This topic that has boiled down to Wii vs Last gen never ceases to amaze me to the level of ignorance. Too many people think that power is all in the numbers. Well while those numbers are heplful they don't tell the real story. If I have 2000 cars trying to get across a 2 lane bridge. The other side is only processing 2 lanes of traffic even though the terminals can process 3000 cars.
The XBOX had great numbers, but was bottlenecked all over the place. The GC had superior architecture that the CPU could easily and has outperformed the Xbox CPU. Just because it was well designed.
The end result is that around 22 million /sec polygons were done successful on the GC in a game. While the XBox was at 14 million /sec. That's a significant amount of RAW crunch the GC was outdoing on XBox.
Where XBox was king. This is an area were MS is just smarter due to experience. Nintendo chose their pixel technology the TEV. A Wicked piece of processing that can do amazing effects. The downfall. It's a pain in the ass. Developers last and current gen still consider it a pain in the ass. They consider it enough of a pain in the ass to make baseless claims that Wii CANT do X Ability. If Nintendo isn't smart enough to drop the TEV behind then they can suffer. Better Tech does not mean people will use it. MS on the other hand built up on standard PC DX Shaders technology(sorry dark, but it's not ATI shader tech that the problem). DX Shaders were much more supports. There's online documentation and help ALL over the place. DX Shaders are easier to work with.
So why do a majority of XBoX games look better.
1. Lack of consumer base on the GC
2. Memory means more objects & texture
3. TEV could do same texture processing effects faster, but most developers didn't want to bother. And still don't.
4. Most people can't tell processing effects from hardware capability.
5. The community support because of it's PC background just made making XBox games easier. Even though the NGC api was written to be super easy. Community support goes ALONG way. Even on inferior technology.
Anyways. The Wii power isn't just as simple as double. Doubling the chip doesn't just mean double power. hardware technology uses curves not linear progression. I agree with another poster. Which I think is far more relevant to the power of the Wii. It's ashame that developers think in terms of power. Rather in terms gameplay and the people that play them.
I've posted my 2 cents. This is at 6 pages as of writing this. This means that productive discussion isn't in effect, but instead the pattern of "I believe what I want" is ruling.
Squilliam: On Vgcharts its a commonly accepted practice to twist the bounds of plausibility in order to support your argument or agenda so I think its pretty cool that this gives me the precedent to say whatever I damn well please.
