Who wants to know how fast the Wii U is? Anyone? This question has been in the brain of quite a few of us since we learned about Nintendo’s new console, but they, of course, are loath to tell us anything because they have this weird idea that raw power isn’t everything in making games. What a bunch of weirdies. Although Nintendo continues to let us down with information, Eurogamer has been able to pull some interesting tidbits from developers with final dev kits.
Before the juicy bits, I want to point out that you should read the whole article because it has some interesting quotes from developers. Now to the stats!
The CPU: The Wii U’s IBM-made CPU is made up of three Power PC cores. We’ve been unable to ascertain the clock speed of the CPU (more on this later), but we know out of order execution is supported.
RAM in the final retail unit: 1GB of RAM is available to games.
GPU: The Wii U’s graphics processing unit is a custom AMD 7 series GPU. Clock speed and pipelines were not disclosed, but we do know it supports DirectX 10 and shader 4 type features. We also know that eDRAM is embedded in the GPU custom chip in a similar way to the Wii.
Or…relative stats. We still don’t know specific numbers for the CPU and GPU, but does that really matter at this point? I think we all have a pretty good expectation of how powerful this console will be in comparison to the Xbox 360 and PS3, and according to quotes in this article, the Wii U surpasses the current consoles on the whole but not by leaps and bounds.
One of the biggest things to be thankful for is the 1gb of RAM (the PS3 has 256mb and Xbox 360 512mb) which will simply allow for SO MANY PIKMIN. Apparently the GPU is made of sturdier stuff than its current rivals, as well, with better shaders and wizbangs.
So there you go. Now, friends, scurry off to the message boards to complain about how the Wii U has already failed because of its stats!
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That 1GB of ram is great. However, these little teases of Wii U info are mostly driving me nuts at this point. I just want a price and release date. Come on, Nintendo.
That will be on September 13, if I understand it correctly. They are supposed to have a big Wii U event then.