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JWeinCom on 05 January 2020
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HoloDust said:
JWeinCom said:

The X-Box 360 had roughly 5 times as much Ram as the Wii, which is important if you're loading HD textures.  It's power consumption was approximately 1/10 of the XBox 360's 2009 model which would indicate significantly less need for cooling.  The 360's processor had 3 cores and ran at about 5 times the speed in addition to having other advantages.  Its memory bandwith was about 1/7 of the 360.  The Wii doesn't support HDMI output.  The Wii itself is less than half the size of even the smaller 360 models.

To be clear, are you suggesting that Nintendo could have gotten the Wii anywhere close to the threshold for HD while lowering power consumption cooling requirements and costs?  

Hm, not sure what Permalite had in mind, my original idea when I said Wii HD is Wii that is capable of outputting Wii level visuals (or slightly better, with better AA for example) in 720p, not a PS360 level console. So some 2.5x Wii, which is still way bellow PS360. Miyamoto himself said he wished Wii was HD and they were caught by surprise with HD TV adoption rates.

I didn't say it needed those exact specs, but that was just to give an idea of what HD consoles were doing.  Someone with more tech knowledge can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think to get even in the ballpark would require a pretty major hardware revision, rather than an update with a cheaper chipset.  Unless you're talking about some real barebones upscaling, and I dunno if even that could be accomplished while cutting costs.  

As for whether or not the idea is a good one in general, I don't think so.  The PS4 Pro makes sense for instance, because there is a significant amount of the PS4 audience interested in top quality visuals and 4K.  Whereas I don't think the Wii audience was mostly interested in visual fidelity.  I'm sure there were some people who would prefer an HD Wii, but I don't think it would be enough to make it a profitable venture, especially if it means developing separate versions of all their games to run on both systems, or making Wii HD exclusive games which would fragment the market.  A Wii HD would have made sense later on, but 2009 was still way too early IMO.