We didn't get much of a taste of the console's visual capabilities either. In the initial introductory video, the only real semblance of an HD video game was a concept demo for the Legend of Zelda. In his
excellent Wii U preview, Oli Welsh says it like it is:
"It's undeniably beautiful, although you can attribute this in part to Nintendo's exquisitely hand-crafted art assets," Welsh
observes. "The lighting is excellent, with many changing sources and a few particle effects in evidence - but my untrained eyes saw nothing here that an Xbox 360 or PS3 couldn't do. Perhaps Digital Foundry will say different."
Or perhaps not. The Zelda demo, or "HD Experience" as Nintendo calls it, is almost certainly running at a native resolution of 720p, with no anti-aliasing and seems to be locked at 30 frames per second with v-sync engaged (subsequently verified with a good look at a 60Hz feed taken from G4's broadcast coverage of the event).
The lack of any kind of hardware AA, combined with the sheer amount of light sources might suggest that this is Nintendo's stab at producing a deferred lighting engine (particularly when factoring in the player-controlled time of day element), but on the other hand, the engineers may simply be showcasing the shading power of their new hardware.
As it is, much of the aliasing is obscured in a depth of field effect, with character shading being rather CG toon-like - similar to what Nintendo use on their Miis, but with better edge silhouette lighting to give it a kind of unearthly glow. The art style is certainly different to the run-of-the-mill Xbox 360 title, with a fast fall-off in lighting around an object: Link is bathed in shadow very quickly once he stops being directly lit.
It's a good demo, but as Oli says, it's very difficult to see this as anything other than affirmation that Nintendo's technical vision of the next generation is to effectively match the rendering performance of what's in the marketplace already. Once again, the platform holder is relying on ingenious controller-based concepts rather than cutting-edge tech.
The only other hint we received about the technical prowess of the Wii U came from the Japanese garden demo, which shows a bird taking flight, landing on a tree branch which blossoms into flower, before returning to the skies again, soaring over water, where the scenes shifts to a fish leaping out towards the camera.
The water effect is one of the most impressive elements of the demo. The surface looks similar to the tessellated fluid surfaces added to Unreal Engine 3 during the Gears of War 2 development work, with a pleasing 3D volume to the effect that's most especially noticeable when the fish is just above or below the water line.
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In terms of how powerful Wii U actually is, aside from the occasional 1080p claim, Nintendo has made no effort to put any kind of distance between it and the current generation HD consoles, and it's fair to say that the demos back this up. There is still discussion amongst fans of an enthusiast-level gaming GPU in the machine, but the fact that the Wii U itself is quite small would present some serious heat dissipation issues - the
pre-production units photographed at E3 certainly possess a lot more vents than the original Wii. Curiously, the diminutive form factor of the console itself tells us far more about the potential power of the machine than Nintendo's own spec sheet.
As it is, we now have
direct confirmation that Wii U features a 45nm, power efficient, IBM multi-core processor based on POWER architecture, but almost nothing about the make-up of the Radeon GPU. Factoring in the lack of differentiation between Wii U and the current generation consoles, it's likely that Nintendo has put a great deal of investment into the controller and will be looking to make the base unit as cheap to produce as possible.
At this point we're speculating, but our guess is that Wii U's RAM is based on GDDR3 or DDR3 - far more cost efficient than the top-end GDDR5 and the hitherto non-existent DDR4. In terms of the make-up of AMD's custom Radeon GPU, we reckon it probably has more in common with the Radeon HD 4650/4670 as opposed to anything more exotic. The 320 stream processors on those chips would have more than enough power to support 360 and PS3 level visuals, especially in a closed-box system. Fabricated on AMD's current 40nm process, it would be cool enough and cheap enough, but the 2012 launch may well mean that Nintendo could move directly to 28nm, making for a more cost-efficient, cooler box.
