The Flipper was built by ArtX who was a company that (primarily) focused on flight simulators, and they were purchased by ATi because (as a company) they produced many advanced processors which were inexpensive. The Flipper (at the time) was a very conventional design for a GPU and was primarily focused on producing a large number of polygons per frame, with a high level of texture detail per polygon, with a well known set of texture effects that were supported in hardware using the TEV unit; in contrast, the XBox's GPU was a slightly modified PC GPU that was based on a new architecture where the emphasis was on pixel and vertex shaders.

From what I remember, you could produce a game with more polygons displayed to screen with more texture layers and higher texture detail on the gamecube than you could on the XBox but were limited to a handful of texture effects the TEV did well (like bump and specular mapping); whereas you could achieve much nicer lighting and texturing effects on the XBox.

It wasn't so much art-style that was different between the XBox and Gamecube, because developers who knew how to used the Gamecube's hardware well (like Factor 5) could produce very impressive realistic looking games (like Rogue Squadren 2/3).

        Then why so many games on Gamecube that were cell shaded like WindWaker?  It was Nintendo's idea since the N64 days to create games that looked like cartoons and they thought the Gamecube was going to do an even better job at that.  But at the time people wanted more realistic looking games like Halo, Splinter Cell, KOTOR, and the realistic Final Fantasies. 

Wow, just when I thought the "Xbox > Wii" threads where done.

First, I'd like you to list them.  Then compare them to the number of games that utilized standard shading and lighting.    You'll find category B far outweighs category A.

If you simply mean games with bright and colroful graphics, that not what cell shading is.

Okay just stop posting. The N64 was designed by SGI. It was designed to produce the most realistic graphics of it's time. The damn thing was consumer grade Silicon Graphics workstation. It was based on computers that powered the special effects of movies like Jurassic Park. I've never seen someone post so much unverifiable bullshit on a consistent basis. Do you even bother to do a simple Google search before you post your nonsense?

Edit: What makes it worse, is the team that designed the N64 formed ArtX. They did such a good job on the Gamecube GPU that ATI bought them and they pretty much single handedly brought ATI up to Nvidia's level. They are aren't enough face palm and fail train gifs on the internet for your last few posts.

Do you have a link to back up that claim because it sounds pretty ridiculous to me.

Since the Rogue Squadren games were built as a showcase for the architecture of the Gamecube it isn't unreasonable to expect that a straight foward port couldn't be done without serious downgrades, and it is entirely reasonable to expect that Lucasarts was unwilling to devote hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars to rework content to produce a similar quality result on the XBox for the sales the game would likely get.

Wasn't Resident Evil 4 also made from the ground up for the Gamecube?  The PS2 which was significantly weaker didn't exactly do a horrible job when it was ported to it.  The Xbox is significantly more powerful than the PS2 and had the best version of every multi-platform game made (Splinter Cell for example was downgraded from the Xbox to the Gamecube) so I just find it hard to believe the system couldn't handle Rogue Squadron 2 and 3.

Some videos for comparison purposes:

Halo:  Combat Evolved -- Halo One (xbox)

Metroid Prime One (Gamecube)

Crimson Skies:  High Road to Revenge (XBOX)

Rogue Squadron 2 (Gamecube)

Jade Empire (XBOX)

Tales of Symphonia (Gamecube)

Conduit (Wii)

Madworld (Wii)

No More Heroes (Wii)