I'm learning new stuff all the time. This is why I mostly participate in hardware debates otherwise who cares as long as it sells well and gets awesome games. I know I want it so badly and it has more games that I want then on PS$ or xbone so good for me. I mean I have like 20 Wii U games but the games I am interested in on either of the other two, well I can count them using the fingers on my right hand so less than 5. You enjoy whatever you enjoy but thanks for increasing my knowledge. Even with all this, people more competent than me have said that the tech inside switch is no joke and pretty high tech so I'll take their word for it since they have bias against one company while no offense, but most people on this site do.

Kirby's Epic Yarn, Muramasa, Red Steel 2, Jett Rocket, Sonic Black Knight/Secret Rings, Rayman Origins, de Blob 1 & 2, and Donkey Kong Country Returns are alos up there for me as Wii games that managed to look good in spite of the hardware's limitations.

Yup, Kirby's Epic Yarn also looks beautiful.

wii had 24MB of main system memory, 2MB frame buffer, 1MB texture cache and 64MB of slower memory designed for audio and caching from the dvd drive, where as xbox had 64MB of main shared memoy and each game was given a 700mb hard drive partition for fast caching of important data. The few games that were available on both wii and xbox often the xbox had more content, 5.1 channel sound, 32bit colour and other benefits.

Xbox had some amazing graphics like Conker for example. I certainly see the original xbox as more powerful and capable.

As an owner of an original Xbox... I *WISH* games looked that crisp and clear. Sadly they don't as it uses Composite/Component cables rather than anything digital like HDMI or DVI.

The Xbox 360's backwards compatability does help make up for that though.

The 24MB bank of 1T SRAM is used for all code and data.
The 64MB of GDDR3 is used for the same less-intensive tasks as the 1T SRAM, however the system does reserve up to 16MB for the OS and other tasks on the GDDR3 pool, which decreases the real usable capacity from 64Mb to 48MB, it is not all DVD drive cache, you only need a few megabytes for that.

The Xbox had the sound advantage because of one simple reason. nVidia SoundStorm. And that is thanks to the Xbox using an nVidia nForce chipset.
That meant the Xbox was the first console to offer full real time Dolby Digital 5.1 channel encoding and it also handled all that processing (About 4 billion operations per second) on it's own independent audio chip, freeing up the CPU for other tasks. That was a massive advantage back then.
And that wasn't even half of what the sound hardware was capable of... It could do full 3D positional audio with effects on top of it.
It was a proper "APU" or Audio Processing Unit. (Not to be confused with AMD.)

The only other decent competitor at the time was Aureal A3D which was equally as amazing... And Audigy in some aspects, Microsoft really did pick an amazing Audio solution for the original Xbox and that should be applauded.

The real advantage the Xbox had though was those damn progammable pixel shaders, which is what the Direct X 8 era was all about, the TEV could technically perform every trick/function the Xbox GPU can, but it required far more work/passes to pull it off... So often developers didn't bother and games often looked flat and drab because of it, whilst the Xbox had reflective, bump mapped, shiny, defined materialistic surfaces which Halo 2 pushed pretty hard.

That isn't to say the Wii didn't have it's advantages though, it should have won in terms of sheer bandwidth and fillrate, but the Xbox was just a more flexible machine that should have lasted a couple more years longer on the market than it did to truly shine in the games department.

I would have liked to have seen how Kameo presented on the original Xbox in real time, which looked pretty crisp on the Xbox 360 when it released.

That's a bullshot, Conker on Xbox was 640x480. It was still probably the best looking game of the 6th gen, but it didn't look that good.

There were Xbox games that couldn't have been done as well on Wii, but there were also Wii games that couldn't have been done as well on Xbox. It all depended on what kind of techniques the game pushed. Kind of like PS3 and 360, where each had advantages and disadvantages versus the other.

Component cables aren't bad you know , you can get 1080p out of them and they are only one small step away from VGA quality. I used a xbox with a component cable to a projector and was pleased with the image. Many xbox owners do a internal VGA conversion as well to up the quality even more.

I don't know your insight on the wii but I remember reading an article about developing for the wii and it said the 16MB of slow memory of the Gamecube was replaced with 64MB DDR memory and mapped the same serving the same purpose. The slow access times of the larger DVD disc which could be up to about 6x larger in capacity and for some games dual layer required a much larger cache to reduce or eliminate loading times. The wii had lightning fast data transfer between the 24MB, 2MB and 1MB but much slower access to the 64MB memory. I'm sure developers would have worked out techniques to optimise it's use though and make good use of it.

I have both component and composite cables on my original Xbox, component is certainly a big step up from composite... But it's not perfect, the image quality is still terrible and "soft".
Playing Halo 2 on the Xbox 360  (HDMI) via backwards compatability is a much crisper, cleaner image.

I can provide pictures if you want. ;)

Yeah internal VGA conversaion is a thing... Many gamecube owners do a HDMI conversion on early Gamecubes as well.

It is really up to the developer on how that Ram is used. 64Mb of GDDR3 memory for a DVD drive is just not a thing on any platform.

However, the Wii does have the Ram advantage in terms of capacity... At 480P bandwidth demands will be significantly less, the SRAM helps with that anyway... But the GDDR3 should be good for about 4GB/s of bandwidth to the GPU.

With that in mind... Streaming textures and meshes from the Xbox's hard drive is a far better prospect than the Wii's 8MB/s data transfer rate of it's DVD drive... Some games even stream from both the Hard Drive and DVD Drive on the Xbox at the same time... Which means the Xbox doesn't require as much texture or mesh data in main system memory, sadly we never got to see that aspect pushed to the extreme on the original Xbox... It wasn't untill Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction that such a feature really started to gain popularity during the last generation of console hardware.

Really wierd about your component cable quality. I do know many cables varied in quality but the good models gave an excellent picture but of course it also depends on how good the display device deals with component too.

Are you saying your component cable quality is worse than wii, gamecube (if you've tried it) or ps2? I have no such issues and for many years used xbmc for media tasks too and it was brilliant quality.

At the time I was using a Hitach 42PD7200 plasma I think or something like that. I may not have got the model number quite right. It's a £3000 plasma tv with a powered stand that I picked up for £13 faulty and it only needed a 30p resistor to fix. It gave an amazing picture with component using a alis panel.

Still gives a excellent picture with my current tv though.

On the Gamecube the 16MB was used for audio and the optical disc cache and its small disc meant access times were already very low. The gamecube almost felt like a cartridge system such was the speed of the games loading from those little discs. If 16MB was required there then 64MB minus audio use doesn't seem wrong for caching a dvd disc. If you remember the long loading times of ps2, you don't really get that on wii and definitely not Gamecube. I'm pretty sure data would generally be moved to and from 1t ram and gddr before being processed from 1t ram. I could be wrong but the gamecube and wii are pretty much identical and run all the same games its just in the wii you have that 50% speed boost and the 16MB slow memory replaced by the 64MB GDDR. Surely it has to appear identical to the 16MB in gamecube mode and be accessed a similar way to enable 100% compatibility. When you are ensuring 100% compatibility you can't radically re-design how something operates. Also the most half-assed wii games seem to have decent loading times compared to ps2 games. I think we will have to agree to not agree on this one. Not that I'm saying the memory can't be cleverly used but I think audio and caching the dvd drive is its main use normally.

I am saying compared to HDMI or DVI, Component can't touch it.
Can't comment on Wii, Gamecube or Playstation 2. (I don't own those consoles.)

The cable quality is fine.

When I first got my Xbox 360 Core console back in 2006~ I used component. (There was no HDMI) and later I upgraded to an Arcade console (And Microsoft sold me a 20Gb HDD for $20 AUD which was a bargain at the time.) and I moved over to HDMI. The difference was night and day.

On the Original Xbox, I have both Composite and Component cables and the image has always looked "soft" rather than crisp and clean, it's far worse on Composite though, partly that is because the resolution is typically only 480P, but even with 720P titles, I would prefer to emulate the game on Xbox 360 and use the HDMI port.

With that in mind, I have always used digital connectivity... Back in the 90's I had a TNT2 which only had a DVI connector and since that day I have used DVI for everything with it's eventual replacement via HDMI and Display Port... So the difference that Analogue connectivity brings has always been jarring to me when I was forced to use it on consoles. (Xbox, Xbox 360.)

You are correct that the TV does play a big role due to scalers, analogue to digital conversion (Which results in image quality loss) and other factors... But it's been the same story for decades and doesn't detract from the fact that digital connections are superior.

I was using an LG CRT when the original Xbox launched, it had Composite, Component, DSUB and DVI and could do up-to 720P, which is the kind of display that the original Xbox should have shined on. But Component didn't make the experience enjoyable for me.

When the Xbox 360 launched I had upgraded to an LG 32" LCD CFL 720P panel (LCD TV's were so expensive back then!) and the same issue stuck around.
Now I have a 60" and a 75" TV and the increased panel size accentuates the issues that analogue signals bring.

I have actually spent more time than I care to admit studying how the Gamecube and Wii's memory pools are mapped and what they can use it for.

But no. All that memory isn't caching the Disc drive... Even on PC with *much* faster Optical Blu-Ray Drives, they usually only come with 2-8Mb of cache.. And that is only because they also write data to optical discs that require such large buffers.
It makes zero sense having 16-64Mb of cache for a DVD drive that is only reading at 6x or 8MB/s. Zero at all.

The 1t Ram should be thought of like a typical SRAM or something like eSRAM/eDRAM. The GDDR3 is the system memory.