@shams: But remember that the Hollywood COULD have access to the main RAM to use it as a framebuffer... and actually, I would be surprised if it could not do that. Why would they use GRAPHICS DDR3 memory then? As long as it achieves spec equal or above GC (read: bandwidth) it would keep hardware backwards compatibility.

Also, I think 720p is overpriced by people. It's not that hard to achieve, but a game by... let's say Electronic Arts will not look any better with the current detail at 720p. But I would like to see someone take the effort.

PS: No one has noticed that Super Mario Galaxy uses 16bpp color in some places? ;>

No, it really wouldn't. The Wii would still be obviously inferior in polygon count, texture detail, shader effects, lighting, and anti-aliasing. The Wii is doing just fine on its own strengths. It doesn't need HD, or the costs associated with it. Just accept that the Wii isn't about graphics. I'd much rather have better artistic design than more pixels.

 Actually yes it would. The stuff 3rd parties put on the wii is 5% at most the wiis power. When there is Hd involved developers get more involved in the graphics and would use more of the wii. This means the wii would be better looking and people wouldn't say its last gen because the games would look better than anything on a last gen system.  I am accepting the wii isn't about graphics. I accepted ever since I heard about the wii. The thing I'm not accepting is people saying gameplay over graphics=graphics don't matter at all. Gameplay over graphics= gameplay is more important than graphics but graphics still count too. 

PCs can do HD before Playstation even came to. Playstation 2 gave 1080i in Gran Turismo ( not sure which part ). I'm sure the Wii can handle 720p as long as something gets a bit cut - emphasize a bit - like framerate down to 30fps, lower texture quality, longer loading times, lower polygon count, etc.

 I think it could do 1080p with a cut but a very little one and 720p with no cut at all.

First let's make it clear what "VRAM" means.  The Wii has 64 MB of main memory and 24 MB of graphics memory (VRAM).  It also has the 3 MB of embedded memory on the Hollywood die.

Now let's talk double buffering.  The back buffer (where you do your drawing) resides in the embedded memory.  The front buffer (what's on the screen) resides in graphics memory.  Most of the reason for having an embedded framebuffer is to facilitate overdraw, z-buffer reads, and especially alpha blending and other types of blending operations (see games like Metroid Prime for extreme use of framebuffer effects).  Once you actually get the finished scene, copying it to the front buffer consumes very little bandwidth -- at most, 180 MB/s (3 MB * 60 fps).  At any rate, you only need one buffer in the embedded memory.

Also, if you do need more pixels than you can cram in there, you can always render the top half of a scene in 1280x360 to the embedded memory, copy it to the front buffer, then move the front buffer pointer forward, and do it again for the bottom half.  This is basically the equivalent of doing 480p at 120 frames per second.  Of course, if your 720p game only needs to run at 30 fps, then it would be the equivalent of doing 480p at 60 fps, something a lot of Wii games already do.

I would love to sit a bunch of graphics whores down in front of a monitor and test them to see if they can tell what resolution they are looking at. Give them 10 examples in full screen of different games for each resolution and see if they can even tell. Most probably can't.

What people don't understand is that resolution alone doesn't make a game look good. Texture quality, lighting techniques, shading techniques, BM & quality height-maps to go with, and especially good normal mapping are IMO far more important to get right. In truth the higher resolutions are the lazy way to get an increase in appearance but its effects are limited without proper techniques to back it up.

 the box isn't capable of driving those features while putting out higher resolutions.  One or the other perhaps...but not both.  I thought that it was obvious that each of those things required a little more under the hood ....

 I think the wii could pull of alot of those but maybe not all at high res.