Wii's 2 year resistance

[Bodhesatva]

Entroper said:

Borkachev said:

Going without HD support was a very wise decision. Nintendo didn't have strong 3rd party support for a whole decade, if Wii games would cost about the same as 360/PS3 games in development, Nintendo would have had next to none 3rd party games at launch and in the following months. Also, the price of the Wii would have been higher and most people would have to pay for a feature they couldn't use.

Adding HD support--just HD--to a game would add virtually nothing to development costs. In a 3D game, it's a matter of tweaking a couple numbers in the code.

What it would have cost Nintendo to add this ability to the hardware is another question, but I find it hard to believe it could have been much. Shams mentions limitations in the frame buffer and the RAMDAC - is that all that's holding it back? What would an upgrade to those features, plus maybe a little extra memory and such to handle the extra strain, have cost?

"Plus a little extra memory and such" is where the costs are "hidden," so to speak. You don't just up the clock speed on the RAMDAC and add a little more framebuffer cache. You need additional pipelines to push the pixels. You need much more RAM to store high-resolution textures, and models with higher polygon counts. You need more memory bandwidth to transfer data more rapidly. You could do all these things to the Wii and still end up with a machine that can't match the 360 or PS3 in power. What would be the point of that?

Development for HD does cost more -- you can't just flip the HD switch. If you're going to render in HD, you need to spend more time on the world filling in all the extra details. There wouldn't be much sense drawing Mario 64 in 1080p, would there? Not without major texture and model upgrades there wouldn't.

Okay, that's what was what I understood. I think we can all agree that Borkachev would be right if HD cost little or nothing to add... but that's not the case. Adding HD would have negatively affected the price point, and that's bad.