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Mifely on 05 June 2008
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sc94597 said:
Mifely said:

The original XBox used Nvidia hardware, which was basically an early, custom version of the GeForce 3. It had primitive shader technology (compared to the PS3 and 360 graphics chips), but it *did* have programmable shaders.

The Wii's graphics chipset is, basically, an overclocked version of the GC's. The GC didn't have programmable shaders, but it did have some "neato" functionality (some unusual z-buffer texture support, amongst other gizmos). The Wii's chipset is, more or less, just a faster version of the GC's. The original XBox's graphics chipset was primitive to the point of, frankly, not being able to do much more than the fixed function pipeline of the GC/Wii, but it, and the Wii, are pretty darn close, in terms of raw polygon/texel performance, unless you wrote some real fancy shaders on the XBox, which would be something the GC/Wii couldn't do, but were pretty slow overall (as compared to modern shaders) -- so fancy shading techniques weren't really used much on the XBox, unless the situation called for it.

The Wii's graphics performance suffers primarily from the fact that the Wii doesn't really have much more graphics memory than a XBox did. I want to say it has 64M of base RAM, and an additional 24M of VRAM, whereas the GC had 24M of RAM and 16M of VRAM -- but I honestly don't remember clearly. The XBox had 64M of RAM total shared between the CPU and GPU, and likely anywhere from 16-32M of that was typically allocated to the GPU... but that was entirely app dependant.

In any case, fixed function pipelines can look decent if you're clever with your resource allocation, but it will never be on par with the X360 or PS3, for a variety of reasons (clock, memory, and shader techonology being the main ones).


The wii has 24 mb of internal 1T-Ram, 64 mb of GDDR3, and assumed to have 3mb of edram. The xbox has 64mb of sd-ddr ram. Now that is already more ram than the original xbox by a decent amount. Take in consideration that the wii allows up to 8x more textures due to compression, and the original xbox only allowed for 6x, the ram of the wii being alot faster with 3 times less latency, and you will see that it trumps the original xbox in this area. While not as much as the ps360, the wii still is significantly upgraded from the xbox in the area of ram. The wii has twice as more pipelines and texuring units. While some say that the Wii isn't capable of some shaders they forget that the TEV in the wii is programmable, and is capable of doing anything that the xbox's gpu could. Actually it's been said many times in the case of the gamecube. While broadway and the original xbox's cpu are about the same in clock speed. Broadway is far more efficient than the xbox's cpu. The xbox's cpu was comparable to a celeron while the broadway is supposedly comparable to the powerpc 750CL. Broadway also has almost twice as fast of a fsb, and cache. So I'm going to stick with my stance and say the wii is capable of everything the xbox is capable of , but does it better. Even the gamecube was capable of everything the xbox was. The wii doesn't compare to the xbox 360 or ps3 though.


I think you just made my point for me. 24 + 3MB of dedicated VRAM is pretty comparable to the 16-24M that was typically allocated by a XBox game. Using the GDDR3 base RAM to increase GPU RAM just isn't feasible for a decent framerate, so... I just can't consider it, sorry. Sure the Wii has more memory than the XBox, and its CPU is faster, *and* its GPU is marginally faster to boot.

Yet... all things considered (take into account that the X360 has 512M of shared RAM, and the PS3 has 256M base and 256 VRAM, and way faster CPUs and GPUs), its not really a great improvement over the XBox architecture. It is a superior architecture, for certain... just not one that warrents a "Wii can do gfx like the 360 and PS3!" discussion.

It just can't do it. No amount of fancy coding can change that.