baka on 08 February 2007
Can the Wii do AA or at least some sort of AA?
To be fair, noone has answered your question. Yes, the Wii can do anti-aliasing. Aliasing is the difference between what a line should look like given infinite resolution, and what it looks like given a smaller amount of pixels. Anti-aliasing is the process of placing one or more pixels of intermediate values at the edge of the alias (the Jaggies you speak of.) The intermediate values help the edge of the line to blend into the image, reducing the appearance of the aliasing. There is nothing stopping these pixels from being added.
Now, the Wii has a resolution of 640x480, which gives it 307,200 pixels. Assuming it was running with 24 bits per pixel plus 8 bits of alpha, that would be 9,830,400 bytes (slightly under 10mb) for the entire framebuffer. More likely it's using 16 bits of color information per pixel, even 24 bits leaves enough room. The rest of the system's memory would be useable for holding textures that are not in the graphics chip's embedded 3MB of texture RAM, sound, and program code, which is certainly sufficient as it is more than double what was in the Gamecube. Higher resolutions will expose lower resolution textures much earlier, so the Wii's lower resolution allows the console to do more with less. The PS3 for example is quite memory-constrained when it comes to textures. Higher resolutions have forced developers to use techniques such as palletized textures (keeping a CLUT of RGB values and mapping each pixel to an entry in the table rather than specifying each pixel's color separately, which uses less space) to conserve texture RAM.
Getting back to anti-aliasing, this is less of a function of available video memory but rather the speed of the GPU. In this case we have an ATI video chip - a significantly higher clocked version of the graphics chip in the Gamecube. Given that the resolution has not increased but the speed of the chip has, it is possible that anti-aliasing could be applied with similar framerates if one were to use the chip identically to how it is used in Gamecube titles. However, any operation has a cost to performance that might be better utilized for better effects or more polygons on screen.
We'll see in the future how developers balance the additional cycles granted by the significantly faster GPU and CPU (and additional RAM) in newer Wii titles. Perhaps you will start seeing anti-aliasing in some games, however I would imagine that this depends on the market penetration of HD televisions over time. Most non-HD capable televisions (those without component input) are not even capable of displaying a sharp picture at 640x480. The blur from the television reduces the need for anti-aliasing, in many cases completely eliminating any traces of it. Still, it's too early to tell what developers will do with the additional power of the Wii vs. the Gamecube.
