Wow I totally agree with Squilliam. Never thought this would happen. Like all IBM products (for example the CELL), the PowerPC was very powerful when the developer knew what he was doing. In normal situations the advantage wasn't that big. Besides that the XBOX had a standard GPU with shader units that could be programmed with Direct3D and the Gamecube had a proprietary GPU with some weird programming models.

Which explains why XBOX games all in all looked better (Exceptions prove the rule)

And let's not even get started about this generation.

The XBox's CPU was (pretty much) a stock celeron ... It (typically) takes companies 4 to 5 years to produce console hardware, and Microsoft produced the XBox's hardware in a little over 1 year by (basically) repackaging stock PC components. This resulted in a system which was expensive to manufacture due to poor licencing agreements and was not designed all that efficiently.

What idiota said that the Wii is equally as powerful as the PS2? No really Wii has SMG, MP3 and Zelda oh so they can be done on the PS2? What, do people cover there eyes when games like these are shown?

OT: nice read and I am buying this game whether it is close to what’s on the PS360 or not!

Oh and ceterum censeo SMG looks really nice but the Conduit looks like hell. Trying to mimic next-gen graphical effects doesn't help if the basic models, textures and settings look like jagged hell. The control scheme looks nice and fluid and some of the effects are nice in a serious sam kind of way but seriously compared to Mario this game looks like shit.

The Gamecube's flipper GPU included a TEV unit which is not that different from pixel combiners from the Geforce and Radeon cards from 1998 to 2000; they were (typically) more efficient than the programmable pixel shaders, but they were specific to hardware and were not taken heavy advantage of by developers. Games (like Resident Evil 4) that were ported from the Gamecube to the PC needed far more powerful shader hardware to produce all of the effects that the gamecube was able to do at the same time ... Unfortunately, the Gamecube was not particularly popular and tended to get (third rate) ports from the PS2 that never took advantage of the specific hardware.

What made me laugh like hell was the formula, if they talked about the processor only they should not put the whole consoles in the formula, because 2 Xboxs + 2 PS2 considering CPU, combined RAM and GPU, that beats the Wii by a mile... They should put "2 P3C + 2 Emotion Engines"...

Haha what I said, SMG is simply beautiful and so polished.  Only game I've seen on Wii this generation that actually is over the 6th generation and into the 7th. 

Now I still think the Conduit looks good and hopefully when that finishing polish comes in it will look as good as the hype would suggest.

very good summery of the pc world IBM hard but good with varying degrees.... x86 evil heh no, just what windows chose so we all have it

Developers on the Wii aren't going to be looking to use that power.

1. Why spend millions to develop engines to take advantage of the Wii when its a dead end graphical architecture?

2. Do developers see a return for spending a lot on advanced graphics engines especially as they are already a couple of years behind the ball and need to get games out quickly.

So really its the PS3 question but worse, because we have a userbase which as a whole does not respond as well to developers pushing the envelope of what the system can be seen to do.

Poor Squilliam, falling for the classic trap that kills more developers than anything else: the "keeping up with the Jonses" trap.

Let me explain this in a fashion that will hopefully make sense: developers do not decide what direction technology advances, consumers do. If your product holds no value to consumers, consumers will not buy it, and thus will not fund your technological advances. The consumer, not the manufacturer, is king. And if the consumer wants games on the Wii, then that's where developers have to go if they want to survive in the long run.

While it is still early in this disruption and the previous market iteration still holds some value, that market iteration has been under considerable strain. This is due, among other things, to exactly what Squilliam is touting: the rat-race-like attempts to keep up with and out-develop other developers with more and more expensive solutions to what amounts to a very simple problem: keeping people entertained. A market where development costs are perpetually on the rise cannot last forever. Eventually, the market breaks apart.