Either Shin’en, the developers behind the gorgeous Nano Assault Neo and Fast Racing League, have a point here, or they are further imply the fact that they are wizards. You see, with all of the complaints being heard about the Wii U and its power “situation”, it feels great to hear such encouraging words from a very talented developer studio. They aren’t afraid to tell it how it is, as seen in their response to the Wii U’s hardware below:
We only know you need to treat the Wii U differently then those consoles because of a very different and in our view more accessible architecture. There is a lot power to unleash in the Wii U. Enough power for many years to come, at least from our point of view.
We know many people see us as Wii U experts. That is because we got a lot of technical praise for Nano Assault Neo but it’s not well deserved. Only very tiny bits of Nano Assault Neo took advantage of the Wii U architecture. We had the game from start in 720p at 60fps. We drew the complete game world twice for TV and GamePad. We had tons of overlays, special effects and even camera streaming and still had no GPU or CPU problems. So we simply had no reason to dig deep into the architecture. We didn’t expected to be seen as the spearhead of Wii U graphics as it undeserved, when looking at what the Wii U can truly achieve.
Lots of power, eh? Well, it can’t be more powerful than the Xbox 360 can it? Well, Shin’en says that it isn’t only more powerful than the 360 and PS3, but instead several generations ahead:
The Wii U GPU is several generations ahead of the current gen. It allows many things that were not possible on consoles before. If you develop for Wii U you have to take advantage of these possibilities, otherwise your performance is of course limited. Also your engine layout needs to be different. You need to take advantage of the large shared memory of the Wii U, the huge and very fast EDRAM section and the big CPU caches in the cores. Especially the workings of the CPU caches are very important to master. Otherwise you can lose a magnitude of power for cache relevant parts of your code. In the end the Wii U specs fit perfectly together and make a very efficient console when used right.
This fresh new point of view is, well, refreshing. Do these comments perhaps lessen your worries about the Wii U’s future? It appears that it just takes a bit of time and a pinch of effort to really dig in to the system and reap the benefits the hardware provides, but are most third-parties going to be willing to do that? Sound off in the comments below!
Source: Nintendo Life
Thanks for posting Dustin, it is refreshing to hear from someone that has worked with the Wii U that it is the real deal. As we all know another strategic win for Wii U is that it has come out a year earlier. Now is the time for the smaller studios (who haven’t already) to jump on board before the giants wake up, retool and squash the insects.
Awesome. Really great to see someone brave enough to compliment Nintendo consoles. As we saw with the Wii, somehow Nintendo 1st and 2nd party devs knew how to make kick-ass games.
Were they using different hardware? No. They were just using a different part of their brain…. the part where effort and intelligence are stored.
Hopefully this kind of talk can inspire other devs to speak up as well.
good to know that there are still developers that support nintendo, i purchased nanno assault just for support and i find it amazing!