Yes, but compared to XB360 Wii added little more RAM and while the driver itself for motion is surely small, some memory will be consumed by the game code that actually uses it giving a meaning in the game to the motion detected... In the end Wii has little more RAM but it uses it very well for things that people notice more than graphics, once these have reached an acceptable level and even exceeded SD TV's capabilities, increasing graphics performance would require a lot more RAM, not for the resolution itself, but particularly if increasing effects, textures size, antialiasing level, etc (as those 32MB of the first GeForce, for example, were enough for 1024x768@32bit, that's more than SD, but with very basic antialiasing and relatively small textures).
My point, to cut it short, is that having little more RAM it's perfectly natural it doesn't exceed XBox graphics capabilities in a dramatic way, as graphics are quite heavy on RAM, but Nintendo never meant to do it.

If I don't get it wrong, I think Wii actually has an additional low powered RISC CPU used for the connection to the Wii Remotes. Well, the main CPU has to do some work with the controls anyways just like an ordinary control, but still...

I was just saying the resources allocated by the motion detection software are not really much more than that of standard input method resources. It's just a few KB's of data.

The point about ram and the higher resolutions is this. If Xbox could render 1080i with all those effects using just 64 MB of RAM, then the Wii should have no problems doing the same with 88 MB (+3 MB frame buffer).

While that's not substantially better, it does suggest Ram is certainly not an issue. Especially when you consider the type of RAM being used and how efficient the hardware is overall. The only thing keeping Wii from the same output resolution options as the Xbox is the physical limitations applied by Nintendo.

@Viper1

Probably true.

Yeah, 1T SRAM and GDDR3 SDRAM, both faster then Xbox DDR.

Wonder if the higher resolution block is built in or just a software block?

With 24MB dedicated to graphics you could do even 1080p@32bit, if you want, as you just need 8MB for the frame buffer, but you'd got 16MB left and you'd have to choose how to use them: double buffering would require another 8MB, for example. If you want to better other aspects of graphics quality than simple resolution, RAM matters, frame buffers, double buffers, z-buffers all eat a fixed amount of RAM at a given res and bit depth, so you must take into account how much free RAM for other graphics features you need and decide which res you can afford accordingly.

I've seen the idea a few times in the past, that Wii's controls are a resource hog... I don't buy it at all.

The Wii game with the best graphics (SMG) uses Wiimote+Nunchuk with motion sensing plus IR pointing and an additional remote for IR pointing.

Never said they are resource hogs, simply said they added little RAM compared to XB1, and you must use some of this additional RAM (I don't know how much) for new features, so you can't expect a much higher resolution, plain and simple. But given the higher computing power and a little more RAM you can expect, at a same given resolution, more and computing heavier effects applied, for example better antialiasing, better anisotropic filtering, etc. Simply don't expect little more RAM available to be wasted on higher res, as it would eat RAM stealing it from other features that could have a better visual result.

One consideration is that the Flipper handled texture compression on the GPU while the XBox GPU required any compressed textures to be decompressed before being passed into the GPU; on top of this the Flipper had 3MB of memory built into it, of which 1MB was devoted to frame-buffers, and (if compressed to the maximum allowed by the GPU) the 2MB of remaining memory was similar to a high speed 18MB texture cache. While this still may not sound like a lot compared to what the HD consoles have, this works out to 16 32 bit texels for every pixel at 480p.

It was 2MB FB (24bit FB + 24bit z-B) and 1MB texture cache, but the long and short of this is the same , very well used RAM (and let's not forget that in the past RAM price was much higher and subject to wild jumps and speculations), more than enough computing power carefully employed where it matters.

of cousr the developers are being lazy, at least the most of them. High Voltage, Sega, SquereEnix, Capcom and Nintendo itself are the hard workers here.