Topic: Wii U Hardware

@Mandoble
I disagree on your main argument there. RAM is definitely a critical resource and it is responsible for the "fluid gaming experience" (as I said) however we've gotten the point where RAM is both ridiculously cheap and in abundance. You aren't going to get that much more out of a modern system by putting a heap of RAM in it, especially for a single task device, because you can pretty much afford to put as much as you need in there without breaking the bank. Especially if you don't have to worry about power consumption!

When you think about it @Sony_70 was kinda on the money before in a strange sort of way. Mobiles have 1GB RAM these days and for that reason I think it's fairly safe to say we don't live in a RAM limited world anymore. We aren't talking high end multitasking devices here we're talking call, facebook and watch videos devices and they're putting 100s of MBs and even upto 1GB of RAM in them and handing them out for ~$100-250AU a pop.

I struggle to see a reason why the Wii U would need that much more than 1-2GB of RAM but I don't see why it couldn't (even though obviously it would be faster and more expensive than 2012 often DDR2-ish phone RAM!). At the same time I wouldn't be going nuts if they surprised us all and revealed it has 8GB because I don't think it would make that much of a difference. Not with the CPU and disk being the limiting factors and not with this 1080p single or at most dual task game console world it's going to exist in.

the orignal rumour from last year was 32bit cpu,1.5GB RAM (ps4/720 64bit cpu will get more ram)which would really give us a gaming pc,even more so slightly,but id question 8 years though,unless really good games are abundant.As for the cost of ram it would be bought at next to nothing when bought in its millions.

Storage device built in would compromise tech,it has been comfirmed of cloud storage at different prices and there are SD card slots,i have 32GB HCSD card but may buy a 64GB card if wii u can use them.

Well it mostly depends on how intensive the OS level stuff will be. Nintendo doesn't have a big multimedia foucs so I don't expect a lot of ram. I do expect enough do that the system can have some sort of suspend and go to the menu like the 3ds does.

Wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo gave the WiiU around 1 GB of memory. They never said they will build a gaming PC, and are more concerned about cost. Well, it depends on how advanced the GPU and CPU is. If WiiU surpasses the PS360 specs by 50 percent, then 1.5 GB or more is essential to provide some smooth, buttery play time. If it's also media-ccenter oriented, 1.7-2 GB should suffice.

You dont need to do heavy multimedia or multitask in order to require large ammounts of RAM, using high res texture packs would be enough. Some of these addons for PC games already exceed 4GB.

I know but I want my console to multitask like a tablet Kr a pac. One of my main complaints with my 360 is while I can listen to music stored on my he'd while playing games I cant stream music from zune or last.Fm while o play and that's due to ram constraints. Also would love to go into the dashboard without leaving the game and starting the game where I left off.

Hopefully since the 720 is being built off a windows 8 kernal thy try to add that feature and windows phone has it.

What has nintendo said,focusing on online distribution,early last year the rumour was 1.5 GB GDDR 5 memory plus cpu memory.since then there has been up to 5 dev kits(spec improvments)that can run unreal 4,gearbox,epic,etc have claimed wii u is a power house,except the wii nintendo have always had better graphics.ames for the wii u that are multiplat are better on the wii u.i think people have set in their minds that wii u will be alot less powerful than 720/ps4,nintendo are not that stupid they want to go neck n neck with the others.ps4 is rumoured to be pushing for 1 GB v ram,4 GBGDDR,dont be surprised at E3 when nintendo drop a nuke bomb of awsomeness at naysayers and haters(the first to buy one).

Im just counting the days,not long now.

Well I call BS on that original rumour then. To point out the glaringly obvious 32bit CPUs kinda went extinct quite a few years ago and even the Wii has a 64bit CPU.

Also I have NFI why you keep ranting about 1GB "vRam" and 4GB of "GDDR5"... is this the 90s or something? VRAM was replaced by DDR variations years ago and I can't really remember the last time I got a video card that didn't have some variation of DDR. So what I think you probably mean by that would be 1GB of RAM for the video card and 4GB of RAM for the system.... which makes sense. However that would more likely mean 1GB of GDDR5 (10s of GB/s) and 4GB of DDR3 (~5GB/s).

I quote
"This is a true next gen console"
"wipes the floor with current competition"
"multiplatform releases will be ported down from the WiiU"
"Loading times? virtually non-existant"
"Neglecting to show the actual console last year gives them an arsenal to engage people with, this year"

source (cannot reveal untill after mid December)