We didn’t have such problems. 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.
When testing our first code on Wii U we were amazed how much we could throw at it without any slowdowns, at that time we even had zero optimizations. The performance problem of hardware nowadays is not clock speed but ram latency. Fortunately Nintendo took great efforts to ensure developers can really work around that typical bottleneck on 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.
We can’t detail the Wii U graphics chip, but any modern GPU supports various anti-aliasing modes with the usual Pros and Cons. Many GPUs have a certain amount of AA even for ‘free’ when rendering. Usage of these modes depends on your rendering style (like forward or deferred) and other implementation details.
Nano Assault Neo is running in 720p yes. We had the game also running in 1080p but the difference was not distinguishable when playing. Therefore we used 720p and put the free GPU cycles into higher resolution post-Fx. This was much more visible. If we had a project with less quick motions we would have gone 1080p instead i guess.
It’s not a problem to make beautiful 1080p games on the Wii U. As on any console or PC such titles need ~200% more fill rate than 720p. You can use this power either for 1080p rendering or for more particles, better post-Fx, better materials, etc.
It should also be not forgotten that many current gen games don’t even run at 720p, but at lower resolutions which are scaled up (not to mention that most also only run at 30fps).
