E3 2012: Wii U Tech Specs Supposedly Leaked – Have A Look At Them Here

Let's see what drives this thing.

According to information received from an “anonymous” source by VGleaks (anyone else notice how the most interesting news is almost always anonymously sent?), the entire tech specifications of the Nintendo Wii U have been released on to the internet, and every Tom, Dick and Harry is having a curious gander. Hold your horses though, as these specs are from the Wii U devkit - the hardware developers are currently using for their Wii U titles in the works. In other words, the retail version of the console that will be released at launch will most probably be slightly different.

From what I can deduce below, the developer version of this console has been stated to boast 3GB of RAM – assuming this is accurate, the retail version is probably only likely to have 1.5GB of RAM, with the console’s OS consuming 500MB of that, leaving developers to manage with the 1GB left for their games – that’s twice what the Xbox 360 and PS3 currently have. Another thing to note is the console’s apparent lack of a hard-drive, supposedly leaving the Wii U with 8GB worth of flash memory, expandable through the use of SD cards. No hard-drive? Slightly unsettling.

So, basically, it’s pretty powerful. With all that in mind, have an inside look at what we’ve been given below:

[box_light]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. [/box_light]