Not sure what you're referring to, but the pther posters are referring to an older GameCube game.  I'm not going to post on this any further, since... well there's no point.

And, for reference, 24 million / 40 = 600K single-textured, unlit polys at once (no normal -- thats another 3 floats/12 bytes per vertex), with no code, or game of any sort, assuming the 3MB of GC VRAM (they're talking about a GC game, as I said) is all used for textures and the framebuffer.  The GPU performance of the GC is listed pretty clearly on wikipedia -- 337.5K polys/frame at 60 fps, and that's untextured, unlit, single-cycle fill which is probably about 10-20x faster than your typical game polygon.

Rogue Squadron, Rebel Strike, etc. could have had millions of polygons in a single level, but... that irrelevant.  That's only a disc space limitation, and really has nothing to do with graphics performance.  I'm not sure what these guys think they're talking about.

 "The Wii is probably about 600K at 60 fps, again with tiny, untextured, unlit polys"

I got 2000 polys/frame. Also I think they are talking about per second while you are talking about per frame. 

So you guys may both be correct. They are talking about second you are talking about frame. 

This is very true.

One of my big qualms with the Wii is that third parties view customers of the Wii as "people who don't care about graphics."  This gives an excuse for devs to be lazy in this are and not improve other aspects of the game because they think people have gotten into a mode of thinking that worse graphics + motion controls magically improves the gameplay and game experience.  It's a bad cycle that has been entered.  Luckily, Fatal Frame 4 appears to be changing that.

As a solution, I think it's time Nintendo develop minimum quality standards for third parties, like they did in the old times.   More games like No More Heroes, Zack and Wiki, etc.

20M / 60 is only about 335K, which would mean that these games would have to be running untextured, unlit, <= 4 pixel wide/long polygons to achieve this.  I don't recall Rogue Squadron or Rebel Strike being that boring. =)  Even if they are talking per second, they're dreamin. Besides:

 Lets take a realistic situation.  3 float for x,y,z + 2 float for 1 u,v tex coord (one texture is kinda weak though), plus 3 float for a vertex normal == 8 floats per vert (32 bytes).  at an average of 2 verts per triangle, this is still 64 bytes per poly.  If you actually had 335K polys, such that you could validly render 20M per second at 60 fps, that's:

335000 x 64 = 21.44M... almost all of the GameCube's RAM, just to hold the mesh data.  That's ridiculous, to say the least, not to mention that the GC's realistic GPU performance amounted to about 20-40K polys/frame at 60fps (variable depending on all sorts of factors like # of textures, total fill, # of dynamic lights, etc), not 335K of the boring uselss polys they use to gauge max performance.  I'm being pretty generous here, even.  Most GC games had about 20-30K polys/frame, but didn't break 30 fps.

Back to the original topic, the point is that, even though the Wii exceeds the GC's performance numbers by a good margin, and even the original XBox to some (IMO minor) degree, its not even in the same class as the other consoles of this generation.  There's not really any point in discussing it.

You could claim that "good programming" could make the Wii really shine... but that's not really unique to the Wii at all, is it?  You might say its less so on the Wii, due to the much more detailed pipelines on the other consoles, even.  Even on a good day, the Wii can't hold a candle to the other two platforms, in terms of graphics.  That's why Nintendo games are all about gameplay, and not just a pretty shine.

Ok no problem there.

We aren't trying to compare it thought ot eh xbox 360 and ps3. We are complaining that we are getting this on the wii.

and most games look like this. 

When the ps2 did better graphics. We are saying that there should be a minimum standard for wii games, and that is God of war 2.

We are no way trying to compare the wii to the ps3 or 360 yet you keep thinking we are. Everytime a graphics thread comes up about the wii people think that. 

We should in no way be getting ps2 graphics. 

Well... point taken.

The Wii gets shovelware, because publishers pay crap $ to innocent newbie development teams to develop crap for it, and quickly.

That's the danger of being "everyone's console".  Everyone (meaning publishers) wants to make a quick buck.  Honestly its only 1st party publisher teams (i.e. teams internal to not only Sony, MS, Nintendo, but also internal to Capcom, Konami, etc.) that ever have the money and time to make something decent. 

Most 3rd party devs, these days are only scraping by on the scraps the publishers feed them, before the marketing teams at the publisher think they can dupe the general populace (i.e. the supposed typical Wii user) into plonking down the money in hopes of getting a good game.  Then the developer goes belly up, and the publisher hunts down a new team of suckers for the next project.  Sad, but true.

On top of that, the Wii hasn't been around long enough to allow good devs to create a decent Wii engine, if they weren't already a studio that worked on the GC (which was relatively rare).  Give it a couple years -- but you can never expect really great titles on the Wii, that aren't from Nintendo, honestly.  Game Designers are artists... storytellers if you will.  Its rare to find one willing to put up with technology that is kinda... old news, even if the controller is "neato" and the publisher promises big sales.  The few designers that have been around long enough to design titles which use the Wii effectively don't work at companies willing to put up with shovelware deals... and that, and super blockbusters, are all the cutthroat games industry wants to pay for, anymore.

The publishers are the reason the Wii hasn't seen good games.  They aren't willing to spend millions on a Wii title, when they believe they can make more money by selling a game about flipping burgers with the WiiMote.

@Mifely, There are some good engines coming to the wii like this one made by high voltage.
http://wii.ign.com/dor/objects/14248157/the-conduit/videos/hightechwii.html

Game running with the engine
http://wii.ign.com/dor/objects/14248157/the-conduit/videos/conduit_trailer_051608.html

The Wii will have some decent 3rd party engines after a while, but they'll never be truly spectacular in the graphics sense.  They won't suck as bad as most of the shovelware does though.  Nintendo has consistantly set the high bar for their games with their 1st party titles.  There really aren't engines that ever outdo them on their platforms, ever.  Some come close now and then (RE4 on the GC, for example), but Nintendo will always be king.  You can't ever expect more out of the Wii than Nintendo provides.  Their games are fun to look at, but not astonishing in the graphics department.  I would argue that "fun to look at" is what really matters to the typical Wii user, and Nintendo knows that.

Some of the shovelware... heck a lot of it, appeals just fine to kids.  Thus, it sells, and the older gamer sees it as shovelware.

The % of shovelware will always be much higher though, due to the nature of the beast.  People *do* buy the shovelware... and that's exactly what keeps it goin.  The Wii will never see the likes of games like MGS4, GTA4, etc... FF XIII, and so on will just never go back after hitting the high end on the PS3/360.  If the Wii has any breakout awesome titles, they pretty much have to be new IPs, where there's no "step backward" to be taken.

Even then, the Wii is limited -- much smaller memory than its competitors, weaker CPU/GPU... it just doesn't compare.  Compare it to a PC of even greater potential... say a 1.4 GHz P3, or even a superior Athlon, with 128 MB of memory and a 32 MB graphics card... all supposedly faster/bigger than the Wii, even after considering the superior architecture of the Wii's components/bus/memory/etc.  How long has it been since you owned a PC of those (superior to Wii) specs?

Eh.  That game looks about the same as 5-year old PC games... maybe a little better than some late-era XBox games, which is exactly what I would expect on the high-end from the Wii.  Nothing spectacular, but certainly better than the shovelware that currently dominates the Wii market.

As a side note, there doesn't appear to be any skinned, animated meshes in that first demo, except for the fish, and maybe the water (although I imagine the water might just use some good shader-esque multi-texturing, multi-pass techniques to get that effect).  There's a pretty big difference between rendering animated, skinned geometry, while moving through an environment too large to fit in memory at once (i.e. a game), and rendering a bunch of static stuff in a scene.  The demo is neato (for the Wii), but not much moreso than the original XBox demos, really.

 Well the game is in alpha stages, and they think they could get it to run at 60fps. So it should look better when it's done. I say it looks like half life 2. They might even beable to get it to look as good as hl2 episode 1.