Nintendo might do a high-end/low-end thing with handhelds... release a new, more PSP-like one-screened GameBoy alongside a new DS, where the DS 2 lauches at say, $150, and the GBX launches at $99. Or something to that effect. I see the "GameBoy" brand as being too valuable for Nintendo to abandon flat-out.

If most developers ares saying so it must be true .In fact the Cube wastn as powerful as the original Xbox ,but somewhere between the PS2 and the Xbox .Games as Ninja Gaiden ,KOTOR ,Panzeer Dragoon Orta or Fable had way better graphics that the best of the Cube in those genres .Specs wise the Xbox was as well way more powerful with 766mhz against 450mhz for the Cube and more memory and better CPU .Plus the Wii has to control all those damn wiimotes mind you .What most developers are saying is the Wii doesnt support shader arquitecture and thats a big low .

Whoa there Dio

The BOX had a 766Mhz CELERON processor

The CUBE had a 485 Mhz POWER PC Processor


When comparing speeds between the 2, you need to AT LEAST double the MHZ speed of the Power PC (thats for comparing to Pentiums, and Celerons are FAR less powerful"

In Short, the the CPU on the CUBE was FAR better

I've been playing with all three last gen consoles lately, and everything I've seen reinforces my understanding of PS2 < GC < Xbox as far as graphics are concerned. The gap from PS2 to the others is the most apparent, so much as to bother me actually, but I can see it with the other two as well. Some like SSBM and Twilight Princess are still the most beautiful games of last gen to me, but games like Halo 2 and Riddick clearly had superior technology behind them.

The RAMDAC converts the contents of the framebuffer to an analog signal that can be carried over composite/component/whatever.  For a digital 720p output, the RAMDAC is irrelevant, but it matters for component.  The details of the Wii's RAMDAC have not been disclosed.

Also, the Wii's graphics chip has an embedded framebuffer.  If it's the same size as the Gamecube's embedded framebuffer, then it's 2 MB.  That's enough space to double buffer a 640x480x24 display, just.  It isn't enough for 720p, even single-buffered.  But of course, the details of the Wii's GPU have not been disclosed, either.  I think it's likely that the texture cache has been increased, and not the framebuffer, but that's pure speculation on my part.

That is the first time I have ever seen it mentioned that the GameCube was more powerful than the x-box. Or even hinted.

The Wii is approximately 1.5 to 2.5x faster than the GameCube. So that makes the Wii about 60% the power of the 360/PS3. So the Wii is closer to the PS3/360 than the PS2 was the X-box.

Ok. sounds about right.

EDIT: for those of you who didnt notice the scarcasm, It was. 

lol, the majority of the Counter-Strike community is just resistant to change anyway so using Counter-Strike is kind of a bad idea, lol.

Still, I must point out that while Counter-Strike and Half-Life have stood the test of time with their quality and popularity, Half-Life was one of the better looking games when it came out. While it's quality has indeed been proven, without it, it would have been the exact same thing we argue about with the Wii's graphics vs gameplay argument. What about the N64 Zelda's? Didn't those have awsome graphics when they came out? 

I guess you didn't see the endless debates over whether the XBox was more powerful than the Gamecube back in the day. The general consensus was that they were similar in processing power but each of the systems had their own strengths which enabled them to do things the other platform couldn't. The most obvious example of this is that the (massive) ammount of memory on the GPU in the Gamecube as well as it's highly efficient fixed pixel pipelines enabled it to render more textures at higher detail than the XBox could; meanwhile the XBox had programmable shaders which enabled it to produce vertex and pixel effects which were not possible on the Gamecube.

Nintendo appears to have improved upon the texturing strengths of the Gamecube while not putting any effort into adressing programmable shaders. Being that the main enhancements in GPUs over the past 5 years has been in shader technology many people would see the Wii's GPU as less advanced or less powerful than the XBox but this is incorrect; in what it does (multi-textured polygons) the Wii can eat the XBox alive.

When attempting to compare the Wii to the XBox 360 and PS3 it becomes a much uglier task; certainly the Wii is far less powerful but "how much" less powerful largely depends on what you measure. In terms of processing power from the CPU you'd probably find the Wii was about 1/4 to 1/8 as powerful as the XBox 360 or PS3; when it comes to the GPU the Wii is probably 1/4 as powerful in terms of polygon processing, an in terms of shaders  you could say the PS3 and XBox 360 were infinitely more powerful.

No it isnt the first time.

We mentioned it in one of your less glamorous threads, and you ignored it because it didnt fit "your" facts

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=1471&start=0

http://wiinside.blogspot.com/

Dont make claims we can easily debunk Kwaad

This says different Squirrel

http://wiinside.blogspot.com/

So what can you tell me about the TEV unit in the Wii? Does it have any addition pipelines? Vertex shader support?

TEV is Basicly the Same... The GPU has twice the Pipelines now at 8... Tev makes up for this by allowing 16 Texturing Stages per Pipeline... Vertex Shader routines are handled by Tev just like Pixel Shader routines are...

So does the file disclose any of the GPU's performance numbers?Gflops? Polygons per second? Fill rate? Stuff like that?

Only in a round about way... It gives you test code to run and shows some optimizations that can be added...The Code is run via Debuggers Cable or Wireless Network (Wireless requires a Special Disc in the Wii)...

But you can do the math. 8 pipelines at 243mhz… that’s about 1944 megapixels per second. That’s a lot higher than the GC could handle and around twice what the xbox was dishing out.