WiiU Specs unveiled: PC gaming officially cheaper than console gaming.

[The White Hunter]

At any rate iirc both the PS3 and 360 draw about 70W on average and can vary significantly between different games and idling on the OS. The Wii U seems to just draw around 30W for pretty much any game and idling and doesn't hvary much.

It'll be interesting to see whether that means anything beyond it just being really bloody efficient.

Any idea what rating the Wii U power supply unit is? Some people were hypothesizing that once developers have gotten used to the system, Nintendo could 'raise the limit' as it were on the power consumption of the Wii U if needed, essentially allowing the console to draw more power and push the hardware further if needed.

Thing is, from my view, that goes back into the whole 'overclocking' argument. Drawing extra power would make the whole thing damn near impossible to keep cool, when everything's all on one module. Maybe Nintendo have already factored for that though. They seem to have factored for a whole load else.

It runs only jus warm to the touch, so I can tell you that it runs pretty cool anyway and the cooling fan is constant and effective. Has intakes around the edges so it draws straight through and ejects the heat out the back.

I could tell you what rating the power supply is if it's on the power brick and I can read it without unscrewing anything (because I don't desire to be unscrewing power bricks right now), lemme dive down the back of my desk and find out....

...

-hitsheadmotherfucker-

...

It says 15V 5A output on the power brick and bugger all else.

Edit: Google tells me that unreliable sources claim it's rated for around 75W. So maybe there is potential for games to overclock the system or something crazy, but I HIGHLY doubt they'd do that, sounds complicated and risky.

It's likely that as the hardware matures developers will find ways to exploit the hardware more efficiently. Especially since Nintendo are sharing their programming tricks with third parties this time round rather than keeping them to themselves.

Edit edit: As for what you were saying to GrimHeaper above, Nintendo always has a plan it seems, nothing is done without a purpose and nothing is pointless. Whether they actually use some of the stuff is questionable though, the Gamecube is capable of 3D in the same style as the 3DS, for example, but it was never used and I have no idea why.

 

[Sylveria]

Can the PC play Super mario, smash bros, Zombie U, Monster Hunter, Rayman Legends, Pikmin, or Legend of Zelda; no? Then I'll stick with the Wii U thank you very much.

*cough* yeah give google a go some time. It could and it will.

And I could have a Morrigan Aensland Sex Android, but I don't now and have no idea when I will. What the PC "could" do and what it "can" do are vastly different things. If you've got the patience or lack of interest in a console to wait 10+ years for emulation to be stable enough to play it and to have a computer good enough to handle it, be my guest. But, all that does is demonstrate that PC gaming is going to be a decade behind console gaming as far as the available library.

Oh, and you're engaging piracy when you're using roms and emulation because you didn't buy the console and games.

 

[Sylveria]

Can the PC play Super mario, smash bros, Zombie U, Monster Hunter, Rayman Legends, Pikmin, or Legend of Zelda; no? Then I'll stick with the Wii U thank you very much.

Dude... No console can brag against the PC when it comes to the library. Nope. With at least two decades of back-catalogue, PC crushes any console in this regard.

I believe what you tried to say was "No, the PC can't play any of those above listed games unless you download emulators and roms, which are in most cases acts of piracy and/or copyright infringement."

20 years of backlog is nice, assuming you can get the stuff to work but volume =/= quality nor does it equal demand.

 

[Stavros Dimou]

So ok some people believe WiiU has secret alien technology in it.
Let me tell you a secret: Time will pass and third party games will keep not showing up on WiiU.
Because it won't be able to run them. Remember my words.
You can't change the fact that its a weak machine,weaker than even the current generation xbox360.
Its graphics card might be as good as it might be,and unknown to most people,but from the moment its processor which is very known is so much less powerful than xbox360's, it will bottleneck the graphics card and the power will go wasted.

 

[Stavros Dimou]

PC+Wii U+PS3/4 master race reporting in. I don't have to worry about not getting anything except Halo and Gears of War. I have my PC for graphically awesome games and good multiplats, the PS3/4 for console-exclusive multiplats like Metal Gear Rising, and my Wii U for it's awesome exclusives.

Oh, and you seem to be not noticing the big-ass controller with a touch-screen that comes with the package. That adds about $50 onto the price of every Wii U made. You're also not taking into consideration the other absolute musts for PC gaming, a decent Keyboard and Mouse and a decent Monitor which all add £100 to the price if you shop around well and don't get a crappy 15 inch monitor. So a computer with the same specs as the Wii U would still cost about the same due to those added costs.

.
A PC with your graphics card can play at good settings games that WiiU can't even run.
Modern games like Far Cry 3 couldn't run on it even at SD 480p with every setting at "low".

That's simply bullshit. The Wii U is actually more powerful than the two other consoles, and they're able to run FC3 at 720p with medium-ish settings. Go look at the 360's and the PS3's specs, they're shit compared to even mid-range computers today.

Explain me how an IBM POWER6 processor with 3 cores running at 1.6Ghz (WiiU) is more powerful than an IBM POWER 6 processor with 3 cores at 3.2Ghz (xbox360) ?

I actually posted a link to the original Neogaf thread a few posts above you, where they do exactly that. Kindly read it. It will explain things much better than I could, regarding the Wii U's memory management, optimisation, higher amounts of RAM, and the fact that the hardware is almost completely custom.

Slightly more on-topic: My other objection with the DF/Eurogamer piece is how it completely misrepresents how information about console specs is obtained.

It took an extraordinary effort to get this far and you may be wondering quite why it took a reverse engineering specialist using ultra-magnification photography to get this information, when we already know the equivalent data for Durango and Orbis. The answer is fairly straightforward - leaks tend to derive from development kit and SDK documentation and, as we understand it, this crucial information simply wasn't available in Nintendo's papers, with developers essentially left to their own devices to figure out the performance level of the hardware.

This is bullshit. The reason we didn't learn anything about the Wii U's specs is because of NDAs. Anyone working in the games industry has to sign an NDA if they want to work on next-gen/unreleased hardware. This basically means, if you get caught leaking anything, you will get the living shit sued out of you and never work in the games industry again.

Those AMD workers who got caught leaking hardware documents for the Nextbox and PS4? AMD is currently suing them to oblivion.

We don't have any confirmed, nailed-down specs for the PS4 and Nextbox. All we have is a bunch of rumours and possible out-of-date documents, which may or may not have come from people breaking their NDAs. Just because a console doesn't get much in the way of specs leaked, that doesn't mean anything. Developers may simply think its not worth getting sued just to put another anonymous rumour up on the internet. Who knows? But acting as if this is some specific flaw of Nintendo's, when it's actually an industry wide practise, is just foolishness.

I've read many pages from the Neogaf thread you linked me too.
So it seems that this graphics card's computational power is somewhere between:

Worst Case Scenario: 176 GFLOPS
Absolute Best Case Scenario: 600 GFLOPS

Let me give you a perspective:

AMD HD 4650 launched at 2008 costing 60 euros: 386 GFLOPS (can run games like Oblivion,Counter Strike on high at 720p,30+ fps)
AMD HD 4850 launched at 2008 costing 150 euros: 1000 GFLOPS (can run dx10 games like Crysis,on high at 720p,30+
fps)
AMD HD 6850 launched at 2011 costing 150 euros: 1651 GFLOPS (can run dx11 games like Crysis 2,on very high at 1080p,30+fps)



So its most possibly between a card that would have costed 20E and 100E at 2008.(5 years ago)
And because technology advances,with the same money today you would get a much more powerful card that you would back then. As I said on an earlier post,it would be too hard to find comparable PC parts that have about the same power as the ones of WiiU,because so weak and old technology parts have stopped being produced for years,and even if you buy the cheapest part in a PC hardware store,it will still be more powerful than the corresponding part of WiiU.