Nintendo targets Switch-emulation chat servers, decryption tools with DMCA (2024)

caramelpolice said:

Not sure where TechPowerUp is getting their info from, but the Flipper GPU in the GameCube is 100% not based on "Rage 5" or the ATI Rage series at all, nor is Hollywood based on the Radeon RV515 (which would actually be more akin to the Xbox 360 GPU).

The GameCube GPU is actually a custom design developed by ArtX, who were bought by ATI shortly before the GameCube launched in 2000. And then, yes, they did a die shrink and bumped the clocks and gave it more memory for the version in the Wii, but it is exactly the same GPU architecture. Even TechPowerUp's page shows you that the number of shaders etc. are identical and the fillrate increase is exactly proportional to the increase in clock speed.

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Thanks for the info. I think TechPowerUp may have just plopped the GC/Wii GPUs into the "architecture" that best matched the year of release, although oddly Flipper is the only "Rage 5" GPU listed at all on their site. Maybe they should both be called "Art-X" architecture, since I can't find a codename of anything for that architecture.

On Art-X's Wikipedia page, it says their worked paved the way for development of R300, so it seems that Flipper/Hollywood is a precursor to that architecture.

This thread has quotes that show that Art-X became know as ATI's "west coast" or "Silicon Valley" team, and after working on R300 seemed to move to leading the R600 development.

If you dissect in, for example, to the R600 product, with is our next, next generation, that development team is all three sites - Orlando, Silicon Valley, Marlborough – but the architectural centre team is in the Valley, as you point out, but all three are part of that organisation.... So the R600 family will mainly be centred primarily in the Valley and Orlando with a little bit from Marlborough, and then the R800 would be more unified.

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So it seems like the Art-X team had a strong influence in ATI going forward, but it's not clear how much of the original Art-X architecture survived.

However, digging into the Wii U hardware, it looks like by that time, the new GPU architecture was different enough they packed the original GC/Wii GPU in for compatibility:

he Latte graphics chip contains both a "GX2" GPGPU, which runs Wii U applications, and a "GX" GPU, which enables backward compatibility with Wii games. The GX2, designed by AMD, is based on the Radeon R600/R700 architecture and is clocked at approximately 550 MHz.[81][83][a] It contains 32 MB of eDRAM cache memory, which can also act as L3 cache for the CPU.[a] The GX, originally designed by ArtX, contains a 1 MB and a 2 MB bank of eSRAM cache memory.

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Although, there seems to be some contention on using the "GX" names to refer to the GPUs, as that's the name of the Graphics library in the official SDK, not necessarily the name of the GPU.

This article mentions that the GPU in Hollyood was "is identical to Flipper's albeit with minimal corrections," and with a clock boost:

Also, this is an interesting read:

So, the new GPU would've made integrating Wii U functionality into Dolphin more complicated, although I also read that the CPU going multicore was another reason Dolphin didn't add Wii U emulation to it. Emulators do tend to focus on just one console, although oddly, when they cover multiple consoles/generations, it seems to be largely Nintendo products, like the emulators that cover Game Boy/Game Boy Color/Game Boy Advanced, or multiple generations of DS/3DS.