| Blue3 said: Xbox Cpu - 733 MHz Wii Cpu - 729 MHz Truth is not slander, its just a cold harsh stuff for a nintendo fanboy to accept. |
Wow, I didn't know there were still people who think MHz = power. That hasn't been valid for over a decade now. When it came to gaming the Cubes 485MHz G3 was almost as good as the Xbox's 733MHz P-III. That's because it had 320KB of cache compared with 160KB and while the Xbox's P-III was an off the shelf gimped processor for notebooks the Gekko was modified with several gaming friendly addtions like extra instruction sets and an improved FPU. Check any benchmark site to see how different CPU's with the same power can be. My old Athlon 3000 at 2.16GHz generates 3.2 GFLOPS while the 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo in my laptop generates 5.7 GFLOPS per core. For gaming the difference can be even more pronounced since PC CPU's and gaming CPU's are used differently (even PC CPU's are used differently which is why benchmarks generate different results).
It's hard to say exactly how powerful the Wii is since we know so little about it. From guestimates it seems the Wii's CPU is around 50-100% more powerful than the Xbox's (depending on how modified it is, the Gekko was about 2% bigger than the standard 750cx, Broadway is 18% bigger than the standard 750cl). The GPU is extra difficult to compare. It's claimed Hollywood is just a Flipper clocked at 243MHz but it's almost 3 times larger than the Flipper. At any rate, since the Flipper could do about 2/3 the poly count of the Xbox it would at least be a little above the Xbox now and probably in the 50-100% range also. I've read that the limited 24MB of useful RAM was what kept devs from fully using the GameCubes power and that's what improved the most. Now it's 88MB which is above the 64MB of the Xbox plus the Wii has the 3MB embedded RAM the Xbox didn't have. Overall RAM bandwidth is still presumably higher on the Xbox but its less efficient, higher latency, has to make up for the lack of embedded memory, and the RAM isn't connected directly to the GPU. As to the point of this thread, the differences between the Wii and Xbox should be comparable to the difference between the GameCube and PS2. The Wii should be able to do about 45-60 million polys/s compared to 30 for the Xbox. For a comparison of what the difference should be check out this site with videos of both PS2 and GCN RE4 http://www.gameswelike.com/web/re/RE%20Comp.htm (I didn't know the PS2 version looked that bad).
So no the Wii in no way comes close to the PS3 or 360 but few would argue that anyways (though there apparently are some Nintendo fanboys who do). However, despite similar CPU clock speeds the Wii should be noticeably more powerful than the Xbox. The Xbox and GCN both were close to having the maximum needed power for 640x480 resolution so I assume the Wii is the maximum for 853X480, which explains why Nintendo chose to stop there and not make the big expensive jump into a still small HDTV market. True we haven't seen any games yet that showcase the Wii's extra power but we should this Christmas with Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3. Mario Galaxy is I think already looking better than any Xbox game and MP3 was starting to last time we saw it. Nintendo really needs to make those games look as good as they can since it appears 3rd parties can't be troubled to do more than put their 5th string N64 teams on their Wii projects (I don't care if they do but I don't want to hear them complaining about low profits or about Nintendo selling more on the Wii than they do).
