The biggest part of the article makes sense... But then you fok it all up by saying... Wii could handle X360 games but not in HD... Thats just plain bullcrap!!! Cause then, if Nintendo were to release a patch so Wii could handle 720p... It would have the same graphics as GoW... Yeah right!...                           

The last part is just plain bullcrap... and im a Nintendo fanboy who is saying this!... I hate to say it, but you can't denie truth!

You comparing a 733MHz x86-architecture-processor with an 729MHz PPC-architecture-processor? We all know, that x86-architecture was built for high clock-speed until recently, when the core-architecture came out. Now, with a core or core2 processor, you have the same processing-power at a really lowered clockspeed. The PPC-architecture at the other hand wasn't optimised for high clockspeed, but more power at slower clocks. If your numbers are correct (I have no idea at which numbers X-Box and Wii run), then you are actually stating that the Wii is far more powerful than the X-Box.

Shrug, I wasn't looking for a bad shot, just picked the first one I found.  I've seen it in motion while I was playing it.  It's pretty, but it still "looks like a PS2 game" to me.

@Starcraft, I think you jumped too far in your logic.  When they say Wii could handle 360 games but not in HD, they mean not in HD -- so no, they're not saying you could release a patch and it would handle it.  It wouldn't.

The point is a fairly good one though.  The Wii's graphics system is fast enough to get about as much detail out of 480p as you're going to get.  Whether it can handle 360 or PS3 games or not depends a lot on the game.  It may have the graphical prowess to render essentially the same game with lower resolution textures and only at 480p, but it doesn't have the Cell or Xenon.  Yes, it's faster than the Xbox, but really, if the Wii has a weak point, it's not the graphics, it's the CPU.  Still, I doubt most games out there are really using most of the Xenon or the Cell.

If the clockspeed posted above is right, then the Wii is far more powerful than the X-Box. So I don't agree. And Apple switched to Intel, after Intel switched the architecture to cores. So with the core-architecture the clockspeed can be much lower for the same processing-power. The apples wasn't slower than a PC before, they were much more expensive. Actually supercomputers were built with apple-processors. And I think Apple switched to Intel, because Intel made a good deal for Apple. Thats much more important. Look at the other hand, that this gen every game-console-maker switched to PPC-architecture.

Is there better than Nvidia the 8800 Ultra .. I guess no !! well comparing the Wii and XBOX 360 is not right, I own a Wii and I can tell you this is not right but to claim that The Wii is as powerful as the Xbox this is realy shame, innaceceptable more!!! this is what we call ignorence you know Why !!! .. the Xbox is released in 2001 and the WII is in 2006 .. FIVE YEARS ... FIVE YEARS ... FIVE YEARS !!!!!!!!!! FIVE YEARS can't you see that.. the Xbox CPU is designed by Intel and The is designed By IBM !!!!! ... IBM !!! IBM !!! can't you realize this ... to be honnest every Xbox 360 or PS3 fan doesn't admit that NINTENDO is the worth ambassador of the video gaming world. P.S. Miyamoto I like video gaming I like electonics I like graphics and above all this I like the way you are ! thanks god I'm living in the same years you're living thank you Miyamoto.

Wow, I didn't know there were still people who think MHz = power.  That hasn't been valid for over a decade now.  When it came to gaming the Cubes 485MHz G3 was almost as good as the Xbox's 733MHz P-III.  That's because it had 320KB of cache compared with 160KB and while the Xbox's P-III was an off the shelf gimped processor for notebooks the Gekko was modified with several gaming friendly addtions like extra instruction sets and an improved FPU.  Check any benchmark site to see how different CPU's with the same power can be.  My old Athlon 3000 at 2.16GHz generates 3.2 GFLOPS while the 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo in my laptop generates 5.7 GFLOPS per core.  For gaming the difference can be even more pronounced since PC CPU's and gaming CPU's are used differently (even PC CPU's are used differently which is why benchmarks generate different results).

It's hard to say exactly how powerful the Wii is since we know so little about it.  From guestimates it seems the Wii's CPU is around 50-100% more powerful than the Xbox's (depending on how modified it is, the Gekko was about 2% bigger than the standard 750cx, Broadway is 18% bigger than the standard 750cl).  The GPU is extra difficult to compare.  It's claimed Hollywood is just a Flipper clocked at 243MHz but it's almost 3 times larger than the Flipper.  At any rate, since the Flipper could do about 2/3 the poly count of the Xbox it would at least be a little above the Xbox now and probably in the 50-100% range also.  I've read that the limited 24MB of useful RAM was what kept devs from fully using the GameCubes power and that's what improved the most.  Now it's 88MB which is above the 64MB of the Xbox plus the Wii has the 3MB embedded RAM the Xbox didn't have.  Overall RAM bandwidth is still presumably higher on the Xbox but its less efficient, higher latency, has to make up for the lack of embedded memory, and the RAM isn't connected directly to the GPU.  As to the point of this thread, the differences between the Wii and Xbox should be comparable to the difference between the GameCube and PS2.   The Wii should be able to do about 45-60 million polys/s compared to 30 for the Xbox.  For a comparison of what the difference should be check out this site with videos of both PS2 and GCN RE4 http://www.gameswelike.com/web/re/RE%20Comp.htm (I didn't know the PS2 version looked that bad).

So no the Wii in no way comes close to the PS3 or 360 but few would argue that anyways (though there apparently are some Nintendo fanboys who do).   However, despite similar CPU clock speeds the Wii should be noticeably more powerful than the Xbox.  The Xbox and GCN both were close to having the maximum needed power for 640x480 resolution so I assume the Wii is the maximum for 853X480, which explains why Nintendo chose to stop there and not make the big expensive jump into a still small HDTV market.  True we haven't seen any games yet that showcase the Wii's extra power but we should this Christmas with Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3.  Mario Galaxy is I think already looking better than any Xbox game and MP3 was starting to last time we saw it.  Nintendo really needs to make those games look as good as they can since it appears 3rd parties can't be troubled to do more than put their 5th string N64 teams on their Wii projects (I don't care if they do but I don't want to hear them complaining about low profits or about Nintendo selling more on the Wii than they do).

Wii could never handle sumfin like GOW less HD, first off the wii doesnt have any shader support (if i remember correctly, or its pretty basic shader support, one of the two)....

It's not certain if it has standard shaders like Pixel Shader 2.0 or 4.0 whatever the 360 has but it does have a form of shader effects from its TEV.  This forum discussion from 2002 about the Flipper covers the differences http://forum.beyond3d.com/archive/index.php/t-1086.html

The key part is: "The TEV and "pixel shaders" are basically cute acronyms for what used to be called color combiners. The TEV also incorporates the Texture reading part of the pipeline.

A color combiner is in general implemented as a single logic op, in NVidia's case thats public (register combiner docs) and is of the form
A op1 B op2 C op1 D
where op1 is either Dot Product or multiply, op2 is either add or select.
As you can see by repeating this multiple times with some register manipulation between stages you can do most basic math. Pixel shaders just provide a simple consistent interface to this (and other vendors implementations).

The TEV uses a different basic combine operation which is a little more limited. However since the Texture reads can be interleaved with the combiner operations it allows you to do things that would require multipass render on NV2X."

Normal Mapping has been done on the Wii which the GameCube couldn't do so something was added to Hollywood.  I've read that the Wii can also do displacement mapping before but I haven't heard anything more about that.  As to Gears of War, it should be doable even without shaders.  It won't look as good even in EDTV comparison is all.

Few big budget games have come out to the wii yet.  You can't judge the quality of the graphics possible on the wii based on Excite Truck.