Wii's 2 year resistance

[your mother]

shams said:

your mother said:
...

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.

...

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.

If that's the case, then I'd be disappointed, but what you mention sounds like it is a memory shortage issue, and yeah, there'd be no workaround for it, unless of course color depth takes a hit, but even then you mention the Wii only does 32-bit, so them's the breaks.

It does seem very shortsighted though, IMO that Nintendo would design the hardware like that for the sake of manufacturing efficiency when (on PCs at least) cost-wise the impact would seem to be minimal.