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Shin’en talks Wii U, says the GPU is “several generations ahead of the current gen”

Posted on May 29, 2013 by (@NE_Austin) in General Nintendo, News, Wii U


“The Wii U GPU is several generations ahead of the current gen. It allows many things that were not possible on consoles before. If you develop for Wii U you have to take advantage of these possibilities, otherwise your performance is of course limited. Also your engine layout needs to be different. You need to take advantage of the large shared memory of the Wii U, the huge and very fast EDRAM section and the big CPU caches in the cores. Especially the workings of the CPU caches are very important to master. Otherwise you can lose a magnitude of power for cache relevant parts of your code. In the end the Wii U specs fit perfectly together and make a very efficient console when used right.”

– Shin’en’s Manfred Linzner


Shin’en is talking about something I’ve been putting out there for a while now: The Wii U’s architecture is fundamentally different from a PS4, PC, or any other console out there. You can’t use the same “engine layout” (as they put it) and get the results you want, so if you want to get the most out of the console you have to be able to put in the extra effort to make an engine that takes advantage of what its strengths are. This is a huge reason why we aren’t seeing third party, multiplatform support on Wii U, and why we generally haven’t seen it on past Nintendo systems.

Via HDWarriors

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