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dahuman on 23 July 2009
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PearlJam said:
Viper1 said:
PearlJam, most of you post is true though your second to last paragraph isn't.

Most developers barely even touched the TEV during the Gamecube years which means they haven't had "nearly 10 years" of experience with it. Now with the Wii and its enhanced TEV we still have a learning curve and that's even if the developers intend to utilize it.

This is where Nintendo has such the upper hand over 3rd parties in that they've been using the TEV for that "nearly 10 years" period you mentioned. Most 3rd party developers are not familiar with writing code that converts DirectX programmable shaders into fixed function TEV shaders.

If most developers hadn't touched the TEV as you say GC games wouldn't have come anywhere near Xbox quality, which a lot of them certainly did. They have still had about 10 years to use it any way you slice it, maybe it just isn't as effective and efficient as you think it is. The PS2 had 2 vector units but devs mostly only used 1, not because they didn't know how but because it didin't worlk out like Sony intended. Extra programming to use both didn't give you 2x the performance it was closer to 1.5x if that, but it killed the vram. Using the TEV in the GC and Wii limits other resources and strains the CPU and Memory. Thats' what happens when your effects aren't hard wired and you have to program everything yourself.

 

dahuman, maybe "real 3D" isn' the right term but it certainly did use texturing over actual light sources and geometry more than the Xbox did. And GC was very similar to a PC, it did use an IBM chip, Ati GPU and PC-like memory. It was a different setup but it was familiar, it wasn't completely new like the PS2 or in some ways the PS3.

A better comparison is a Mac in the older days, different programming style resulting in the same purpose applications with one having more advantages over the other in certain areas and vice versa. Ultimately, it's the fault of the publishers or the executive decisions to not put the budget and time into making Wii games, while it was understandable on the GCN since it was in last place, it's certainly not the case for the Wii considering how many units it has sold thus far, and we didn't see anybody take advantage of the Wii until 2009, which is ridiuclous and shitty considering that it's a lot more powerful and efficient vs the Xbox.