George Harrison: Wii Hardware Revision 'Not Out of the Question'

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RPGuy96 said:

Crono said:
What would be really bitchin is a USB attachment thats basically an external video card to piggyback onto whats in the Wii already. It would have more RAM, and an extra/better GPU to enable those oh so coveting HD resolutions and shader effects. All games would still support Wii without the attachment, but the new games would have optional eye candy and higher resolutions that would kick on automagically if you have the attachment.

Not sure if USB is fast enough to be a passthrough though. I thought they had external video cards already that ran on USB.

It isn't. Throughput on PCIe x16 is 4 GB/s; throughput on USB 2.0 is 480 MB/s. I'm not sure exactly what the Wii uses to communicate with its GPU but you're pretty much guaranteed that a USB solution would be a downgrade.

QFT, even if it is an understatement lol.  There is pretty much no way you could get decent graphics over USB, especially since those 480 MB/s numbers are all burst speeds, not sustained.  Hell even Firewire 800 which is significantly faster (and significantly less supported) would be a huge stretch to do anything meaningful.

 

Don't get me wrong it's a good thought, but not feasible with the current setup.