Akihiro Suzuki of the Dynasty Warriors franchise says the Wii U’s CPU – which features three Power PC cores – poses certain “challenges” for developers.
“One of the weaknesses of the Wii U compared to PS3 and Xbox 360 is the CPU power is a little bit less,” Suzuki recently told EuroGamer.
“So for games in the Warriors series, including Dynasty Warriors and Warriors Orochi, when you have a lot of enemies coming at you at once, the performance tends to be affected because of the CPU. Dealing with that is a challenge.”
Although Nintendo has yet to release official Wii U CPU specs, reports indicate the processor is slower than the CPU powering both the PS3 and Xbox 360. Nevertheless, says Suzuki, one of the Wii U’s strengths is its custom AMD 7 series GPU, and the 1GB of RAM available to games: double that of the PS3 and Xbox 360.
“Developing on new hardware in itself was a challenge, and also making that launch date was a challenge. But from a visual standpoint, based on the performance of the Wii U, we knew the game had the capability of having much better graphics than games on PS3 and Xbox 360,” he clarified.
“Make no mistake, from a visual standpoint, it is able to produce better graphics. So our challenge was to make a higher quality graphics. We were able to meet that.”
Suzuki also noted that the PS3 is equipped with multiple CPUs and an SPU, allowing devs to calculate the various motions of in-game characters on the CPU to ensure a title runs smoothly. Meanwhile, Xbox 360 CPUs are formulated to spread out the processing power so things run efficiently.
“With the Wii U being new hardware, we’re still getting used to developing for it, so there are still a lot of things we don’t know yet to bring out the most of the processing power. There’s a lot that still needs to be explored in that area,” he added.
