the CPU only having 4 threads total, or is that a rumor? And your second statement of the Wii U being weaker then the 360 is out right untrue.

It's a rumour: http://www.vgleaks.com/world-premiere-wii-u-specs/

[Mako]

I wouldn't be too worried about this. The difference in power between the Wii and the 360/PS3 was enormous, but I don't think we will see that much of a difference this time around. If the Wii U really is 4 times the power of the 360 what does that mean for the 720 and PS4? 10 times more powerful or more? Like Reggie said, this time is different with HD graphics and an online infrastructure to rival their competitors. There won't really be any excuse for developers to not port multi platform games to the wii u or even have it as their lead platform to save money.

[LegendofSantiago]

@FireFoxMcCloud I....I guess I can agree with that. I have said this before when people talk about which system is better. The Wii offered something different at a good price and it had a lot of fantastic games that will never be on other platforms. But anyway, people should relax though, the wiiu will be good and it will have decent /good 3rd party support

[Triforce of the Gods]

You're kinda nuts if you think Unreal Engine 4 isn't a "significant improvement".

I also don't see what the big deal is about the difference between SD and HD. Even to the point that playing the Wii and the SNES on a 42 inch HD TV doesn't look "like shovel" like people claim it does.

>_> <_< *puts on flame shield*

[gtt]

You're kinda nuts if you think Unreal Engine 4 isn't a "significant improvement".

I also don't see what the big deal is about the difference between SD and HD. Even to the point that playing the Wii and the SNES on a 42 inch HD TV doesn't look "like shovel" like people claim it does.

>_> <_< *puts on flame shield*

I bet you watch things stretched too.

and blowing up 256x224 to 1920x1080 does look like a giant pile of shovel.

[chris_the_wing]

@gtt
SNES upscaled looks awesome! You take that back!!
As for the Wii, yah, most aren't really benefiting from being stretched that much. Some Wii games however that run at 60fps, or stylized 2d platformers do look really great, even that large. You can't discount resolution, but you can't discount frame rate either, it's all about visual information to the eye. A 720p game that runs at 30fps gives you
1280x720x30=27,648,000 pixels of information per second, a 480p game that runs at 60fps gives you
480x854x60=24,595,200 pixels of information per second, which is pretty close really.

[gtt]

@gtt
SNES upscaled looks awesome! You take that back!!
As for the Wii, yah, most aren't really benefiting from being stretched that much. Some Wii games however that run at 60fps, or stylized 2d platformers do look really great, even that large. You can't discount resolution, but you can't discount frame rate either, it's all about visual information to the eye. A 720p game that runs at 30fps gives you
1280x720x30=27,648,000 pixels of information per second, a 480p game that runs at 60fps gives you
480x854x60=24,595,200 pixels of information per second, which is pretty close really.

and a 2x2 pixel image at 200million frames/sec gives you 800,000,000 pixels of information per second. that's such a bad measure of anything as to be useless.

[keyz]

@LegendofZelda1996

No, you better read the article again buddy.


Are you kidding me, if the Wii U is 4 times as powerful as the XBOX 360 we should all be jumping for joy. The article clearly claims the other two are going for around 6-8X more powerful which means they'll only have about a 20% advantage over Wii U. If they want to go the ultra power route again through a recession then let em do it. Must be nice to have money to blow. Also, Kotaku has some of the most biased and fanboy journalists in the industry.

[chris_the_wing]

@gtt
SNES upscaled looks awesome! You take that back!!
As for the Wii, yah, most aren't really benefiting from being stretched that much. Some Wii games however that run at 60fps, or stylized 2d platformers do look really great, even that large. You can't discount resolution, but you can't discount frame rate either, it's all about visual information to the eye. A 720p game that runs at 30fps gives you
1280x720x30=27,648,000 pixels of information per second, a 480p game that runs at 60fps gives you
480x854x60=24,595,200 pixels of information per second, which is pretty close really.

and a 2x2 pixel image at 200million frames/sec gives you 800,000,000 pixels of information per second. that's such a bad measure of anything as to be useless.

Are you telling me you don't notice the difference between 30fps and 60fps? The human eye can only effectively measure at max around 200fps. Your mini TV math would have to be revised to 2x2x200=800 pixels of effective information, but that would be pushing it.

[chris_the_wing]

1cpu with 3 cores, but only one of them has 2 threads . Nintendo did the impossible, make hardware that is weaker than 7 year old consoles.

Do you have a link to your information pertaining to the CPU only having 4 threads total, or is that a rumor? And your second statement of the Wii U being weaker then the 360 is out right untrue.

It's a rumour: http://www.vgleaks.com/world-premiere-wii-u-specs/

All I see that could suggest that is
"
PowerPC architecture.
Three cores (fully coherent).
3MB aggregate L2 Cache size.
core 0: 512 KB
core 1: 2048 KB
core 2: 512 KB
"
But that doesn't give you enough info to say it's only 4 thread, I don't think. It looks like one of the cores has 2MB's of L2 Cache compared to the other two which only have 512KB's each. Is 512KB's not enough to run 2 threads? I'm asking, I don't know.

[cbbomb]

I don't really care about 3rd party support.
I buy Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games, for the rest I have my PC.

Still having UE4 support is a must since all game companies that work with UE3 will jump to UE4 when it releases.

Pretty true statement, although the Nintendo games seem to be hiding.

Have you forgotten the countless times Nintendo chose not to release a game because there was no market for them? Xenoblade? Last Story? Pikmin 2?

Where third parties go the market goes. The same market that would be Metroid or Zelda or F-Zero. There'll be no market for them, therefore, Nintendo won't produce.

Skyward Sword sold only 3 million worldwide. Most games today, especially HD games, have to sell at least 2 million just to break even. That will be true of the next Zelda. Now what happens if the Zelda Wii U sells only 2 million? And then after that, only 1 million? Woops, it isn't making a profit! There is a reason why people aren't surprised if Nintendo doens't make another Metroid Prime game. Considering that they barely sold more than a million. and Metroid will be one of those games that needs to sell 2 million to break even. That's why Reggie made a big deal about Other M not reaching 2 million. But they can't sell reach that number because the people who would appreciate a game like that own a PS3 and Xbox 360. In other words, the market for Metroid is someplace else.

Stop living in this fantasy land that Nintendo is completely immune to everything. That you'll get your games no matter what. Nintendo needs third party support more so than ever. They said as much back at the end of Gaemcube. They can't make enough games themselves anymore and satisfy enough of their fans anymore. They said this themselves. Or do you think they were lying? They need third party support to satisfy gamers who aren't into all of Nintendo's franchises. They need a market to