First place console theory

[davygee]

HappySqurriel said:

If you were to come up with a series of performance benchmarks the difference between the Wii's performance and the PS3/XBox 360's performance would seem huge; in terms of what the performance difference actually means in real world terms I would say the difference between the N64 and Playstation was far greater.

In early 3D games having twice the processing power was huge because every decision you made was mostly determined by hardware limitations; the difference in what was possible on the Saturn/Playstation and the N64 had huge impacts on how games played. As technology improved the number of hardware limitations decreased and thus the impact extra processing power makes is much smaller. To illustrate this point consider the Difference between Doom II (released in 1994) and Half-Life (released in 1998) and compare it to the difference between Half-Life and Half-Life 2 (released 2004). I think that it is safe to say that the difference between Doom II and Half-Life is a much greater "real world" difference even though the processing power difference between what was possible between Half-Life and Half-Life 2 was far greater.

 

I agree to some respect.  The difference between say Wolfenstein and Doom was just out of this world and I can see where you're coming from.  But the Wii's power is much more similar to last generation than this.  And you can see the difference.  Look at Gears of War compared the last gen.  Although it's not completely noticeable at the moment because the world isn't HD compatible yet...but in a few years time when more and more people have access to HD TV's....you'll pretty easily notice the different between Wii's 480p and PS3's 1080p.

Resolution is a big deal and has been on the PC for years.  I remember playing Quake at 640x480...but you can now play games with much more detail and at a much higher resolution.....while in the console arena...we have been used to 480 for too long.  It's time to up the level a few notches.