Viper1 said: The reported Xbox (150 million) and PS2 (75 million) polygon numbers were theoretical maximum wireframes. This means no textures, no lights, no A.I., nothing but lines. The reported GC figures were given by Nintendo as under gaming conditions which included a range of effects, lighting and textures on however even the given poly count was bested at launch by Factor 5. Nintendo stated "6 to 12 million polygons per second (peak)" but Rouge Leader 2 pushed 15 million. EA Canada had tested it to run 22 million at 60 fps though I can't say what game conditions were present. The Xbox and Gamecube both pushed 18-20 million polygons at their best and the Wii is noted as being able to handle more than that by several developers.

And i'd like to add that the theoretical values are often obtained by running a limited set of code and the values are calculated from if. As an example, if you can manage to push 150 polygons in one microsecond for once, it gives you an theoretical value of 150 million polygons a second. Despite that 999 999 microseconds after the one measured, the hardware would average to 5 polygons per microsecond. And as BenKenobi and Katilian said, conditions vary in different situations. Basically everything is a tradeoff. The theoretical number is something that can't be topped in any situation, and it's never going to be used, while the lowest number, polycount with full effects, is a number, that without topping it, everything works perfectly. But, you can top it easilly, by using less effects (textures, lighting etc.). So i believe that Nintendo propably have given the number of polygons with full effects, so that the devs have something to start with. But NDA exists, and i don't think anyone wants to get fired and pay the fine for breaking it.

shams said: The biggest change to the Wii from the GC, is double the number of texel units. This gives the Wii approx double the fill rate, and double the texture effects. This is in addition to any increase of clock rate, or other changes.

I believe this is true, but so far the best evidence I've seen for it comes from conjecture based on the die size.  Is there more convincing evidence out there?

tastyshovelware said: Nintendo has said before the wii is 1.5-2x more powerful then the gamecube. Which more or less makes it as powerful as the original xobx. This would make sense since wii development costs have always been low and the wii is about a quarter the size of the xbox (meaning the wii isn't loaded to the brim with the newest tech).

 The Xbox was no where near twice as powerful as the GC. It might have been close to it in pure technical specs but that is ignoring the different architectures the systems have. The Xbox and Gamecube were fairly similar in terms of real-world performance by all reports I have heard and that makes the Wii much stronger than the Xbox.

Developers already many times released specs on Wii at least clock speeds on the chipsets but not the poly's it can do.

It's been also printed in mags and websites since Wii launched or not long before as developers got their hands on it and spilled the specs.

Nintendo never confirmed the numbers developers gave but never denied them either. 

 

Wii CPU is said to have a 729Mhz CPU (Xbox was 733MHZ)

 

Wii GPU 243MHZ (Xbox 233MHZ)

 

Gamecube CPU 485MHZ

 

Gamecube GPU 162MHZ

 

 

^^ there are your specs.

Well, at the end of the day, I don't think a single gamecube game, first or third party, looked up to par with ninja gaiden or other high end xbox titles. Plus, you have to realize, the gamecube was $200 launch (as opposed to xbox at $300). MS took a huge hit for that system and used far more tech.

Now, I'm not saying this as a diss to the wii. But, I own Galaxy and there are still some textures in that game that lack some serious detail. However, I'm not a graphics whore. My only real complaint is that if nin had put just a tad more money into their product and made the wii say 4 times more powerful then the GC, suddenly we may not see as many ps2 ports (or shovelware).

tastyshovelware said: ^^ there are your specs. Well, at the end of the day, I don't think a single gamecube game, first or third party, looked up to par with ninja gaiden or other high end xbox titles. Plus, you have to realize, the gamecube was $200 launch (as opposed to xbox at $300). MS took a huge hit for that system and used far more tech. Now, I'm not saying this as a diss to the wii. But, I own Galaxy and there are still some textures in that game that lack some serious detail. However, I'm not a graphics whore. My only real complaint is that if nin had put just a tad more money into their product and made the wii say 4 times more powerful then the GC, suddenly we may not see as many ps2 ports (or shovelware).

I think you're wrong there, we would see as much PS2 ports and shovelware. In terms of specs, Wii would propably still be closer to PS2 than PS360. Maybe there after all would be less shovelware on Wii and more on PS360, but Wii would still be the main platform for it (cheapest to develope for, most popular). As for the price correlating with performance, there really isn't any. GC was spent years to develope hardware that was cheap to manufacture and easy to program. There were also certain patents with Gekko, to improve performance. While XB was rushed and made from standard on-shelf parts, which were expensive by nature, without optimized manufacturing process and optimized hardware.

And then Nintendo would have seen no profit and would have lost money and continue it's downfall to a Sega status as even though they made profit on Cube it didn't sell that well and Nintendo was on a continous downfall of systems sold since competition grew tighter. NES 60 mill SNES 49 mill N64 35 mill Gamecube 21 mill they could no longer try the traditional make a product to out muscle the compeition it just would kill them.

 

 

MS has Windows to fall back on and Sony has the rest of it's electronics.Nintendo relies almost entirely on it's gaming (even though they own the seatle Mariners Baseball team and the NBA Atlanta Hawks) DS alone is not enough to fall back on and by going with the business strategy with Wii and DS they now as a company have more money as a corp than Sony and pushed Sony out of Japans top 10 most wealthy/Successfull companies and later moved to #3 in Japan...sony lost money and still does same as MS on their higher end machines that is why they must have software to sell to make up for the difference while Nintendo makes mass profits on hardware and software. 

So while the shovelware is annoying at times we will see less of it as time goes on as PS2 slowly dies and Wii continues to grow in support and sales although not all ports are bad after all Okami and Bully is nice to have. 

Viper1 said: The reported Xbox (150 million) and PS2 (75 million) polygon numbers were theoretical maximum wireframes. This means no textures, no lights, no A.I., nothing but lines. The reported GC figures were given by Nintendo as under gaming conditions which included a range of effects, lighting and textures on however even the given poly count was bested at launch by Factor 5. Nintendo stated "6 to 12 million polygons per second (peak)" but Rouge Leader 2 pushed 15 million. EA Canada had tested it to run 22 million at 60 fps though I can't say what game conditions were present. The Xbox and Gamecube both pushed 18-20 million polygons at their best and the Wii is noted as being able to handle more than that by several developers.

you'll probably find that the quoted figures were actually solid polygons rather than wireframes. Wireframes are actually much slower to render than solid polygons so you would actually get a lower number if you were quoting wireframe polygons rather than solid polygons. And there'd be no point releasing the lower number now would there ;)

 

Ryudo said: Developers already many times released specs on Wii at least clock speeds on the chipsets but not the poly's it can do. It's been also printed in mags and websites since Wii launched or not long before as developers got their hands on it and spilled the specs. Nintendo never confirmed the numbers developers gave but never denied them either.    Wii CPU is said to have a 729Mhz CPU (Xbox was 733MHZ)   Wii GPU 243MHZ (Xbox 233MHZ)   Gamecube CPU 485MHZ   Gamecube GPU 162MHZ

 

^ ^ There are some numbers... NOT your specs.

The biggest mistake most people make is comparing clock cycles.  This doesn't work, the xbox had a pentium chip the GC and Wii have a PowerPC chip.  Per cycle the powerPC chip does a lot more work..  Depends on instruction but on average it's twice as fast but can be more.  So to compare them you'd have to double the GC/Wii clock speed to look at like for like.

Which looking at CPU only would make the GC slightly quicker than the XBOX and the Wii just under twice as fast. On top of that you have to look at the graphic effects, the XBOX did some nice shiny shiny stuff but the GC did fluffy particle style stuff  and water really well.  In fact of the last Gen I'd struggle to find a game on PS2 or XBOX that even came close to Pikmin 2 in terms of graphics.

In comparing the end-to-end unified architecture of the 2 I'd put the Wii at twice the power of the original xbox (in some areas it's less in some it's more, but as an average it's twice the clout) which for SD output is excellent.

I work in the chip industry and the analogy I always use to explains comparisons of chips based on cycle speed alone is wheels, imagine a skateboard wheel and a tractor wheel, now if you are going to judge them purely on how many times the wheel does a full rotation (cycle) are you going to get a picture of the real world performance?  The skateboard may need 75 rotations to travel the same distance as the tractor wheel...

As mentioned above the Wii is a very capable console (look at Metroid or Galaxy, those titles look better than some 360 releases), but it is annoying to see sub standard PS2 style ports-a-plenty on the shelves. 

The Wii has a quite different memory layout as well.

The 1T-SRAM that the Wii uses internally is lightning fast, has no delays - and has a significant bus route to the VRAM. I think program code + textures (guess) reside in this part of memory. Its biggest advantage is high memory density, and very low power consumption (using 1 "transistor" instead of 6 - in normal SRAM).

It also has a 3MB VRAM/texture cache - no idea if system memory (the 1T-SRAM) can be used as a substitute for VRAM in any form). This small VRAM is my biggest criticism of the design - give it 8MB or 16MB, and its a much more versatile and powerful device.

The VRAM is embedded within the GPU (internal memory), while I believe the 1T-SRAM is embedded within the CPU (may be wrong here - Wiki says GPU?) - making it very fast and small to manufacture.

It also has a "normal" 64MB of external memory (much slower, wait states, etc..) that can be used as a cache, sound, game data and so on.

As always, Wikipedia is a great place for info:

Wii specs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii#Technical_specifications

GC specs (Wii definitely based around):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_GameCube#Central_processing_unit

...etc...