ssj12 said: z64dan said: ssj12 said: Timmah! said: I believe the specs are as follows: Main Processor (Newt): 729KHz Graphics Processor (Bollywood): 243KHz 64KB of RAM @ 12 KB/Sec Transfer Speed 3 Polygons per minute 16 Colors Power Source: Hamster on wheel Die Size: 1.5" Duct Tape This is straight from Hus, so it may be a little off, but I think it's pretty close.   that was a bit low... does the Wii support 64bit processing/graphics? Lets see N64 was 64 bit, Gamecube was 128 bit, so wii must be 256 bit! (yes, that was a joke)   Actually the N64 was only advertised to be 64bit, but it was only 32bit like the PS2.

This isn't completely correct. 

The N64 had a 64 bit CPU (64 bit intergers, 64 bit instruction set and 64 bit internal bus) but it had a 32 bit external bus.  Developers could, however, lock it down to 32 bits overall to make a game run faster since 64 bit data uses twice as much RAM.

The GPU was completely 64 bit.

For comparison sake:

PS2 - 128 bit

GC and Xbox - 32/64 bit hybrids (Much like the N64) 

Mario Galaxy certainly looks better than Doom 3 would look if you played it on a GeForce 3.

@Viper, the PS2 was a 64-bit CPU.  It was able to perform SIMD operations on vector data stored in 128-bit registers (usually 4 32-bit floating point values), but so is the Pentium 4, and we don't call it a 128-bit CPU, we call it 32-bit.  In fact, we have had 64-bit and 80-bit FPUs for decades now, but the "bitness" of a CPU is typically defined by the size of its general purpose registers and memory address space.

The Gamecube and Xbox both had 32-bit CPUs and 64-bit data buses.  The Nintendo 64 had a 64-bit CPU and a 32-bit data bus.

Bitness is a pretty poor way to judge a CPU's performance.  Generally, 99% of integer code is 32-bit; 64-bit general purpose registers don't become important until you need a virtual address space larger than 4 GB. 

Honestly, I could be wrong but I think that most people want to know "How powerful the Wii is" and the important question is "as compared to what?" or "in what context?" ...

The Gamecube was an amazingly powerful system back in the day, being able to produce games with 15 Million polygons per second with 18 MB of texture data (the texture data was compressed to 2MB in the Flippers on chip memory); in the context of 480p this works out to be (roughly) between 0.7 and 1.4 polygons per pixel with 5 texels per pixel. On top of all of this the Gamecube had a TEV unit which enabled it to produce similar effects to what a pixel or vertex shader could produce on the XBox or PC.

If you look at it from a theoritical performance perspective the Gamecube should have been able to produce graphics that were far better than could be displayed by 480p when it was released. The problem is that we don't live in a theoritical world and between bottlenecks, tradeoffs and lack of optimization the Gamecube never achieved its theoritical promise.

Now, what we know about the Wii is that it is an enhanced version of the Gamecube's architecture. I think that it is a fairly safe assumption to think that Nintendo's goal with the Wii was to eliminate the bottlenecks in the Gamecube, improve real world performance, and enable even poor developers to produce graphics which match or exceed the output capabilities of 480p.

In comparison to the Gamecube the Wii is actually a pretty big step up, and in the context of a console that is focused on displaying graphics at 480p the Wii is very powerful.

Thanks Entroper, I'm familiar with all that but I'd forgotten the actual configuration of the PS2.

Bit depth really lost its relevance during the "16 bit" era.

Here is one of the pages I read while information gathering:

http://wiiall.blogspot.com/2006/06/wii-gpu-has-nice-blendingshading.html

Wii Patent:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=8&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=Nintendo.ASNM.&OS=AN/Nintendo&RS=AN/Nintendo

 There were a few others I found, but mostly through some tedious convoluted web linkage (google->blog->blog->source->source, etc) that I can't find at the moment.

Thanks for the links. The first one misinterprets the original information and confuses pipelines with blending stages. They are not the same thing. It's weird, the blogger doesn't seem to know what he's talking about technically, but he does come to a reasonable conclusion: that the capabilities of the Wii are in between the last generation and the 360/PS3, and that it has more shading ability than most people realize.