Frostbite 3 not on Wii U due to poor Frostbite 2 tests

[compl3x]

EA DICE's Frostbite 3 engine, which powers the upcoming Battlefield 3 and the recently announced Star Wars games, will not support Wii U due to poor results from Frostbite 2 testing, engine director Johan Andersson tweeted.

EA yesterday announced a partnership with Disney to exclusively create games based on the Star Wars brand, and that they would be powered by Frostbite 3. When inquired if Frostbite 3 ever previously ran on Wii U, Andersson replied there was never such case.

"Frostbite 3 has never been running on Wii U," he said. "We did some tests with not too promising results with Frostbite 2 and chose to not go down that path."

EA in March said Battlefield 3 would skip the Wii U, as DICE creative director Lars Gustavsson saidit's best that the company sticks to doing what it knows well.

"I?d rather play it safe, deliver something really good and then look at the future and what could possibly be done than trying a bit too hard and [failing]," Gustavsson said at the time.

EA executive producer Patrick Bach at GDC provided similar thoughts, saying Wii U is not part of the team's current focus.

Frostbite engine not used for Wii U due to 'not too promising' test results [Polygon]

http://www.destructo...ts-253295.phtml

[spaceelf]

I might die of shock now ;)

[notuptome2004]

yea i dont buy that i doubt they even tried to get FB2 engine up and running on the Wii U well i bet they ported it got it up and going but saw it not running right with no optimizations and siad F it also in this article they keep referencing BF3 not 4 so mmm Ubisoft is one game devloper tho out there that is taking the time to push the Wii U in up coming games same with others

[Kyang]

EA DICE's Frostbite 3 engine, which powers the upcoming Battlefield 3 and the recently announced Star Wars games, will not support Wii U due to poor results from Frostbite 2 testing, engine director Johan Andersson tweeted.

EA yesterday announced a partnership with Disney to exclusively create games based on the Star Wars brand, and that they would be powered by Frostbite 3. When inquired if Frostbite 3 ever previously ran on Wii U, Andersson replied there was never such case.

"Frostbite 3 has never been running on Wii U," he said. "We did some tests with not too promising results with Frostbite 2 and chose to not go down that path."

EA in March said Battlefield 3 would skip the Wii U, as DICE creative director Lars Gustavsson saidit's best that the company sticks to doing what it knows well.

"I?d rather play it safe, deliver something really good and then look at the future and what could possibly be done than trying a bit too hard and [failing]," Gustavsson said at the time.

EA executive producer Patrick Bach at GDC provided similar thoughts, saying Wii U is not part of the team's current focus.

Frostbite engine not used for Wii U due to 'not too promising' test results [Polygon]

http://www.destructo...ts-253295.phtml

Upcoming Battlefield 4 game right?

[Azies]

Could be because the Wii-U is a piece of ****.

[Blackhearted]

I really doubt they did much of a real test of FB2. As if it can run on the other 2 boxes, it could run on the wii u. They likely just didn't want to do the necessary work you have to do when porting something to a different platform.

[Boxster17]

It's all about risk reward in this business. Maybe in a year or two we'll see a severely scaled down version of this running on it, but right now I just don't think there's an install base to support it. This makes even more sense when you consider the lead platforms for this are all X86 which the Wii U is not.

[Alladaskill17]

So 'next gen' is just a term companies throw around for fun, not a standard lol Nintendo is 2/2 on being a generation behind in terms of processing & graphics power haha

[dead.cell]

I really doubt they did much of a real test of FB2. As if it can run on the other 2 boxes, it could run on the wii u. They likely just didn't want to do the necessary work you have to do when porting something to a different platform.

Keep telling yourself that. Meanwhile, the rest of us are starting to notice a trend... :ermm:

[Blackhearted]

Keep telling yourself that. Meanwhile, the rest of us are starting to notice a trend... :ermm:

So what then, you actually beleive a system that's equal to or a little greater than the ps3/360 somehow can't run the same things those systems can?

[notuptome2004]

Keep telling yourself that. Meanwhile, the rest of us are starting to notice a trend... :ermm:

Well right before crysis 3 was finished it was up and running on the Wii U just fine before EA axes it and siad No it was running visuals beyond the PS360 was having so yea they are just lazy cause the Wii U has a GPU far greater then the PS360 and has GPGPU functionality and clock speed dont matter anymore as far as CPU goes

[HawkMan]

So what then, you actually beleive a system that's equal to or a little greater than the ps3/360 somehow can't run the same things those systems can?

The CPU however is weaker, and Frostbite use CPU quite heavily.

[theyarecomingforyou]

The CPU however is weaker, and Frostbite use CPU quite heavily.

This. The Wii U has a weaker CPU than the X360 or PS3. While it might be possible to work around it, the small install base clearly doesn't make it economically viable to do so. Nintendo has chosen not to compete with Microsoft or Sony on specs but instead with asymmetric gameplay through the Wii U GamePad. Unfortunately that means that games that push the envelope graphically aren't suited to the Wii U.

[Lingwo]

If the Wii U was selling better. Then i bet all of a sudden Frostbite 3 will magically support Wii U.

[HawkMan]

If the Wii U was selling better. Then i bet all of a sudden Frostbite 3 will magically support Wii U.

Not magically, but EA/DICE would be more willing to spend the significant resources required to port the engine and optimize it for the system

[fusi0n]

Sucks for the Star Wars part.. BF players don't want to play on a Wii U anyway.. but I am sure having that control would give an edge for the game for console players..

[LaP]

I personally see the lack of support from EA and Activision/Blizzard *cough* Activision *cough* as a really good thing for a system. That is just me tough.

[spaceelf]

I personally see the lack of support from EA and Activision/Blizzard *cough* Activision *cough* as a really good thing for a system. That is just me tough.

Being ignored by the Western market really worked well for the Sega Saturn eh? I'm sure Nintendo will have a fantastic time of it...somewhere.

[LaP]

Being ignored by the Western market really worked well for the Sega Saturn eh? I'm sure Nintendo will have a fantastic time of it...somewhere.

Sega was more importantly notorious for not supporting old hardware after the new one was released.

[Blackhearted]

The CPU however is weaker, and Frostbite use CPU quite heavily.

I'm not saying whether you're wrong or right, but has there ever been a decent source for that claim? Or are we still quoting one post from some random guy on twitter as a hard fact?

[dead.cell]

So what then, you actually beleive a system that's equal to or a little greater than the ps3/360 somehow can't run the same things those systems can?

I'm pretty sure that neither you or me know the answer to that.

From my perspective though, it totally reminds me of a difficult client who wants something done that, while technically feasible, is just such a pain in the ass that you tell them no anyway. :p

There's a difference after all to something "running" and something actually running. Personally, I'd love for everyone to experience the Frostbite engine, if only to spoil the living crap out of people and get them to shy away from the Call of Duty series. I mean, I don't really care for graphics, but damn, when it's a night and day difference, it's hard to not consider it.

[Dotdot]

Could be because the Wii-U is a piece of ****.

Suprised this kind of comment gets past. Thank you for such an impromptu and indeed constructive post.

[Boxster17]

I personally see the lack of support from EA and Activision/Blizzard *cough* Activision *cough* as a really good thing for a system. That is just me tough.

I don't quite understand the logic that having less choice of games to play on a console is a good thing? If they release a bad game that you don't want to play, then don't play it, it doesn't affect you in the slightest.

[Gerowen]

Nintendo has now twice in a row produced a video game console that is seriously lacking in horsepower compared to its competitors. You can only ride your "classic" franchises for so long before people get tired of playing the 400th iteration of Mario Party and want to play some Battlefield, or Crysis, or Killzone, or Halo, etc. Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of older Nintendo games, but I've been seriously un-impressed with the last two consoles from Nintendo, because even though the Wii-U does have some nifty features like being able to play games on the controller while the television is occupied, they just can't keep up with their competitors in terms of visual quality. The Wii-U is just barely more powerful than the PS3 and the 360, and with the imminent release of the PS4 / XBox Infinity, both of which have hardware specs that are in a whole other league compared to the current generation, I don't think Nintendo will last much longer.

[notuptome2004]

Nintendo has now twice in a row produced a video game console that is seriously lacking in horsepower compared to its competitors. You can only ride your "classic" franchises for so long before people get tired of playing the 400th iteration of Mario Party and want to play some Battlefield, or Crysis, or Killzone, or Halo, etc. Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of older Nintendo games, but I've been seriously un-impressed with the last two consoles from Nintendo, because even though the Wii-U does have some nifty features like being able to play games on the controller while the television is occupied, they just can't keep up with their competitors in terms of visual quality. The Wii-U is just barely more powerful than the PS3 and the 360, and with the imminent release of the PS4 / XBox Infinity, both of which have hardware specs that are in a whole other league compared to the current generation, I don't think Nintendo will last much longer.

Well your lacking in the knowledge of the Wii U as it runs a 1.2ghz Trie core chip with 32mb of cach and while it may be slower then the PS360 chips in processing speed the GPU is 4 to 5 Generation newer with more ram in the system and as others have siad and myself GPGPu functionality so allot of CPU intensive task can be computed on the GPU and Games such as Trine 2 NFSU and some up coming games all run PC assets while adding more features. Thw Wii U disc size also helps a little since it holds 25gb of storage . so the Wii U is not really lacking in HP but Lacking in some Developers even trying to make a game for it .

Crytek already had a very good version of Crysis 3 running on the system running PC assets and stuff but EA canned it right before it was to go gold

Here is a Developer Quote on the Wii U source here well Site that source is linked to

http://thewiiu.com/topic/7747-interesting-article-regarding-cpugpu-in-wii-u/

Developers quotes - ?The CPU and GPU are a good match. As said before, today?s hardware has bottlenecks with memory throughput when you don?t care about your coding style and data layout. This is true for any hardware and can?t be only cured by throwing more megahertz and cores on it. Fortunately Nintendo made very wise choices for cache layout, RAM latency and RAM size to work against these pitfalls. Also Nintendo took care that other components like the Wii U GamePad screen streaming, or the built-in camera don?t put a burden on the CPU or GPU"

?I can only assure that the Wii U GPU feature set allows us to do many cool things that are not possible on any current console. The Wii U has enough of potential for the next years to create jaw-dropping visuals. Also remember the immense improvement we saw on the PS3 and Xbox 360 over the years"

Developer talking about RAM latency in Wii U - "They put a lot of thought on how CPU, GPU, caches and memory controllers work together to amplify your code speed. For instance, with only some tiny changes we were able to optimize certain heavy load parts of the rendering pipeline to 6x of the original speed, and that was even without using any of the extra cores"