Aliens: Colonial Marines Producer on Wii U.

[MilkyWay]

Nintendo's Wii U demo reel at E3 last year contained a clip of Aliens: Colonial Marines, but we haven't heard much about the version since then. Speaking with Gearbox President Randy Pitchford, we tried to surgically extract a viable specimen of information out of him, but he refrained from getting too specific.

"Nintendo still has a lot to announce with their platform, and it's not up to us to go ahead of them," he told Joystiq. "I think it's a great platform and I'm really excited about it, particularly with this game, there's a lot of exciting opportunities like, 'Wow, my motion tracker is there, and I can move it like this!'" he said as he moved his arms side to side. "There's just so much cool stuff."
Aliens: Colonial Marines (4/4/12)

Brian Burleson, the game's producer, was a lot less forthcoming with details on the Wii U version, but he was still positive about it. "You'll have to wait," he told us. "But I play it all the time, and it's really good."

That's great for this particular game, but what about the system in general? How does an acclaimed developer like Gearbox feel about it? "There's a lot that we can do with that screen," Pitchford said. "It's a really cool system -- it's pretty powerful. I want to be careful, because I don't want to risk any sensitive information that Nintendo's not ready to share yet, but in our experience it's a great system. I think it's a really nice bridge to the next generation. I think people will be surprised. I don't know off the top of my head how many of the specs they've released, so I want to be very careful not to jump the gun, but we're very pleased with the hardware. And even since they gave us our first alpha kit, our very first 'pre-prototype' development hardware that they kind of let us play around with, they've done so many things to make the platform better. So it's getting better for us as developers."

To be fair, Pitchford is very passionate about gaming and gets really enthusiastic about a lot of things -- he professed extreme excitement for Duke Nukem Forever, after all. But his words, particularly about the system's power, might be encouraging to those who worried the Wii U wouldn't even stack up to the PS3 in terms of graphical capability.

Source: http://www.joystiq.com/2012/04/04/gearbox-boss-says-impressive-wii-u-a-really-nice-bridge-to-the/

Take it for what you will.

 

[Kreij]

i've read articles that say their inside dev sources report that the Wii U is less (graphically) powerful than the 360 or the PS3. But until we see real specs or someone is willing to put their name on a quote, it's all just FUD as far as I'm concerned.

 

[ShiBDiB]

Sounds more like "The games shit and far from ready." or "The consoles shit and as such were not putting alot of effort into the game.."

 

[RoutedScripter]

i've read articles that say their inside dev sources report that the Wii U is less (graphically) powerful than the 360 or the PS3. But until we see real specs or someone is willing to put their name on a quote, it's all just FUD as far as I'm concerned.

That was a late april fool from gamesindustry.biz

Total bullcrap - but the early kits were overheating and had to be underclocked, the add-in GPU theory fit in perfectly, the HD4xxx were the biggest heaters ever, that's not the actual GPU, it was just the early spec-target when the actual custom GPU was not out of FABs yet.

WiiU GPU is "over 1 TFLOP" - that's 4 times more than X360


http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=36445246&postcount=11446

 

[NC37]

I'm surprised people would even consider that a WiiU with 4800 series graphics would be considered weaker than current gen. Seriously.../facepalm

I dunno if the 4000 series were the hottest running from ATI, wouldn't surprise me. My old X1900XT was just a mini oven, specially with it's VRMs. Not even an aftermarket cooler saved mine. Sucker just fried itself.

 

[xenocide]

Total bullcrap - but the early kits were overheating and had to be underclocked, the add-in GPU theory fit in perfectly, the HD4xxx were the biggest heaters ever, that's not the actual GPU, it was just the early spec-target when the actual custom GPU was not out of FABs yet.

WiiU GPU is "over 1 TFLOP" - that's 4 times more than X360

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=36445246&postcount=11446

"Over 1 TeraFLOP" according to?

And that forum post is just some guy throwing out ideas that may or may not make sense. For example, saying the Wii U's GPU will be made on 28nm because Nintendo always uses the lowest process node, is ignoring the fact that when the Wii came out 90nm was already cost-effective and quite plentiful--currently 28nm is in super high demand, and only a handful of places can make it, usually with mediocre yield, the difference between a GPU designed on 40nm and 28nm at this point is easily like $50 a wafer...

I'm surprised people would even consider that a WiiU with 4800 series graphics would be considered weaker than current gen. Seriously.../facepalm

I dunno if the 4000 series were the hottest running from ATI, wouldn't surprise me. My old X1900XT was just a mini oven, specially with it's VRMs. Not even an aftermarket cooler saved mine. Sucker just fried itself.

The major difference is the WiiU will also be rendering multiple instances of the game, one for the TV, and another to stream to the controllers they are implementing. I highly doubt the system will be weaker, but I also highly doubt it will be exponentially more powerful.

 

[RoutedScripter]

"Over 1 TeraFLOP" according to?

And that forum post is just some guy throwing out ideas that may or may not make sense. For example, saying the Wii U's GPU will be made on 28nm because Nintendo always uses the lowest process node, is ignoring the fact that when the Wii came out 90nm was already cost-effective and quite plentiful--currently 28nm is in super high demand, and only a handful of places can make it, usually with mediocre yield, the difference between a GPU designed on 40nm and 28nm at this point is easily like $50 a wafer...



The major difference is the WiiU will also be rendering multiple instances of the game, one for the TV, and another to stream to the controllers they are implementing. I highly doubt the system will be weaker, but I also highly doubt it will be exponentially more powerful.

I partly agree with him however we don't know the process node ... yes it is speculation but it comes from the background of research and experience. I totally agree that HD4XXX has to be the add-in card.

He bets on 28nm, I don't, i think it's 32nm that's going at fishkill at GLOFO. Since IBM is also at fishkill with WiiU CPU, i don't know if 28nm is at fishkill yet - the most advanced stuff is at DRESDEN as that was the main plant imo, the employees would have to go 6 months to germany to training then get back to work at fishkill ... i might look deeper into this but there's not much info out there to look at either.

There is tons of discussions going on and it's impossible that we can make a common ground here in a few posts.

You might find some wortwhile stuff on thewiiu.com forums where i also post (watch for bruce-willis avatar)

 

[xenocide]

Glofo's NY plant is actually in Malta, and it just went online this year, it says they are doing production on 32nm, starting 28nm, and experimenting with 20nm product. I can't comment on Fishkill--we'll chalk it up to legal reasons. I just don't see 28nm in the cards for Nintendo, the cost is too high still.