Ah, so the OS was holding the superior processors back.  That must be it...

Man, you are a pain. Wanna compare processors directly? Go have look at benchmarks. Not that they're specially meaningful, but at least they're the standard way of doing that. Looking at the minimum requirements of a 3 years old game that claims to work on 6 years old hardware equipped with a 56k modem, no matter how successful said game is, is certainly not the way (if anything it shows power does not equate with success!)

If you do decide to go about this intelligently, you'll look at some benchmarks. If you do, you'll find out that, in integer performance, a 600Mhz G3 can, for some benchmarks, be comparable to something like a 1Ghz P3. You'll also find out that the memory performace is worse on the G3, and that the floating point performance sucks balls too. But, as you should know, the Gekko is not just your old G3 - it's a souped up one. If you were curious enough to look at the differences you'd find out they improved the floating point unit, and added a vector unit. If you knew anything about processors, you'd know that these are both things that the P3 has, and surprise, surprise!, stuff that helps with games. You would also find out, that the memory used on the consoles is very fast, and that very little is known about extra improvements potentialy made for the Wii. But I guess you won't do any of this, nor believe me either, so there's no point in arguing with you any more. You go on believing as you wish.

Finally, I'll just repeat this. There is no question the Wii is ridiculously less powerful than either the 360 or the PS3. But to say that the Wii is clearly less powerful than the original Xbox is just silly - that is not clear, at all. Wanna keep on saying that it's barely more powerful? Please do, if that pleases you. Cause really, who cares? If anything is clear, is that this battle is not being fought, and won, on power. Lets see how fast the Wii outsells the original Xbox LTD? 18 months is a guess...

Even if a 600MHz Apple proc is equal to a 1GHz Intel proc (a point I don't agree with), that's fairly weak.  I'd still say the Wii is not much more powerful than an Xbox 1.   You say it's not clear, ok.

That said, I completely agree with your last paragraph.  I am not against the Wii; I plan to buy one.  I just don't see it as a next gen console and would be very sad to be without a next gen console as well.

They're improving, it just takes time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMx6r_1NeIQ I'd say 3rd parties are starting to make some excellent progress. Dragon Quest Swords is looking great, comes out July 12th in Japan.  :)

The PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, PSP, DS, and Wii are all "Current Gen" platforms, because they are all out, and are all technically viable platforms to develop for.  "Next Gen" would be those console's sucessors.

This whole thread is ludicrous.

The GAMECUBE was on par with the Xbox, they were ALMOST identical computing, and graphics wise.

The WII's processor alone, is double that of the Cube

First and foremost, the comparison presented by Level Up was between the GPUs of the original Xbox and Wii.  There was no discussion between the CPUs and the systems as a whole.  And the main feature discussed was the use of programmable versus fixed function shaders.  While the Wii does not have a graphics chip that is as flexible as the Xbox, it appears that after you factor in all of the things that contribute to system performance the Wii has enough going for it to be somewhat more powerful than the original Xbox.

And if ignorance if bliss, you must be in a state of nirvana winbane.  Clock for clock, the PowerPC architecture is faster than the Pentium 3.  And Gecko did an admirable job versus the higher clocked Celeron last generation.  (It didn't hurt that Gecko has twice the on board cache and was fine tuned for gaming versus the off the shelf Celeron for the Xbox.)  Assuming all IBM did was a die shrink and upped the clock 1 1/2 times, Hollywood would be much faster than that tired, old Celeron in the Xbox.

Indeed.

It was my impression that the Wii's graphic "TEV" unit(s) could be programmed to do a variety of graphical effects, pixel shaders included, but at a cost to the fill rate for each "trick" used. The Gamecube had 1 TEV unit, and there's a lot of debate that the extra size of the graphics chip in the Wii is due to their being a 2nd TEV unit on board. But since anyone who would give the answer to that is under NDA with Nintendo, so we probably won't know for some time. Also, another board programmer mentioned that the wii has stencil buffers for shadows, while the gamecube did not.

Yes.