Topic: Will Wii U take off this winter season?

@rallydefault
The difference is, is that I generally know what I'm talking about, and people still disagree with me alot of the time. I admit in this case that I'm not quite certain.
Anyway, I just don't see how PC gaming can be a viable platform at all. I don't really see anything from any PC game that can't be done on a home console, at least at this point.
With Wii U, Xbox One, and even PS4, I just don't see how a PC can level up popularity wise(which sometimes matters more than taking full advantage of a more powerful machine) to more accepted home consoles.

If EA released their full The Sims game, or Spore on home consoles. They would make more money than just PC. I understand that the highest selling PC games do well, but I think they would still be doing better if they focused those PC games on consoles.

They usually release a spin-off type game of their PC games. Most people would just buy those games for home consoles if they could, rather than PC. PC is still relevant as a platform(not as much financially, IMO) in terms of capability, but not so much as the maximum potential audience.

EDIT: It's the same way I feel about Apple and their products, except in reverse. PC is a good machine, but it's not as popular, regardless. Devices like iPad and iPhone are popular, and still relatively powerful, but they never take advantage of the hardware, so I see no reason why anyone who has ever bought the first iPad would ever upgrade. You can still basically run every app ever created on the first iPad unless it has camera features. Developers are still stick catering to every iPad, because Apple released them too close together, as well as having an additional accessory for almost every standard piece of hardware, like SD, HDMI, etc.

iPad also doesn't run a standard and more capable OS like Mtn. Lion when it could, so the iPad has been artificially gimped.

That's because cross platform games are often held back by the lowest common denominator.

I don't care what any of you say these consoles my use custom PC/PC parts but the console is still built very differently from a PC. Which you cannot do yourself, like others proclaim.

the "stuff" inside your console is pretty much the exact same stuff inside a PC that you can build yourself.

Good luck in building your own PS4, You’ll be hard pressed to find any PC with GDDR5 plugged directly into the motherboard rather than sitting on the graphics card. This just isn’t how PCs works, which is my main point.

Fewer games and it took Sony forever to catch up and start recouping their losses.

IBM, Sony, and Toshiba jointly invested $400 million in developing the Cell processor, & thats before making the PS3 itself. Also the most expensive components inside the PS3, dropped in price dramatically from 2006 - 2009, over half price.

The Wii U will be fine. Nintendo has three blockbusters from their top IPs coming out(Mario 3D World, WW HD, DK Tropical Freeze) this holiday season and Wonderful 101 is already out/coming out soon depending on which region. Not only that, the Wii U already has a promising 2014 with Smash bros., Kart 8 and Bayonetta 2 confirmed(X, Yarn Yoshi and SMT X FE may also be 2014). Things are looking up for the Wii U.

Although the Wii U probably won't be as successful as the Wii, it still doesn't mean it won't be a success. Did the PS3 sell as much as the PS2 or PS1? Nope. Was the PS3 a failure? Not at all.

I don't think you really understand why the PS4 using GDDR5 is an advantage if you think PCs are disadvantaged without it. You wouldn't want a PC with GDDR5 "plugged directly into the motherboard" because it would reduce performance for the types of tasks you usually rely on the CPU for. With a console it makes sense to compromise on the performance on those sort of tasks to reduce costs, yes compromise as in it makes it run slower, because the main goal is to improve graphics performance.

So you put the CPU and GPU on the same chip and then share graphics optimised memory. Makes all sorts of sense.... for a console...

I finally bought my Wii U (basic set. very hard to find. some stores told me they only ever received one shipment of them--at launch!), so I'm ready to see the Wii U take off this winter.

That said, I am very disappointed with the lack of promotion--or general visibility--of the Wii U. I went shopping for a few days last week, and there were no displays, somewhat empty shelves, and more importantly, no new stock of Wii Us. It felt as if Nintendo has gone on vacation for 6 months, and has yet to return. If I didn't know any better about video games I would say Nintendo never released a new system at all--and no games either...

I don't think you really understand why the PS4 using GDDR5 is an advantage if you think PCs are disadvantaged without it

I didn't say that at all, i was pointing out a console is built very differently from a PC, which is my point, & what i said.

People's comments show me, thay don't really know about the PS4, or the modifications its had. His taking about the CPU latency to do with the GDDR5 used as system RAM, where as GPUs are designed to be extraordinarily latency tolerant. No Sony hasn't compromise anything, they've made modifications to deal with this, which all this info is in the public domain. I cannot be bothered to go into it but look it up, otherwise carry on misinforming people. It's like me talking about the games coming out for the Xbox One which i don't know, so i would be presuming stuff and therefore misinforming you.

My main point and i don't know how meny times i have to say this, is a console works & is built very differently from a PC. And before anyone presumes anthing, i'm not talking about which one is better or anything else for that matter.

@banacheck
You said that you couldn't just grab GDDR5 and put it in a PC motherboard and used that as somehow proof that consoles are entirely different. Problem is you could do that with a PC if you really wanted to. The only reason you can't is because it's not a very good idea for the vast majority of machines.

It would improve gaming performance with machines that have an integrated GPU or ones running on AMD's APU designs. The reasons it would is for the same reasons that it makes sense on the PS4. The reason it doesn't happen is because nobody really cares that much about graphical performance on APUs enough to build an entire chipset around it. People who care about graphical performance on the PC buy discrete graphics cards.

Consoles are low end PCs, always have been and are even moreso now.

@micronean yeah, the basic set has dropped way down in price making it a lot less obvious to go for premium. Many will end up connecting external storage anyway

You said that you couldn't just grab GDDR5 and put it in a PC

I didn't say that at all please read what i said:

You’ll be hard pressed to find any PC with GDDR5 plugged directly into the motherboard rather than sitting on the graphics card.

Which is totally true, did that sound anything like you just cannot grab GDDR5 and put in a PC, no it doesn't.

Problem is you could do that with a PC if you really wanted to.

I'm not saying if you wanted to, i'm talking how it is now, not in some mythical future.

somehow proof that consoles are entirely different.

Thay are built differently yes or no? and that was a very very simple example, or was meant to be.

Consoles are low end PCs, always have been and are even moreso now.

i wasn't even talking about either.

I give up yes your all right all consoles are built exactly the same as a PC, whatever.

I read what you said and I disagreed with it. Arguing with half quotes doesn't do your argument any favours. I agree that you can't just grab standard PC components and use GDDR5 as system memory. However that doesn't mean that it's magically different because of that fact. The fact is you could do that and it wouldn't break anything. It would just be a very niche product.

No they aren't and I said as much in the bit of my post that you chose not to quote. Let me quote it here:

So you can ignore that again if you want and claim that I was talking about something else. The fact is though that if a company thought it was worth building motherboards and CPUs that allow you to build something identical to the PS4 they would. Even crazier that PC at the end would happily run stock versions of windows because both MS and Sony are using x86 now. (you'd probably have some driver issues but the point remains)

What "that" do you think I was talking about? The fact that they are low end doesn't alter the point I was making which was the same for the entirety of my posts. You think that the consoles are so dramatically different that it's not worth even comparing them to PCs. That @rallydefault was wrong to say

... and I disagree. I think what @rallydefault said is entirely accurate and pointing to GDDR5 as proof that he's wrong got you nowhere. The consoles probably also have a proprietary ribbon connector for their optical drives but that equally doesn't make it "not a PC". The fact is you could build a PC with GDDR5 as shared system/graphics memory, integrated graphics already shares that memory. The fact that it's never GDDR5 in a PC is purely a demand issue.

You still need the OS. Honestly, that's all I see keeping any machine from running any game. Hardware is hardware. The OS controls that. As long as you have the code, you can basically make any of these machines do what the others can.

I could be wrong, but that's how I see it. The Wii U handles most of its process via the GPGPU, that why people don't see it being a good option to port. It just handles things differently. That doesn't mean it can't handle it at all.
Just look at the Xbox and GCN. They basically had identical performance, give or take, but they were built completely different.

@SCAR
Actually in that way the Wii U is more like the 360/PS3 than the XBOne/PS4 are because it's PPC and the new consoles are x86. Also the PS4 and XBOne are using an APU, one chip that does everything, so in that respect they're not that different from the Wii U with it's CPU + "GPGPU".

doesn't mean that it's magically different because of that fact

no one is saying it is, thats your assumption.

post that you chose not to quote. Let me quote it here

I chosen not to quote it because it's irrelevant, to what i am saying.

I'm not saying can you bulid a PC equivalent of the PS4, Xbox One or the Wii U because you can & some. I'm saying you cannot build a PS4, Xbox One or Wii U, i took the PS4 as an example which you took as a threat to your precious PC otherwise you would of not gone on your little rant talking about crap we are not even talking about.

Here is a little fact for you, as i know being the PC fanboy you are this will eff you off. Both CPU/GPU will be able to communicate with one another much faster and more efficiently than in a traditional PC set-up, thanks to the unified memory setup as opposed to the system your PC uses, with the CPU utilizing your DDR3 system memory and your GPU harnessing the more robust GDDR5. Combine this with the high-bandwidth GDDR5 memory and the fact that much of the traditional CPU tasks will be offloaded to the GPU, and you have a machine that you simply cannot compare to a modern PC.

Specs are just just different from machine to machine, that's why it's pointless to compare them, really.

The PS4 is essentially an Xbox One with tons of extra memory. I don't really see how a ton more memory can really do much within the industry, and Sony hasn't done anything else that the Xbox One can with literally alot more inside.

Unless PS4 runs Linux, or has homebrew type functions, I don't see why Sony put so much memory inside.

I can see Xbox One running Windows 8 programs from ports. It might as well, IMO.

Maybe I'm missing the point of PC vs. consoles, but it just seems like home consoles can do mainly everything PCs do with things being alot less complex(in terms of variances in builds).

Just look at the Art Academy app on Wii U. With a few more tools, more access to data management, and enhanced internet integration, you'd basically have a PC hooked up to your TV based on very specific programs(in comparison to Microsoft Paint).

The only time I ever use my PC is whenever I need a more flexible machine to do whatever while I'm online(like posting pics using HTML, videos in HD, etc), or Microsoft Word. Miiverse will eventually be able to post to other sites online, and then you can just post from that elsewhere. You don't need a PC for Microsoft Word, but that's just where that market has been known to be.

Once HTML5 gets supported alot more, I'll probably never use my PC ever again since I have a Wii U.

EDIT: Maybe I'm not being as specific as I should, but home consoles can do alot more than what they design them to do. Xbox One with a ton of Microsoft applications would probably sell to non-gamers as well. Just make Kinect have more real world use, and people would buy it to do work. If the "PC concept" of being able to do virtually anything was applied to gaming consoles, we'd see alot more interesting things happen.

EDIT: I'm talking Commodore 64, Atari PC, N64DD, Sega CD, etc. status. Since current technology has surpassed earlier technology(obviously), you can do similar things without requiring add-ons, or being as obscure of a machine as the Commodore 64 or Atari PC.

@banacheck
Unified memory setups aren't an invention of consoles nor is the idea of putting a GPU right next to the CPU. They used to build integrated graphics on low end motherboards, your integrated GPU that sat on the motherboard somewhere shared some of the system memory. Now there's a growing trend to put slightly better ones on the CPU itself. Often they allow you to use the GPU for general computing tasks or to put it another way use it as a General Purpose GPU or GPGPU. You can buy APUs and build your own PC around them if you want to. I'll even put a link to one of them right here -> http://www.ple.com.au/ViewItem.aspx?InventoryItemID=612964&am...

So you can build a PC using "basically the same stuff" that they build the consoles out of. These new consoles if anything are closer to a standard PC than the ones before. Now they all run on custom operating systems and are well and truly locked down but they are really just a PC with non-removable components in a custom case.

and no, I'm not some rampant PC fanboy defending PC gaming here. I simply disagreed with your attack on @rallydefault when he said the PS4/XBone were made of basically the same stuff as what you'd use to build a PC out of. That was correct and you were wrong to disagree. Nothing more.

@SCAR392

PS4 has the same amount of memory as the Xbox One, with the PS4 just being faster. The reason why they opted for so much over the Wii U's 2GB is for a couple f reasons.

-Game Developers are used to using more than that and ran into restraints on the 7th gen systems,
-To get all the OS features right out f the gate for stuff like livestreaming and instant switching. Something the Wii U will never be able to do outside a few apps.
-Most phones and tablet are already at 2-4GB per ram and they want to keep up.
-To future proof the systems in general.

About the RAM debate that's going on here..... don't be sucked in by the marketing bullet points. A phone with 2-4GB RAM? What are you doing on a phone that needs that much RAM? Really, that's no better than the cameras on phones that have like 18MP or whatever. You're paying for a marketing bullet point not a better experience.

The Wii U is fine with the amount of RAM it has. These other consoles probably could use a bit more because they have more horsepower behind them. Much beyond that? Won't be an issue for quite a while yet. Come back when we're talking about consoles that can actually do 4K gaming

Well I can't record video or live stream via the Wii U, so as long as it can't do that on the system level the BS works at this moment. Also I don't really care about 4K gaming as it isn't relevant right now. (it probably will be 6-8 years maybe even sooner). But having instant switching, stuff running in the background, and stuff like upload studio and twitch support is real.

Also while most MP are bullcrap look up the Nokis 808 and the Lumia 1020. Spitting the hot fire in the imaging department.

All cameras on mobile phones suck (compared to DSLR...)
If the RAM is only used for ridiculous stuff like recording video, then I agree it is not needed. Wii U also downloads in the background and does other things in the background so I don't see the problem there.