I’ve been reading a lot on line and I’m finding out that the Hollywood Chip may be more capable than developers want you to know. Do Wii games look like PS2 because it has no more power or because they are lazily programming for the PS2 and ramming it down our throats?

Nintendo Wii

Wii GRAPHICS MYTHS DEBUNKED!

So, as we know there has been a lot of talk about Wii's graphics, the competition, the previous generation e.t.c and there have been a lot of myths too, I got a little fed up so I decided to debunk them.

1. "Wii can't do Normal Mapping." - Who actually said it couldn't? That's something I've always wondered. Digital-Legends proved that even the N-Gage which didn't even have a 3d accelerator chip let alone shaders or h/w bump mapping did normal-mapping too.
and so can the Nokia N93's *Dreamcast* based PowerVR MBX graphics chip. Furthermore, Konami will use Normal-mapping technology in Dewy's adventure for Wii and Factor 5 have already expressed their displeasure of developers not using normal-maps on the system. The Wii isn't as capable at the techniques as some other systems, but it can be done to some capacity.

2. "Even though the Wii's ATI Hollywood GPU has a higher clock speed than the Xbox's XGPU, it still isn't capable of as many pixel fillrate calculations. Wii isn't capable of pixel shading. Nor is it capable of graphical effects such as stencil shadows, self-shadowing and light scattering". This is wrong. Rogue Squadron II did these effects on Gamecube back in 2001, light scattering was an excellent addition in Rebel Strike in 2003. The ATI Hollywood can actually produce "insane fillrates" to use Factor 5's words. Hollywood is capable of a pixel fill-rate of almost 972 mega pixels. Having such a high fill-rate capability means that the Wii can perform advanced shaders, advanced texture filtering and advanced multi-layer texture effects better than the Gamecube could. MG will use a variety of shader integration techniques. Look @ Mario Galaxy presentation and you will see.  

3. "Wii is hardly anymore powerful than the Gamecube. In fact its not much more capable than the PS2." Don't make assumptions by what early Wii games display. Wii's CPU for a start would arguably outrun the Xbox's twice over thanks to its fast Power PC architecture. The huge RAM (over twice as big & faster) also allows for larger richer worlds than before.

4. "The Wii is incapable of good physics." Really? Wait til they switch the Vacuum Laser on, physics all over the plce. All those interactions at once? Wii was having a picnic, hardly touched Hollywood for graphics functions too. Broadway used a fraction of the CPU to compute those physics. The system is capable of even more. Btw, AGEIA Physics are already in use for current & future Wii titles.

5. "The controller interactions require huge amounts of processing power, that's holding back Wii graphics." Incorrect. It doesn't have a performance hit. If it did games  wouldn't run in 60 frames per second with so many advanced effects. Those are 5 good facts about the Wii, now, we know that it really ends up in the developers using the full abilities of the Wii and what type of game will be intended to use them, so far no game out for the Wii has, but the potential is there. Interesting stuff no?

http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Crunshii/wii-more-powerful-than-xbox360-w-pics--36878.phtml

The important word for Wii's graphical capabilities is TEV (Texture Environment Unit). Don't forget that. When developers talk about making a game for Wii they never ever mention the TEV unit in the Wii. They only say it can't do some of the things the original Xbox could do, like shaders. They are very wrong though and they need to go back to Gamecube school (or talk to Factor 5's Juilan Eggebrecht) to find out that even the Gamecube could do everything the Xbox1 could do, only with a different method. The Xbox1 worked similar to a PC, so if developers made a game for it they would make it like a PC game. They couldn't do that with the Gamecube since developing a game on Gamecube was completely different. Custom shaders, custom lighting, custom textures - custom everything. Xbox and PC follow a code that most developers know and its not all custom. They have programmable shaders, like Shader Model 2.0 for instance.

The Gamecube has the TEV and that allowed for games like Starfox Adventures and Rouge Squadron 2/3 to have texture compression, Light sourcing and advanced shading for graphics that were considered amazing for the time they were released. Go back and play Star Fox Adventures again and tell me that it doesn't still look awesome, and it was released 5 years ago.

The same applies to the Wii. Developers don't want to have to make a game from the ground up for the Wii when they can just port over PS2 games with PS2 graphics and add Wii controls to make a quick buck. When they release a game on all systems they don't use the 360 version because they can't do it without re-writing the entire game all over again for Wii to make it look similar. It's just too much work for those lazy devs. Using a PS2 engine for a game is a lot more easy since the Wii can do that in its sleep.

The Wii does not have Shader Model 3.0 and it doesn't have the power to run it, but it can produce custom shaders with the TEV that look almost exactly the same but have no name other than "custom". You can see this in Super Mario Galaxy. Basically all you can do is look at the game and ask yourself if it looks as good as high level shaders in other games, I'm sure the answers will vary. Mario Galaxy definitely has the best shaders yet in a Wii game and many people from various sites have said that the game looks so good that its on par with many Xbox360 games.

The Wii has S3 texture compression for incredibly detailed textures on walls and surfaces. Only 2 games on Gamecube used this technique and they were Geist and Timesplitters 2. No games on the Wii use this yet, but they are coming.

The Wii also is capable of the Next-Gen Motion-Blur that is so nice in games like Gears of War and Lost Planet. It remains to be seen how much of this effect we will see in Wii games if it is being used with other effects turned on.

We don't really know the Wii polygon pushing power, but we do know that it has to be more than Gamecube. Remember that the Gamecube was no slouch with polygons, Rouge Squadron 3: Rebel Strike accomplished 20 million fully textured, light sourced and shaded polygons at 60 frames per second in the famous "Escape from Hoth" level. Many people think Resident Evil 4 was Gamecube's limit in power, but I think it really was Rebel Strike.

Here is a quote from an IGN interview with Factor 5's CEO Julian Eggebrecht on the Wii's power and developers being sloppy:

IGN: Resident Evil 4 was a beautiful GCN title. Rogue Squadron was doing things at launch that developers still haven't done on Wii. Why do you think that is? Are studios getting sloppy on Wii?

Julian: Yes. I'm so disappointed knowing exactly what the Wii can do -- and I still think nobody knows it better than we (no pun intended) [laughs]. I really have to say, boy, am I disappointed! They all have finally figured out, five years into the hardware's life cycle, how to do at least basic shaders and a rim light, but that's what everybody does. But I still don't see enough bump and normal-mapping, if any. I still don't see enough post effects, although you would have insane fill-rates with Wii. I don't see any of that. I was digging out Rebel Strike the other day and was looking at it, and we had some people who were visiting ask, "Why isn't anybody else doing this on Wii?" And I am at a loss. I really am.

So basically the Wii can look very similar to the Xbox360 in terms of graphics in low-res 480p when a game is made by a developer that actually makes the game knowing the Wii's strengths. You can't go into making a game on the Wii thinking that its a PC or an Xbox, because if you do you won't be able to make games look as good as you want. The developer willl come away thinking that the Wii just isn't capable of doing things like Shaders, Normal Mapping, Motion-Blur, detailed textures and Bloom lighting-when it absolutely can. I'm not saying the Wii will look exactly the same as 360 in the future, but I am saying that we haven't seen what the Wii can go graphically by a long shot. The system is capable of every Next Gen effect out there, maybe it can't do all at once but it can do them all to a lesser degree at least.

Look for Super Mario Galaxy to fully expose all these developers when it actually does all things graphically that Third Parties have said the Wii cannot do. Its too bad we only have 1 true game to prove this(Metroid Prime 3 is close) but I'm sure we'll see more in the future. Factor 5 needs to show them all how its done and Capcom needs to bite the bullet and release Resident Evil 5 on the Wii.

http://revoeyes.blogspot.com/2007/07/wii-has-more-power-than-you-think.html

NEC has revealed that Nintendo Wii will use the same NEC eDRAM for its graphics processing, which powers the Xbox 360 as well. With 10MB of fast RAM embedded in the graphics chip, the NEX eDRAM allows enough buffer space for anti-aliasing to be added to graphics ‘for free’.  The same technology is used in Xenos, the graphics chip for the Xbox 360, and Wii is following Xbox 360 footsteps by including it in their ‘Hollywood’ graphics chip.

Note that both graphics chips are developed by ATI. NEC representatives said that the manufacturer has chosen MoSys as the DRAM macro design partner for the Wii project because the company has implemented several times 1T-SRAM macros on NEC’s eDRAM process, and they needed an experienced partner for the job. In order to deliver enhanced graphics capabilities for Nintendo gaming console, NEC will manufacture the LSI chips with eDRAM on the company’s 300-millimeter production lines.  However, the latest 1T-SRAM technology embedded in the Wii console use NEC Electronics’ 90-namometer CMOS-compatible embedded DRAM (eDRAM) process technology.  

Whilst some have been speculating that the Wii will lack the visual quality of the Xbox 360 and the PS3, this latest announcement seems to suggest that Nintendo is serious about graphics. 

What’s slightly odd is that the Wii is rumoured to lack high-definition outputs, which is really where anti-aliasing is needed - AA on standard definition isn’t really a good use of hardware. Could this mean the eDRAM is being used for something else?

There's something that's been on my mind lately. We all know Nintendo's stance on the graphics situation regarding the Wii and the other next-gen consoles, which is, well, that "Graphics don't matter". The official line is that the Wii is about the gameplay and not about the hyper-realistic graphics of the other consoles. This is a stance I can fully back. Heck, I already did, as I bought a Wii on launch day and I've had a lot of fun with it. The Wii Remote, when used properly, can really take a game to a whole new level that pretty graphics will never reach.

But it looks like game companies are using the whole "It's about gameplay, not about graphics" line to release crappy looking games. Sure, it's not about the graphics, but it doesn't mean that you can then release games that look on par with last generation consoles, or even worse, like a friggin' PSP game.

The Wii has fantastic graphic capabilities. Look at games like Mario Galaxy or Super Smash Bros Brawl. They look fantastic, well past the PS2 or Xbox's capabilities. Yet companies keep releasing games that look terrible.

I guess we all are aware of the signs. When a game is simultaneously released for the Wii, PS2 and/or PSP, odds are it will look marginally better than the PS2 version. When it is released for the Wii only, then (most of the time) it looks great. Coincidence? I don't think so.

http://blogs.ign.com/CrisLander/2007/08/20/63939/

I've been saying since I joned vgchartz. I believe the wii is 3 times more powerful than the original xbox/gamecube, and 4-6 times more powerful than the ps2. I beleive it is 4-6 times less powerful than the ps360, about the same difference between the ps2 and wii is the wii and hd consoles. Devs are far too lazy. High voltage, and Tecmo/Grasshopper, and nintendo are the only ones seem to try to make good wii graphics.

I don't have to read all of that to tell you that most games now are being built from PS2 engines, thus crappy looking.

By next year games will be using much better engines and will be built ground up for Wii. Games will look really, really good. Much better than anything last gen.

Do you know what else is funny? Most fanboy's on youtube, and other sites not fully meant for gaming beleive the ps2 is more powerful than the wii and gamecube. I laugh at this.

Fucking lazy developers. Thats all.

Just look Mario Galaxy. Metal textures, heat distortion, reflections, bump and normal mapping (just look Bowser skin), bloom, huge distance draws, and remember for example, in the Good Egg Galaxy, when you figth with the Magma Octopus, how the floor reflects everything?

Or how about the textures in the Queen Bee? or dynamic lighting?

And all runiing at 60fps, using motion and IR Pointer

Sadly enough, if I had to judge from a lot of games I've seen, I would agree with them. Every once in a while I get bummed and I put in SMG just to remember what we should be seeing. And that apparently is a game that looks as good as a Xbox360 but at none HD resolution and that I could certainly be very very happy with.

I thought the whole idea of the Wii was low development costs! If you start designing engines etc then your budget could easily be greater than a HD console game on a paid for engine. You also have a time delay factor as well to consider.

You only need to look at Nintendo's first party titles to know it's not the hardware's fault. There's really no debate. It's lazy, cheap developers.

 You can believe that but it's not true.  Just ask developers who have made games for both the Wii and Xbox.

 Nobody buys a Wii for graphics anyways so what's the big deal?

Do you have blog, Grampy? Post that in your blog & digg it.