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HappySqurriel on 05 January 2008
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windbane said:
HappySqurriel said:
Played_Out said:
@ Summaro400ex

The Wii is approximately 50% more powerful than the Gamecube. The CPU and GPU are essentially the same, but clocked 50% higher, and it has almost twice as much RAM.

This is actually not true ...

One of the few things we actually know about the Wii's hardware is the die-size of the CPU and GPU are half of what the die-size of the Gekko and Flipper were on the Gamecube, and the Wii CPU and GPU are using a 90nm process rather than the 180nm process that the Gekko and Flipper (initially) used. If the Hollywood (GPU) and Broadway (CPU) were "Essentially the same" you would expect them to have 1/4 the die size of the Flipper and Gekko.

To put it another way, we know Nintendo made improvements but we don't know what the improvements were. Reasonable speculation is that Nintendo doubled the number of pixel pipelines and TEV units on the 'Hollywood' GPU, while doubling the L2 cache and increasing the instruction set on the 'Broadway' CPU; the end result is that both the GPU and CPU would be much more powerful per cycle than the Flipper and Gekko processors were.


In other words, the Wii is about as powerful as the Xbox 1.  You can tell this by comparing the simple-to-develop-on Wii (due to being upgraded GC) to Xbox games. 

If you want the graphics just get a PS3, 360, or PC. 


 

So, the Gamecube was widely considered to be roughly as powerful as the XBox and had several of the most impressive games of the previous generation, Nintendo enhances the hardware making it more powerful for every clock cycle, increases the speed of the processors, adds a ton of memory and the Wii is roughly as powerful as the XBox?

 

Now I could be alone, but I think the most interesting difference in design between the Wii and the XBox 360/PS3 is that Nintendo choose how powerful the Wii was going to be; the PS3 and XBox 360 were designed to be as powerful as they could be which meant that when they ran out of time the processors' power was set (they didn't ever say "this is the right ammount of processing power").

In performance the most interesting difference between the Wii and the XBox 360/PS3 is that the Wii doesn't have many games that have frame-rate issues while a large portion of the XBox 360/PS3's library has noticeable frame-rate problems; what this means is that developers are not really pushing the Wii, and they are pushing the limits of what is (currently) possible on the other platforms, and future PS3/XBox 360 games will take advantage of increased power to stabilize the framerate while the Wii could see some graphical upgrades.