I love how most of those x-box games that have been posted have like 63 shades of ugly ass brown, that make them look sepia toned. Maybe the Wii can't handle Brown and gray colors :P

Well, if you look at only one metric it may look bad for the Wii ... if you look at the broader picture its a bit different.

With the marathon analogy in the Olympics there are several countries where their atheletes do not need to go to school or to work and can devote their lives to training, they have access to the most expensive coaches and training equipment available, they take advantage of high-altitude sleeping tents and also cheat using drugs (or other performance enhancers). In contrast, there are lots of atheletes who have nothing but a pair of shoes and a road to run on that also make it to the Olympics ... While the marathon runner who had all the advantages comes in first or second and is praised by their country, I have always thought that the more impressive feat is the marathon runner who comes in third or fourth and had nothing.

Realistically, the $100,000,000 Metal Gear Solid 4 looks great but the $5,000,000 Million "The Conduit" is more impressive.

Um no you didn't. Just look at Sqrl's post and then tell me that the screens you posted were the most accurate. They aren't even close. You could even find better screens from IGN itself if you looked harder. I'm not saying you purposely did this, but you didn't pick the most accurate screens.

@OP YES the Wii is more powerful than the original XBOX. Like others said the reason why Wii games don't show this too often is because developers don't push it to its limits. Tons of the Xbox games in this thread DID push the Xbox to its limits. Out of all of the games mentioned in this thread I'm pretty sure most of them were a constant 30 fps. Almost all of the Wii games mentioned with the exception of a few run at 60fps with better results graphically.(Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3)

Actually, the Wii can:

http://www.gamespot.com/wii/action/princeofpersia/images.html

and

http://www.gamespot.com/wii/action/callofduty5/images.html

Guess what, Star Wars Rebel Strike for the GC, the best looking title last-gen.

And seriously, there is a lot of games better-looking than those posted:

Haunting Ground for PS2.

Those GC screenshots haxxiy posted should be more than enough to prove that the Wii is nowhere near tapped in terms of non-cartoony games.

Super Mario Galaxy beats Super Mario Sunshine by far, so imagine what the Wii can do considering GC games.

Clearly the Wii is superior. Heck, developers don't have programmable shaders to work with, so using a fixed function pipeline they have less work to do (with all that engineering crap), and they have so much more time to do stuff *well*.

And yeah... the clockrate of the GPU is meaningless! Sure sure, the programmable shader architecture NVidia GPU on the original XBox ran at 233 MHz (nv2a chipset -- a variant of the GeForce 3 architecture), but the awe-inspiring Hollywood design ran awesome at 143 MHz, and it was so cool that ATI moved entirely away from its architecture, toward the programmable shader architecture pioneered by NVidia, and now their excellent flexible shader GPU architectures are found on... um... crappy-looking games hardware, like the XBox360. But don't forget that they upped the clock on the Hollywood for the Wii, and clockrate is everything, completely the opposite of what I said above, remember?!?



Give it a rest you guys. The Wii has a decent GPU architecture, that is, in some ways, comparable to the original XBox, yes. In other ways, no. Its not that much better, nor is it that much worse, from any perspective. There are PS2 games that looked easily as good as some of the "examples" posted here (take God of War 2, as an example), and no one regards it as some graphics phenominon.

Don't expect great things, technologically, from the Wii. Its competition (the X360 and PS3) blows it out of the water, in that regard. Expect great talent to come to the Wii, eventually, and make it look good, for what it is.

That's far from a bad thing.

Also, remember that having a fixed function pipeline, no stencil buffer (the GC didn't.. I dunno if the Wii's version of the GPU added one), etc. is a pretty major irritant to devs (engineers AND artists) who have been working with programmable shaders for years now.  They're not lazy -- they have to relearn what works and looks good in that older style of GPU architecture.  Artists used to bake shadows into texture maps to make them more 3D in appearance (which looks great in screenshots, like the GC ones in this thread, but much lamer in motion), whereas they're trained to use normal maps instead these days.  The art of polygon reduction has been long since lost (its hard to find artists who can make a good looking low poly count model, it seems), etc.  Developers have changed how they think -- they're not "lazy"... what an absurdly uninformed comment that is.

In order to have a game truly shine on the Wii, you'd have to hire a bunch of absurdly expensive old-school artists and engineers (they are exceedingly rare... the games industry has very high burnout) to do so.  ...and there goes the supposedly cheap dev costs on your Wii title.  All the masters of those arts are now the leads and directors of the current games industry -- they're not even available for hire as grunts.  They have to retrain their grunts to understand the roots of 3D hardware  instead.

The only wii games, that graphically, impress me are those that try not to be realistic. Madworld for an example.

Wii devs need to focus on making games that are more "cartoony", are cel-shaded, or have more distinctive art styles, as kutasek mentioned above.

It doesn't even matter if the Wii's GPU can outperform the original XBox's GPU in some regards, or not in others. What matters is that user perceptions and expectations have changed.

Wii games shouldn't target "realistic"... ever.