| Entroper said: If you have $2500 you can buy a Wii dev kit and tell us all what you find. :) Seriously though, if the information were out there, fanboys would be all over it like... eh, you fill in the blank. The point is, it wouldn't stay secret long. I honestly think that Nintendo is kinda shooting themselves in the foot by not releasing the specs. They don't want people to compare the specs to the RSX or Xenos, but it's no secret that the Wii is no graphics powerhouse. People are going to compare them based on conjecture and speculation without the specs, you might as well put the numbers out there and let everyone see in black and white exactly what improvements have been made over the Gamecube.  Since you asked specifically about fragment shader support, in order to understand that, it really helps to define what a fragment shader is. It's really nothing more than a series of mathematical operations on various inputs, most of which are textures, and the output is a fragment. The differences between various GPU architectures define which operations can be performed, how many in one rendering pass, what kind of inputs and data types are available (integer, floating point, etc.), and so on. Even the GeForce 2 had "shaders", they just weren't called that before DirectX 8.0. Whenever someone tells you the Wii does support shaders or doesn't support shaders, ask what kind of shaders they're talking about. I think it's pretty obvious that the Wii supports at least GeForce-2-level "shaders" but not something as advanced as, say, Shader Model 3.0. |
I understand why Nintendo didn't reveal the specs prior to launch since the didn't want the same thing to happen to the Wii as happend to the DS (when the PSP's hype got doubled because it was 333MHz vs 66MHz). I agree though there's not reason not to release them now seeing as they're out in the open.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=1086
That very old thread discusses the Flipper's shaders (starts about 4 posts down), basically they're older pre-DirectX GeForce 2 style. Presumably Hollywood uses the same format.
