Final Nintendo Wii U Hardware Specs May Be Leaked

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Nintendo stopped trying to have the latest tech since the GameCube... they concentrated on game-quality and costs. Nintendo Cubes still retain good re-sale value and play-ability. The Wii-U is slightly better than the PS3/360, which is a huge jump over the Wii. There are still some Wii games that look quite good for the games it plays (platforms).

Remember, when the Wii hit the market, it was $200~250 - far cheaper than the $500~700 xbox360/PS3 consoles. The Wii-U is still hard-drive less, so it should sell for $225~250 (display joypads can't be cheap). I paid $120 for my son's Wii console (new) - but it lacks GC compatibility... but otherwise is $150.

They have shown some game types possible with the Wii-U (multi-player) which are kind of neat. Like playing hide-and-seek type games.
 
[citation][nom]whyso[/nom]wait, this thing has only 1 GB ram? Cause thats sad. My phone has 1 GB.[/citation]
your phone has android, ios, wp, or blackberry on it very likely. those take up quite a bit of space and usually run a few apps in background. they need lots of ram. the wiiu will likely have an os no bigger than 300mb max. and it wont have much apps running in the background. most of the ram will go to the games it plays.

bf3 for example, is one of the most ram intensive games(i believe), and with 1080p and max settings it uses less than 2bg of system ram. most current games with smaller maps would likely use close to 1gb ram.
 
[citation][nom]whyso[/nom]wait, this thing has only 1 GB ram? Cause thats sad. My phone has 1 GB.[/citation]

Still more than current gen consoles. Still, "current gen" is 2005/2006, so it's ridiculous IMO that the Wii U is just barely better than the 7 year old Xbox 360.
 
POWER 7 is not latest technology either. I know Wii U won't be a technological revolution, but saying that the CPU is just an improved multicore Broadway I think is misleading. POWER 7 can run older POWER code, there wouldn't be any problems in executing Broadway code if properly done (some software layer sure will be needed, but nothing like an emulator).

PS3 had to incorporate the hardware from PS2 because PS2 was MIPS architecture while PS3 was Cell (POWER + SPE).
Xbox 360 went from the x86 on the original Xbox to POWER too.

What I see with Wii U is that Nintendo will try to build on the success of Xbox 360 making it an easier transition to the new hardware and current developers.
 
[citation][nom]Filiprino[/nom]It was confirmed by IBM that Wii U has Watson technology (POWER 7).The AMD R700 GPU is not that bad. DX11 API level added tesellation and multithreaded rendering along with other minor tweaks. With the tesellation hardware already implemented in R700 you just need a different API that uses it, same for multithreaded rendering.The major change in features was from DX9.0c to DX10 and DX10.1 API level (R700).Current consoles do not have multithreaded rendering, they use only one thread to render graphics.[/citation]
THANK YOU!!! Finally someone that understands that it's not a big deal to not have directx 11 features. Nintendo is trying to keep the cost low while having thier console output the best graphics possible for the money.

I was right!
It does use a unique API and not actual directx or openGL!
Nice to see it will have HDMI running at 1080p (But I think we all kindof expected that).
Nice to see external hard drives will be supported.

Mistakes I see:
1. Dissapointed that it doesn't show support for SDXC because those SDHC will be pushed aside soon enough for SDXC which offers more speed and a lot more capacity. Perhaps a firmware update will add support?

2. Nintendo is still being stupid about the lack of DVD and BluRay playback. They are also stupid for not working the home entertainment system angle instead of the "it's for video games only" route. I know they let you use netflix but I think they need movie playback as well as netflix, hulu and others. On the otherhand I know it would cost them more money to allow DVD and BluRay playback due to licensing and other fees that go along with it.

3. I don't think people are overly excited about the controller. Sure it's like a little tablet but the video's they've showen are poor examples of the usage of this controller. Perhaps if it's features were showen better people might be more exicted about it. I don't know about you but it doesn't get me excited to see someone hold it up to the screen to catch a ball. It would be nice to use for games like zelda and many others that require you to swtich weapons/items or change powerup etc.

Personally, I might get one cause a tablet alone can cost $200 but for a tablet/game console $250 is a damn good deal!
 
Do people really think Nintendo is going to license DirectX 11 from MS? that's why it says equivalent functionality. I'm pretty sure Nintendo has it's own gaming API that it uses and they just say DirectX just cause that's what everyone is familiar with. All of that doesn't even matter anyway, look at a game like Guild Wars 2. That only uses DirectX 9!!!

Edit:
Actually from the wording and placement of the parentheses it seems like they are saying that the Wii U has a unique API called GX2, which supports Shader Model 4.0. And Shader Model 4.0 is equivalent to DirectX 10.1 or and OpenGL 3.3 functionality, not the entire API itself.
 
[citation][nom]dark_lord69[/nom]THANK YOU!!! Finally someone that understands that it's not a big deal to not have directx 11 features. Nintendo is trying to keep the cost low while having thier console output the best graphics possible for the money.I was right!It does use a unique API and not actual directx or openGL!Nice to see it will have HDMI running at 1080p (But I think we all kindof expected that).Nice to see external hard drives will be supported. Mistakes I see:1. Dissapointed that it doesn't show support for SDXC because those SDHC will be pushed aside soon enough for SDXC which offers more speed and a lot more capacity. Perhaps a firmware update will add support?2. Nintendo is still being stupid about the lack of DVD and BluRay playback. They are also stupid for not working the home entertainment system angle instead of the "it's for video games only" route. I know they let you use netflix but I think they need movie playback as well as netflix, hulu and others. On the otherhand I know it would cost them more money to allow DVD and BluRay playback due to licensing and other fees that go along with it.3. I don't think people are overly excited about the controller. Sure it's like a little tablet but the video's they've showen are poor examples of the usage of this controller. Perhaps if it's features were showen better people might be more exicted about it. I don't know about you but it doesn't get me excited to see someone hold it up to the screen to catch a ball. It would be nice to use for games like zelda and many others that require you to swtich weapons/items or change powerup etc.Personally, I might get one cause a tablet alone can cost $200 but for a tablet/game console $250 is a damn good deal![/citation]

My Wii has Netflix and Hulu Plus. I'm sure the Wii U will have them as well. And we can still wait for modders to homebrew the Wii so we can watch DVD's and movies from External HDD's.
 
So, just to clarify...

Wii U will have comprable performance to CURRENT gen consoles: Y/N?
Wii U will have a giant Game Boy Advance for a controller: Y/N?
Wii U will have a really stupid name (Wii U): Y/N?

I don't think it's a stretch to say that Wii killed Nintendo's stance in the hearts and minds of true gamers. GoldenEye on N64 was amazing. Nintendo must have realized after the GameCube that they can't compete with the big boys anymore, so they have their market targeted at younger demographics.

I was really hoping we would get some news of Nintardo coming out with at least a competitor to what Microsoft and Sony bring to the table. Constant revisions, minor upgrades to the "DS" product line should have warned us of this... :pfff:
 
[citation][nom]manicmike[/nom]So, just to clarify...Wii U will have comprable performance to CURRENT gen consoles: Y/N?Wii U will have a giant Game Boy Advance for a controller: Y/N?Wii U will have a really stupid name (Wii U): Y/N?I don't think it's a stretch to say that Wii killed Nintendo's stance in the hearts and minds of true gamers. GoldenEye on N64 was amazing. Nintendo must have realized after the GameCube that they can't compete with the big boys anymore, so they have their market targeted at younger demographics.I was really hoping we would get some news of Nintardo coming out with at least a competitor to what Microsoft and Sony bring to the table. Constant revisions, minor upgrades to the "DS" product line should have warned us of this...[/citation]

Actually, I'd say that Nintendo realized that three (or more) consoles going after the same market is probably not going to make them as much money as using their console to target a different market, one that they have almost entirely to themselves.
 
[citation][nom]manicmike[/nom]So, just to clarify...Wii U will have comprable performance to CURRENT gen consoles: Y/N?Wii U will have a giant Game Boy Advance for a controller: Y/N?Wii U will have a really stupid name (Wii U): Y/N?[/citation]

Well. The developers have said that Wii U has better GPU that current generation consoles, The CPU is not so great (what ever that means...), the amount of memory is big improvement. So all in all it seems to be guite good for a console, when they learn to use those special abilities of that GPU, like different way of using tessalation etc.
It is not mega console, but who would expect that? Nitendo have had tendency of making very popular consoles at not so expensive price. Not to introduce the most resent high tech hardware.
 
I'll buy one. I have kids that love the Wii, and I guarantee the Wii U will have some awesome games. So basically, I'm buying it for the "kids" for Christmas :)
 
Are you people really eating this up? I'm ashamed that Tomshardware would even post such speculation. IBM already clarified that the Wii-U was going to use a Power-7 based processor. That means there is already 1 strike against the article which says it uses Broadway cores. Second strike is the power7 comes in 4, 6, and 8 core variants. So no triple core here. The RAM also seems suspicious. Developers have come out and said there was tons of memory. I'd say 1.5gb at the least. Considering 1gb isn't much more over 512.
 
Iv'e always liked Nintendo because they were never in this industry for the money. They were in it for making great entertainment. And its also not about having the greatest and latest hardware for them. If you really believe that a system has to have high end hardware to be good, then you have something horribly wrong with your thought process. Its not about graphics, its about making a fun game. I'm of the opinion that modern games in general just do not stack up to the 16-bit days. That was the golden era of video games for me. And no offence, but do people actually still use DVD/Blu-Rays? Especially when they have Netflix on the system?
 
[citation][nom]redyellowblueblast[/nom]Iv'e always liked Nintendo because they were never in this industry for the money. They were in it for making great entertainment. And its also not about having the greatest and latest hardware for them. If you really believe that a system has to have high end hardware to be good, then you have something horribly wrong with your thought process. Its not about graphics, its about making a fun game. I'm of the opinion that modern games in general just do not stack up to the 16-bit days. That was the golden era of video games for me. And no offence, but do people actually still use DVD/Blu-Rays? Especially when they have Netflix on the system?[/citation]

I use DVDs occasionally and if I had a Blu-Ray player, I'd use it. If the Wii U supported those features, then I'd use it for them if I had a Wii U and it supported them well enough.
 
I'm pretty sure the 360 can typically use 2 threads for rendering. The truth regarding the Wii U's CPU probably lay somewhere in between P7 and Broadway. The main questions should be: Is it OoO execution? ( probably ), Will it have the all of the same execution units as P7 ( probably not ), Where will it run GHz wise? ( probably on the low end of the P7 scale ), How many threads per core? ( probably 2 ? ), How will the 32MB Mem1 be used? ( GPU eDRAM, CPU eDRAM or both )...
 
[citation][nom]bustapr[/nom]your phone has android, ios, wp, or blackberry on it very likely. those take up quite a bit of space and usually run a few apps in background. they need lots of ram. the wiiu will likely have an os no bigger than 300mb max. and it wont have much apps running in the background. most of the ram will go to the games it plays. bf3 for example, is one of the most ram intensive games(i believe), and with 1080p and max settings it uses less than 2bg of system ram. most current games with smaller maps would likely use close to 1gb ram.[/citation]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]1GB is plenty for 1080p gaming (and higher if you count up-scaling) if they use it properly. I'd prefer more, but it's not unreasonable.[/citation]

Its twice the amount in the xbox 360. The Xbox is more than 6 freaking years old! Its running into RAM problems with the crap looking games that it can run. Double the resolution and complexity of the games (which everyone is expecting--ESPECIALLY with the touchpad/screen controllers which will have a much higher overhead than a standard controller) and you are running into the same problems at launch. Twice the amount of RAM in 6 years is pathetic.

Its not much good to triple the cpu or gpu power without giving it more RAM. Considering there are cellphones with 2 GB of RAM 1 GB is simply insufficient. In two years cellphones will have 2-4 GB of RAM. Yes, it does not run as much stuff in the background but it is also intended as a home theatre sort of device to do other things.

Plus look at the cost. Changing the amount of RAM to 2 or 4 GB is hardly going to cost more 4 GB of desktop ram from newegg costs $40. Its probably a negligable increase in cost to double the ram to 2 GB (guessing around $5-10).

I play GW2 at mid low settings at 1366 x 768 and it uses 1.5-1.7 GB of RAM. Dragon age origins from 2009 uses about 1 GB.
Yes these are PC games and are less optomized than for a console but it can't hurt to have a little more.
The xbox 720 and the playstation 4 are right around the corner and if they have more RAM say 2 or 4 GB (and are significantly more powerful) then developers may simply not design a wii u version of their game (simply because it will be too much trouble to try and optimize it for the wii u-- the xbox or ps4 will likely remain the original game system of choice for designing games which will later be ported to the pc or other platforms). Dice wants at least 2 GB. Same with crytek. Unreal engine 4 is coming out. Its simply stupid (penny wise pound foolish) to simply have 1 GB when it is so easy and cheap to have more.
 
[citation][nom]whyso[/nom]Its twice the amount in the xbox 360. The Xbox is more than 6 freaking years old! Its running into RAM problems with the crap looking games that it can run. Double the resolution and complexity of the games (which everyone is expecting--ESPECIALLY with the touchpad/screen controllers which will have a much higher overhead than a standard controller) and you are running into the same problems at launch. Twice the amount of RAM in 6 years is pathetic. Its not much good to triple the cpu or gpu power without giving it more RAM. Considering there are cellphones with 2 GB of RAM 1 GB is simply insufficient. In two years cellphones will have 2-4 GB of RAM. Yes, it does not run as much stuff in the background but it is also intended as a home theatre sort of device to do other things. Plus look at the cost. Changing the amount of RAM to 2 or 4 GB is hardly going to cost more 4 GB of desktop ram from newegg costs $40. Its probably a negligable increase in cost to double the ram to 2 GB (guessing around $5-10).I play GW2 at mid low settings at 1366 x 768 and it uses 1.5-1.7 GB of RAM. Dragon age origins from 2009 uses about 1 GB.Yes these are PC games and are less optomized than for a console but it can't hurt to have a little more.The xbox 720 and the playstation 4 are right around the corner and if they have more RAM say 2 or 4 GB (and are significantly more powerful) then developers may simply not design a wii u version of their game (simply because it will be too much trouble to try and optimize it for the wii u-- the xbox or ps4 will likely remain the original game system of choice for designing games which will later be ported to the pc or other platforms). Dice wants at least 2 GB. Same with crytek. Unreal engine 4 is coming out. Its simply stupid (penny wise pound foolish) to simply have 1 GB when it is so easy and cheap to have more.[/citation]

Like I said, I'd prefer more. However, it can be worked with if it is true. It's not unreasonable because the OS/driver/whatever could easily use less than 40-60MB of memory and the game, textures, and such could be compressed within the memory to make even better use of it. More wouldn't hurt, but 1GB isn't so little that it can't be worked with if the coders know what they're doing.

That there are cell phones with more memory is irrelevant, that PCs have more memory and need more memory is irrelevant, and that the higher end consoles are bound to have more is irrelevant. FYI, having more memory does not make something more powerful. For example, a GT 430 with 4GB of VRAM will not come anywhere near even a Radeon 4850 that has 512MB of memory in gaming performance.
 
[citation][nom]redyellowblueblast[/nom]Iv'e always liked Nintendo because they were never in this industry for the money. They were in it for making great entertainment. And its also not about having the greatest and latest hardware for them. If you really believe that a system has to have high end hardware to be good, then you have something horribly wrong with your thought process. Its not about graphics, its about making a fun game. I'm of the opinion that modern games in general just do not stack up to the 16-bit days. That was the golden era of video games for me. And no offence, but do people actually still use DVD/Blu-Rays? Especially when they have Netflix on the system?[/citation]

Saying "Nintendo" was never in it for the money is foolish. Of course they're in it for the money, but not only that. Creative geniuses like Miyamoto and Tezuka clearly care about making games, it's their passion. The same can not be said for the zombie and drones heading up EA i'm sure.

At the end of the day, Nintendo has never had impressive hardware. Every single generation of consoles Nintendo has put out going all the way back to the gameboy and famicom has had "bang for the buck" components. Even for the time, the NES wasn't anything mind boggling. There was nothing new. There are Sega Genesis games that even put the Super Nintendo to shame, but Nintendo holds on by making low cost, profitable hardware, and excels at putting out games with memorable characters and good gameplay.

If you want a good example that a game doesn't have to have a ton of eye candy to be fun, pick up the original X-Com on steam, and if you're a true gamer, I can guarantee you'll get more addicted to it than you will the new FPS version coming out.
 
1 GB LP RAM on a cellphone wont compare to the same 1 GB on a console. The only thing it would possibly have to its benefit would be a shorter trace.
 
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