Wii U Tech Specs

[Update: much more detailed tech specs for Wii U have hit the web. Continue to page 2 to to check them out.]

Nintendo opened the doors to E3 2012 this year with a rather impressive display of Wii U goodies during its Press Conference. Unfortunately, the company wasn't about to give out the information that everyone had been craving: a price point, a release date past “Holiday 2012,” or info on some of the more requested games. That’s not to say that Nintendo and front man Reggie Fils-Aime didn’t have a lot to talk about; it was quite the opposite.

Reggie made sure that press and fans alike knew right from the very start of the conference that with so much to talk about, the event would have to focus on just the games . That meant that the tech specs for the Wii U were left to float in the wind. Luckily, we here at Game Rant understand that you want to know exactly you’re playing on, so we have the info that you crave.

Nintendo had already released the information on the fully realized Wii U GamePad earlier this week, and had slowly been leaking information on the connectivity and playability of its console through events like Ubisoft's Press Conference yesterday. Some big highlights were the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology and the Wii U Pro, the additional gaming controller that bares a striking resemblance to the Xbox 360 controller. Both the Wii U Pad and Pro will come with Rechargeable Lithium-Ion, so gamers will no longer have to spend a fortune on batteries while they play. Reggie confirmed during the press conference that the Wii U can, in fact, support two GamePads.

httpv://youtu.be/mZvlpA7knsQ

The Wii U itself isn't as illustrious as its handheld counterpart, but it is a big step away from the Wii. Boasting 1080p and six-channel PCM audio (courtesy of it’s new HDMI output), the Wii U is fully HD. Under the hood it’s sporting an IBM-based multi-core processor, and AMD Radeon HD GPU (meaning that players can see every hair in Mario’s moustache).

Storage, however, is still a slight mystery. According to Nintendo, the Wii U will have on-board flash memory, but the company doesn't specify the amount. It could potentially mean that there will be tiers, much like Microsoft and Sony offer with their consoles, but it’s still too early to tell. Regardless, Nintendo does state that you’ll be able to bolster your save data with either SD memory cards or USB drives.

Finally, there are four USB inputs -- two in the front and two in the back -- and in addition to HDMI, the system will support a variety of video outputs: Wii D-Terminal (whatever that is), Wii Component Video, Wii RGB, Wii S-Video, Stereo AV and Wii AV. Wi-Fi, up to and including 802.11n, is built right in.

It seems that Nintendo has its head on right for the Wii U , but we won’t know more until we see how their demo titles come back. Stay close and see what we here at Game Rant have to say, and let us know what you’re thinking on the matter.

[UPDATE] It seems that you readers weren't the only ones who were a bit dismayed at the minimalism displayed in the Wii U's hardware specifications. Lucky for you, the dev-kit specs were released not long after the press conference, letting loose some very interesting details on what exactly players can expect in the console

For the full breakdown, head to the next page.

 

The Nintendo Wii U launches this holiday season.

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Source: Nintendo

Wii U Detailed Tech Specs

Now that we have the room, let's be perfectly clear that these specs should still be filed under "rumor and speculation," as this is still is reportedly a development kit model, and could change by retail. Some key things to notice in all of the facts and figures here is that the Wii U is running on a three-core PowerPC processor - the same as the Xbox 360. While there's no indication as to what speed it's running at (the Xbox runs at about 3.2 GHz), it's safe to assume that it can run around that same speed as well.

Another interesting tidbit to look at is it's GPU, which is one of the Radeon 4000 series: two generations newer than the Xbox, and nearly three generations newer than most standard computers. That's some serious graphic prowess, something that Nintendo sorely needs to implement to prove they are in the arms race in the coming next-generation console battle.

Take a look at the rest of the specs, and tell us what you're thinking.

Hardware Features

Main Application Processor

  • PowerPC architecture.
  • Three cores (fully coherent).
  • 3MB aggregate L2 Cache size.
  • core 0: 512 KB
  • core 1: 2048 KB
  • core 2: 512 KB
  • Write gatherer per core.
  • Locked (L1d) cache DMA per core.

Main Memory

  • Up to 3GB of main memory (CAT-DEVs only). Note: retail machine will have half devkit memory
  • Please note that the quantity of memory available from the Cafe SDK and Operating System may vary.

Graphics and Video

  • Modern unified shader architecture.
  • 32MB high-bandwidth eDRAM, supports 720p 4x MSAA or 1080p rendering in a single pass.
  • HDMI and component video outputs.

Features

  • Unified shader architecture executes vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
  • Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
  • Read from multi-sample surfaces in the shader
  • 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
  • High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
  • Indexed cube map arrays
  • 8 render targets
  • Independent blend modes per render target
  • Pixel coverage sample masking
  • Hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
  • Early Z test and Fast Z Clear
  • Lossless Z & stencil compression
  • 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes
  • sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
  • Tessellation unit
  • Stream out support
  • Compute shader support
  • GX2 is a 3D graphics API for the Nintendo Wii U system (also known as Cafe). The API is designed to be as efficient as GX(1) from the Nintendo GameCube and Wii systems. Current features are modeled after OpenGL and the AMD r7xx series of graphics processors. Wii U’s graphics processor is referred to as GPU7.

Sound and Audio

  • Dedicated 120MHz audio DSP.
  • Support for 6 channel discrete uncompressed audio (via HDMI).
  • 2 channel audio for the Cafe DRC controller.
  • Monaural audio for the Cafe Remote controller.

Networking

  • 802.11 b/g/n Wifi.

Peripherals

  • 2 x USB 2.0 host controllers x 2 ports each.
  • SDCard Slot.

Built-in Storage

  • 512MB SLC NAND for System.
  • 8GB MLC NAND for Applications.

Host PC Bridge

  • Dedicated Cafe-to-host PC bridge hardware.
  • Allows File System emulation by host PC.
  • Provides interface for debugger and logging to host PC.

What do you think, Ranters -- are these specs too good to be true, or rather, are they not enough? Give us your opinions, and we'll track it down.

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Source: Examiner.com