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rajendra82 on 09 January 2009
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Groucho said:
HappySqurriel said:

There weren't that many games that were ported from the Gamecube to the PC, but Resident Evil 4 was one of the games that was ... While it is not the best metric to compare PC hardware to console hardware (because you get additional performance fromoptimizing for specific hardware on a console which isn't possible on the PC) Resident Evil 4 required a mid-level Geforce FX (Geforce 5) to play on a PC and it didn't play better than the Gamecube version unless you had a high end Geforce FX or Geforce 6 based graphics card.

The reason why I bring this up is that if the XBox GPU (which was a modified Geforce 3) was so much better than the Flipper you would expect that any game ported from the Gamecube to the PC would only require a Geforce 3 or Geforce 4 graphics card ...

 

From what I recall, the strenght and weakness of the Flipper was that there was support in hardware for most of the texturing effects that developers would want to do ... When fully taken advantage of, the overhead from programmable pipelines (like the XBox's GPU) made it difficult to match the same quality level without being noticeably more powerful ... At the same time, few developers ever focused their efforts on the Gamecube so there were few games that ever took full advantage of the hardware that was there.

First I'd like to thank HappySqurriel for presenting a good argument, and posing decent questions, rather than resorting to personal attacks and holding up some comments from a now-defunct developer as the gospel truth until "proven" otherwise.

With regards to console->PC ports, ports just don't tend to make the transition very well.  Even the specs for Halo on the PC were far higher than the XBox, and the port, relatively, would have been a piece of cake compared to the RE4 port from the GameCube.  This is always been the case, and has to do more with the difficulty of porting code, the budget of the port (i.e., manpower and time required -- often ports are very low budget), etc. than it does the hardware.

Your second paragraph makes some excellent points, however.  The flipper h ad some great fixed function features, and yes, the nv2a required some clever shader programming to do the same kinds of work, often at greater expense from a per cycle viewpoint (of course the nv2a clock was higher, so that often made up the difference).  I'm not trying to going out on a limb here to say that the nv2a was very much better than the flipper.  It was marginally better, in my opinion (and many developers, who have widely varying "requirements" for their subjective "better").

I'm trying to put forth here that the Wii's GPU, while clocked faster and supporting a couple new features (and more memory, which is the best part, IMO), is still not much beyond the nv2a or the flipper.  Its primary advantage over the nv2a is in its fixed functionality -- if you want to have your app rendered in an "old school" style, you're going to do pretty well with the Wii (e.g. just about every Nintendo Wii 1st party game, like SMG, MP3, etc.).  If you want anything fancy, its sadly true that even the original XBox could do some things, in some game environments, that the Wii just cannot do.

I think the Wii's GPU is marginally superior to the XBox's (from a high level standpoint), as I've stated many times, as long as you focus on its strengths.  Its going to have a great framerate, and be much more "bad GPU programmer" proof than the original XBox ever was (and that's a lot bigger performance benefit than you might think).  The Wii will always show best in motion relative to the XBox, and not in screens, which is a silly way to compare them..

Good looking Wii games will happen thanks to developers understanding the Wii's limitations and working with what it does well.  Ports focus on getting the job done and out the door.  No Wii direct port from the HD consoles will ever be any good, really, for this reason.  The Wii will excel when its hits the marketshare needed to justify exclusives for its broad demographics (which is more than just 50%, btw), plain and simple -- because successful, good games are designed well around the hardware limits, more than they are ever implemented well or technologically sound.

 

You admit that the NV2A was only marginally better than Flipper.  We all know that Hollywood runs at a higher clock speed than Flipper.  It has undergone a die shrink but is actually bigger physically, so it must have added more than just a couple of features.  It also has more memory, which you yourself admit is a very significant deal.  So Hollywood by all accounts is significantly better than that Flipper.  But then you claim that it is only marginally better than NV2A.  That does not compute.