Wii's horsepower explained.

[Squilliam]

HappySqurriel said:

Kyros said:
Wow I totally agree with Squilliam. Never thought this would happen. Like all IBM products (for example the CELL), the PowerPC was very powerful when the developer knew what he was doing. In normal situations the advantage wasn't that big. Besides that the XBOX had a standard GPU with shader units that could be programmed with Direct3D and the Gamecube had a proprietary GPU with some weird programming models.

Which explains why XBOX games all in all looked better (Exceptions prove the rule)

And let's not even get started about this generation.

 

The Gamecube's flipper GPU included a TEV unit which is not that different from pixel combiners from the Geforce and Radeon cards from 1998 to 2000; they were (typically) more efficient than the programmable pixel shaders, but they were specific to hardware and were not taken heavy advantage of by developers. Games (like Resident Evil 4) that were ported from the Gamecube to the PC needed far more powerful shader hardware to produce all of the effects that the gamecube was able to do at the same time ... Unfortunately, the Gamecube was not particularly popular and tended to get (third rate) ports from the PS2 that never took advantage of the specific hardware.

Developers on the Wii aren't going to be looking to use that power.

1. Why spend millions to develop engines to take advantage of the Wii when its a dead end graphical architecture?

2. Do developers see a return for spending a lot on advanced graphics engines especially as they are already a couple of years behind the ball and need to get games out quickly.

So really its the PS3 question but worse, because we have a userbase which as a whole does not respond as well to developers pushing the envelope of what the system can be seen to do.