Wii's horsepower explained.

[HappySqurriel]

Diomedes1976 said:
I wont enter too much into the technicisms ,but judging by results its clear the Wii isnt much more advanced that the Cube and Xbox.

Most of the better looking Wii games are GC games as RE4 and Zelda.Re4 had a PS2 version only slighty inferior to the Wii/Cube games.

Galaxy looks great ,but its not leagues ahead Mario Sunshine (look at side by side videos).Metroid 3 is just a little step beyond Metroid Echoes .

The Wii specs may be better that the Cube specs ,but you really need very significant leaps in power to see really different results .If you had the PS2 clocked at 400Mhz and with twice the RAM(16Mb) you would still see PS2-like games with a little more draw distance,some negligible detail more,some frames more of animation on 2-3 NPCs more on screen.. but pretty much the same limitations and same feel.Go to open worlds ,hundreds of NPCs on screen ,higher resolutions ,online managing etc and that kind of increase is irrelevant.

More so ,the investment in developing tools for that kind of hardware stopped long ago...Wii is quite maximized right now due to it being a known architecture ,anyone expecting big jumps in its games is fooling himself.

As for The Conduit ,I dont think it looks too well.Given the offerings the Wii is getting it sure looks better than most Wii games but I dont see it as drastically above HL2 or Doom on the Xbox or Black on the PS2 and Xbox .

Even if you assume that the Wii has been "maxed out" that doesn't mean you have seen the most visually impressive titles for it ...

When hardware becomes obsolete developers begin looking for ways to "cheat" an implement more advanced graphical techniques on more limited hardware. Amiga demos were full of graphical effects which weren't possible on Amiga hardware but had been simulated by doing something the Amiga was capable of doing. An example of a faked effect is that you can produce a simulation of bump mapping by producing two textures and interpolating between them depending on how they're lit ... This was the most common way that PS2 developers achieved bump mapping, and it was used by mod developers for games like Jedi Knight 2.