Does this also apply to the PS3 fanboy ravings (especially MikeB) about the untapped power of da CELL?

 God of War? Probably but itl still be a tad hard to port it over since the it has different hardware. If you mean gears of war then no since the wii doesnt use DirectX.

ya i mean  gears of war thnx for the answer.

While the Wii and Xbox have similar clock speed one must remember that the Xbox has a CISC instruction set while the Wii has a Power PC RISC instruction set.

CISC processors are like the x-86 processors in a standard IBM PC and have an expanded instruction set suitable to multitasking and standard computing.

RISC processors have a reduced instruction set and can do simple tasks like shuffling numbers in less time (Clock cycles) than a CISC type machine can.

In plain English the Wii can do the same tasks in less clock cycles than the xbox.

I could be wrong but I suspect that the best looking Wii games will depend more on how clever developers are than how powerful the system is ...

If you go back and look at the best looking games for most platforms (home console and portable) and did a technical evaluation (texel performance, polygon performance, shader performance) and compared these games with very average looking games the majority of the best looking games would be in the same performance range as the average looking games.

Now, you may ask "Why do these games look so much better then?" and the answer is that good developers learn to optimize their graphical assets for the platform they're releasing the game on, and they learn to use advanced lighting and shading effects in a way where they get noticed.

An example of this is God of War for the PS2 ... if you look at the game it has tons of polygonalization artifacts, very noticeable pixelization of the textures and the lighting effects are (generally) not that impressive for a PS2 game but when the developers want to impress you they're very successful.

The Wii isn't powerful, but it still sells very well.

To have an idea of what is capable on the Wii, just look at SMG. That game runs at a locked 60fps, and the effects in that game walk all over any effects that the PS2 could do.

Really, why does it matter? All I know is that we're seeing a ton of lovely artsy games on the Wii, while the HD consoles are awash in a deluge of ugly, shiny-mud-covered "gritty, realistic" games. Graphics are all about the games more than the hardware.

Clock speeds do not matter at all. CPU of wii is slower than XBOX but Wii's is a lot more efficient. Wii's GPU is also faster. But what really matters are hardware featuresl like Wii's TEV. It can replicate effects....READ OTHER COMMENT BEFORE BY ME PLEASE!!!!!!!!!

TheRepublic, posted quotes of pretty much what I would have written personally so I thank him for saving me the keystrokes.

Because most of the technical mumbo jumbo just gets lost in its own sea of jargon, I will provide my own scale to demonstrate the visual capabilities of the Wii as compared to the Xbox and Xbox360.


Xbox                     Xbox360
  1------3-----------------10
          Wii

That is a highly, highly general comparison.  Do not consider the Wii 3 times as powerful as Xbox or just 1/3rd the power of X360 (or that X360 is 10 times the power of Xbox for that matter).  It is simply a basic visual reference.

For those intersted in the jargon and details, you should already have read TheRepublic's post.   The TEV unit is rarely utilized because it requires more effort than simply porting from PS2 or slapping a texture on a poly and calling it a day. 

Super Mario Galaxy used it and was loaded with shader effects all running at 60 fps.  The Conduit is using it.  Take a look at the picture below of The Conduit and notice how many shader effects are applied to the bad guy.  And they have 9 more months of development time to make it even better.