Latest Wii U tech details
February 5th, 2013 Posted in News, Posted by Valay, Wii U
Digital Foundry has put together a comprehensive piece outing new technical details for Wii U. The information was deciphered thanks to reverse-engineering photos provided by Chipworks.
We’ve posted a few Wii U spec bits below. You can find Digital Foundry’s full report here, but if lack knowledge of hardware like us, you won’t understand most of it!
- Wii U GPU core: 320 stream processors, 16 texture mapping units, 8 ROPs
- GPU: close match to the Radeon HD 4650/4670
- Defecit in the number of texture-mapping units and a lower clock speed
- 550MHz clock speed
- “GCN hardware in Durango and Orbis is in a completely different league”
- RV770 does have 16 TMUs at 550MHz and texture cache improvements
- This puts it past Xbox 360′s Xenos GPU
- It’s 1.5 times the raw shader power
- 1080p resolution is around 2.5x that of 720p, so it’s unlikely that we’ll be seeing any complex 3D titles running at 1080p
- Some Wii U ports may be disappointing tecnically due to Wii U’s 1.2GHz CPU
- Nature of the second and third banks of RAM is currently unknown
One Response to “Latest Wii U tech details”
By Hitokiri_Ace on Feb 5, 2013
"- 1080p resolution is around 2.5x that of 720p, so it’s unlikely that we’ll be seeing any complex 3D titles running at 1080p"
That’s about the only thing you need to understand really. It’s saying even if the WiiU is 2X as fast as the PS360 era.. (which mostly use just 720p and upscale on games..) it still isn’t quite fast enough to run 1080p/60fps with complex 3d models, *for now.
*Just like all consoles, and maybe even more so with these RAM/GP GPU processing focused units, there will be a pretty high learning curve for developers. I will go out on a limb here and say that the WiiU IS capable of 1080p/60fps w/complex 3d models.. BUT, we probably won’t see them until the next 1.. maybe 2 years from now.
It’s a pretty big change from brute force (high cpu clock-speed) processing, moving to offloading to the GPU. It’ll come around, and I’m sure it’ll be great.