| Teragen said: If you offered Sony/Microsoft the ability to double the number of cores in their processors, take advantage of a smaller process and increase their clock speed, or add a physics co-proccessor (all with no added cost to the system) they would have taken advantage of this technology Wouldn't any company, including Nintendo? The thing is, both companies were developing the components for their respective systems well in advance, whether is was the Cell processor, FlexIO bus, Xenos, Xenon, RSX or anything else. Such undertakings are very difficult as everything has to work together in a closed architecture and have to meet many criteria which directly relate to price and heating. I'm sorry but no matter how you spin this, the statement you made in your original post just doesn't make any sense - at the very least not to me. |
The obvious fact is that Nintendo had the choice to produce a more powerful console without dramatically changing the cost of the hardware and instead choose to release the Wii as it is; the Wii could (easily) be overclocked to double (or possibly tripple) the current clockspeed and all that would be required is a somewhat larger case and an improved cooling system and yet they choose this speed.
The likely reason Nintendo choose the performance of the Wii was that in peak performance the Gamecube was approaching what could (realistically) achieved on standard definition; with the Wii there should be (almost) no polygonalization artifacts, there should (almost) be no noticeable texture artifacts, and there should be (noticeably) improved effects which should be very close to the limit of what is noticeable on standard definition displays. Certainly, there could be some improvement to the effects which are displayed but those effects are far more noticeable at higher resolutions; basically, most material effects relate to how a material's lighting change over a small area and a higher resolution allows you to see smaller areas of a surface.
My reasoning why you could see a far greater improvement in what we see from the Wii than what we will see from the XBox 360 or PS3 is how focused developers are currently on getting good performance out of each of the systems; basically, every developer is working hard to get amazing graphics out of the PS3 and XBox 360 while few developers have even tried on the Wii. All systems will see some improvements from developers understanding the hardware better and producing more optimized code, they will all see improvements from developers being more efficient when they produce graphical assets specifically for the hardware, but the Wii will also benefit from developers actually trying to see what they can produce on the Wii.
