| Kwaad said: That is the first time I have ever seen it mentioned that the GameCube was more powerful than the x-box. Or even hinted. The Wii is approximately 1.5 to 2.5x faster than the GameCube. So that makes the Wii about 60% the power of the 360/PS3. So the Wii is closer to the PS3/360 than the PS2 was the X-box. Ok. sounds about right. EDIT: for those of you who didnt notice the scarcasm, It was. |
I guess you didn't see the endless debates over whether the XBox was more powerful than the Gamecube back in the day. The general consensus was that they were similar in processing power but each of the systems had their own strengths which enabled them to do things the other platform couldn't. The most obvious example of this is that the (massive) ammount of memory on the GPU in the Gamecube as well as it's highly efficient fixed pixel pipelines enabled it to render more textures at higher detail than the XBox could; meanwhile the XBox had programmable shaders which enabled it to produce vertex and pixel effects which were not possible on the Gamecube.
Nintendo appears to have improved upon the texturing strengths of the Gamecube while not putting any effort into adressing programmable shaders. Being that the main enhancements in GPUs over the past 5 years has been in shader technology many people would see the Wii's GPU as less advanced or less powerful than the XBox but this is incorrect; in what it does (multi-textured polygons) the Wii can eat the XBox alive.
When attempting to compare the Wii to the XBox 360 and PS3 it becomes a much uglier task; certainly the Wii is far less powerful but "how much" less powerful largely depends on what you measure. In terms of processing power from the CPU you'd probably find the Wii was about 1/4 to 1/8 as powerful as the XBox 360 or PS3; when it comes to the GPU the Wii is probably 1/4 as powerful in terms of polygon processing, an in terms of shaders you could say the PS3 and XBox 360 were infinitely more powerful.
