Wii's graphic analysis

[Mag]

Someone from GT made a great analysis of the Wii's graphic and proved those stupid fanboys wrong for critising the Wii's graphic, e.g "The wii is just Gamecube 1.5, The wii is inferior to xbox graphics, etc" and so on.

 

So, as we know there has been a lot of talk about Wii's graphics, the competition, the previous generation e.t.c and there have been a lot of myths too, I got a little fed up so I decided to debunk them.

 

 

1. "Wii can't do Normal Mapping."

 

- Who actually said it couldn't? That's something I've always wondered.

Digital-Legends proved that even the N-Gage which didn't even have a 3d accelerator chip let alone shaders or h/w bump mapping did normal-mapping too.

 

 

and so can the Nokia N93's *Dreamcast* based PowerVR MBX graphics chip.

 

Furthermore, Konami will use Normal-mapping technology in Dewy's adventure for Wii and Factor 5 have already expressed their displeasure of developers not using normal-maps on the system.

 

The Wii isn't as capable at the techniques as some other systems, but it can be done to some capacity.

 

2. "Even though the Wii's ATI Hollywood GPU has a higher clock speed than the Xbox's XGPU, it still isn't capable of as many pixel fillrate calculations. Wii isn't capable of pixel shading. Nor is it capable of graphical effects such as stencil shadows, self-shadowing and light scattering".

 

This is wrong. Rogue Squadron II did these effects on Gamecube back in 2001, light scattering was an excellent addition in Rebel Strike in 2003.

 

The ATI Hollywood can actually produce "insane fillrates" to use Factor 5's words. Hollywood is capable of a pixel fill-rate of almost 972 mega pixels. Having such a high fill-rate capability means that the Wii can perform advanced shaders, advanced texture filtering and advanced multi-layer texture effects better than the Gamecube could.

 

3. "Wii is hardly anymore powerful than the Gamecube. In fact its not much more capable than the PS2."

 

Don't make assumptions by what early Wii games display.

 

Wii's CPU for a start would arguably outrun the Xbox's twice over thanks to its fast Power PC architecture.

 

The huge RAM (over twice as big & faster) also allows for larger richer worlds than before.

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4. "The Wii is incapable of good physics."

 

Really? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSWlZFdRS8o...ted&search=

Wait til they switch the Vacuum Laser on, physics allover the place.

 

All those interactions at once? Wii was having a picnic, hardly touched Hollywood for graphics functions too. Broadway used a fraction of the CPU to compute those physics. The system is capable of even more. Btw, AGEIA Physics are already in use for current & future Wii titles.

 

5. "The controller interactions require huge amounts of processing power, that's holding back Wii graphics."

 

Incorrect. It doesn't have a performance hit. If it did this (below) wouldn't run in 60 frames per second with so many advanced effects.

 

[OverlordMondo]

The biggest issue with this is that I can never tell whether it's comparing the Wii to the Gamecube or the Xbox.