Wii never maxed out?

[Viper1]

gumby_trucker said:

Viper1 said:
Then say Turbo3D microcode.  Don't just make up something like Super Mode.  And if you noticed, I even asked you if you meant the microcode.

Turbo3D was a microcode from Nintendo themselves but wasn't used because it saturated system rsources so much it made it unusable.  However, thee were several custom microocdes written from dozens of developers that exceeded the default SGI microcode.

 

And therein lies your N64 answer on why it was never maxed out.  Becuase you can always write better microcode.  Hell, you could even say a bigger catridge could be developed too.  Again, there are games that push it harder than others but you can't max out a console.

I think this is the main point to this discussion. It may be easier if you could quantify what it means exactly to "push the hardware", but at the end of the day we all know the difference between a game that tried to look its best and one that didn't. This isn't just about polygon counts or number of shaders implemented, it's about the overall impression you get when seeing the game for the first time, and what that implies about the effort that went behind making it.

When the best looking 3rd party games on Wii can't match the quality of the best Gamecbe games, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell you somethings wrong.

If you look at the link provided by curl-6, I think Eggebrecht sums it up nicely - there are indeed compatability issues that would prevent every engine from being ported over, but given the success of the system you'd expect at least some companies to want to push the hardware in order to differentiate themselves from the crowd... but I guess that kind of logic is SO 2007

They didn't push Wii like they did the GC because they felt the effort was beyond their expected return.   The harder you push, the greater the level of diminishing returns was practically the 3d party philosophy on Wii.   If they were going to psuh hard to stand out, they'd do it on the HD systems where such efforts were more likely to be rewarded.  To them the effort to write high quality code for the TEV simply didn't match the returns.   They could use low level efforts and get the same sales results in their opinion.

The other factor is how far in advance a developer makes plans and allocates their projected budgets.  If in 2007 they expected the HD consoles to be in a better position than Wii in 3-4 years, they'd allocate their bigger budgets and reources in that direction.   Once that diection is in motion, it's very hard to shift against it.