Wii's 2 year resistance

[shams]

your mother said:
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The point is, there are many consoles past and present that are capable of displaying a (wide) range of resolutions. I don't understand why people think the Wii is "incapable" of displaying higher resolutions when in most cases this is not a hardware, but software limitation, and with the Wii capable of online and has already received patches, I do believe the Wii can output HD - just that Nintendo don't want to "enable this feature" yet (if at all).

We have been discussing this in another thread.

In short, we don't believe its possible because:

a) The frame buffer is too small (3MB - 2MB frame buffer, 1MB texture cache)

b) The RAMDAC probably isn't designed for it (i.e. cannot sample at a high enough rate to output 720p)

I have also seen documentation that indicates that the Wii *only* does 32bit colour output (i.e. 32bit frame buffer) - rather than 18bit that the GC used. This would also take more memory.

If the RAMDAC was fast enough, AND the GPU (Hollywood?) could use main memory for the frame buffer - it may be possible.

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I wouldn't keep your hopes up. Its just another indication of "manufacturing efficiency", and why the Wii is so small, tight and cheap to manufacture.