Nintendo demonstrates faster Wii U load times

Nintendo promised it'd bring faster Wii U menu loading in a system update, and it certainly seems it'll deliver. The company has released a video showing the main menu loading a good fifteen seconds faster after quitting a game under the upcoming firmware--a whopping 60% improvement.

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Nintendo promised it'd bring faster Wii U menu loading in a system update, and it certainly seems it'll deliver. The company has released a video showing the main menu loading a good fifteen seconds faster after quitting a game under the upcoming firmware--a whopping 60% improvement.

The spring update, arriving in April, is only Nintendo's first step towards improving loading times. The summer update is also due to help, though how and by how much is a secret for now.

Here's the demonstration (via Siliconera):

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  • reply
    March 27, 2013 6:00 AM

    Alice O'Connor posted a new article, Nintendo demonstrates faster Wii U load times.

    Nintendo promised it'd bring faster Wii U menu loading in a system update, and it certainly seems it'll deliver. The company has released a video showing the main menu loading a good fifteen seconds faster after quitting a game under the upcoming firmware--a whopping 60% improvement.

    • reply
      March 27, 2013 6:29 AM

      That's a big improvement! Too bad it still sucks...

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        March 27, 2013 6:30 AM

        I mean seriously... my tiny phone switches between programs / home screen in less than a second, wtf is wrong with the Wii U?

        • reply
          March 27, 2013 6:33 AM

          Well, it has to load the home screen program back into memory and restart it. Your phone keeps a big chunk of ram tied up with your homescreen at all times. A games console can't do that.

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            March 27, 2013 6:56 AM

            Which is funny because Wii U has half of it's 2GB GDDR3 dedicated to the OS. So you have to wonder what is taking up all that space and if one of these updates is going to lower that footprint so devs can use more than 1GB on games.

            From a Time interview with Miyamoto( excerpts in question here: http://www.gonintendo.com/?mode=viewstory&id=197562), it seems that the extended load times had to do with the fact that there wasn't one dedicated OS dev team, they spread out parts of the system to get it done in time for Black friday 2012 and when they put it all together, they didn't have any time to optimize the whole thing. Hence the 4GB day 1 update and these april and summer updates to speed things up.

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              March 27, 2013 7:09 AM

              I bet a lot of the 1GB is used for rendering to the 2nd display...

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              March 27, 2013 7:32 AM

              The reserved gb is for the pause hub I think: if you press the home button there's a thing that lets you do some stuff in the game and with no reloading. The main wii-u menu is a huge monster and can't fit in that space, they have to flush and reload it.

              You would think they could restart it more quickly though.

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                March 27, 2013 7:47 AM

                It'll get better, I bet it will be lighting fast before the Wii Bloody Sunday comes out.

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            March 27, 2013 8:51 AM

            Regardless, this isn't a console from 5 years ago, this is a new console. The fact is, *they* decided to release it like it was (and is). The load times are completely under their control, and the technical reasons aren't my problem, as a consumer. I want it to load fast, and I don't particularly care what challenges they need to overcome to do that. It just doesn't seem like it was even a priority to them before, and this seems like way too little, way too late.

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      March 27, 2013 6:31 AM

      damn updates ate all my gigabytes

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        March 27, 2013 7:46 AM

        If you bought the basic one you're really doing yourself a disservice not getting an external drive. I only have one game installed on the Wii U itself and that's because its the one I've been playing the most of lately and I've been moving it around a fair amount.

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