but wasn’t the gamecube the most graphically powerful system last gen?

It was a pretty close call. Most third party games looked better on the Xbox, but the Gamecube also had its amazing looking exclusive games, like Resident Evil 4, Super Mario Sunshine, and Wind Waker. They’re about equal, in my book.

Yeah…. But.. Most of the games DONT look as good as super mario galaxy.

The article doesn’t provide enough information to prove or disprove the accusation. If X-Box and Gamecube hardware are comparable, then logically one cannot claim that Wii is less powerful than X-Box.

It’s not on raw power alone. Xbox has hardware-based shaders, which account for much of the modern GFX paradigm. The article has it spot on in that respect. However, it’s a bit of a trade off, as with proper planning and effort you can still generate graphics better than that of the Xbox. It just wouldn’t be nearly as easy to pull off.

“f X-Box and Gamecube hardware are comparable, then logically one cannot claim that Wii is less powerful than X-Box.”

I don’t know. At times, the Wii almost appears less powerful than the GameCube!

“Yeah…. But.. Most of the games DONT look as good as super mario galaxy.” Yeah, but most games are first generation, and made quickly to make money before the console might crash and burn.

yer it does seem odd. The GC was less powerful than the xbox but not by that much. you would expect the wii to be more powerful. That said the GD lacked grunt but made up for with effects and shaders.

I was playing Luigi’s mansion the other day and its a stark reminder of just how bad a lot of Wii games look. Metroid 3 for me will be a stunner.

it kinda drives me insane, when people talk about the Wii’s limitations based on a few ugly as hell launch/1st gen titles.

the thing about consoles, is their limitations are almost never met, and then you consider each console usually trumps the other’s in some way or another, faster processors, more memory etc
it’s hard to stack it all up and compare

and who cares? fuck stats.
I’ve said it many times, but gamecube level graphics are enough for me, give me windwaker, mario sunshine, RE4, metroid prime any day of the week

“I’ve said it many times, but gamecube level graphics are enough for me, give me windwaker, mario sunshine, RE4, metroid prime any day of the week.”

That’s just how I feel. I thought Mario Sunshine looked fantastic. I don’t need better looking games than that. If I get ‘em, fine, but I don’t need them.

Whatever, it is clear that the Wii is the least powerful console of all the main 3… and we all know that the least powerful consoles always end up at the bottom, just like in the last generation. Oh wait…

Except the PS2 had a year long headstart that put them pretty damn far ahead, name brand recognition due to the success of the original PlayStation, etc. There’s a lot more to it than it being the “weakest”. You can hardly cite that as a major precedent going forward.

I don’t think this really matters in the long run. The Wii is the least powerful of what’s out there. It’s extremely clear to every one in the business. While I’m sure a lot of it was just about cheapness (as in, more $$$$ for Nintendo) and smallness and quietness are just side effects of that (I mean, all tech shrinks and gets more quiet, it’d make no sense for the thing to be much larger), it doesn’t really matter. It does what it does.

As long as the graphics are good enough for me to distinguish between evil Russians and our boys, it’s fine.

Pfffff! I want a RJ45, I don’t want to buy a WLAN-thingy extra.

I could be wrong, but I think the reason a lot of Wii launch games looked like crap was because all the extra cycles from the bump in CPU speed, and some of the extra RAM, are getting sucked up by the need to transform the camera data from the Wiimote (in pointing games) and/or motion tracking data (in everything else) into usable game controls.

Motion detection is CPU-intensive no matter how you do it. I think the quality of the various Eyetoy games demonstrates that pretty well. So the Wii may well end up being a 480p Gamecube with groundbreaking controls. Personally, I’m fine with that.

As long as I have fun playing with my Wii, I don’t care how many people say it’s small and underpowered…

Did I just type that?!

So the XB had a few hardware shaders…that automatically makes it better than Cube? I guess I don’t follow that logic. If you remember correctly, the Cube was a texture powerhouse, capable of rendering 8 texture layers in one pass. The Xbox could only do 4, and only 3 of them were “programmable”, because one was the dedicated SHINY pipe. While the Xbox had a higher fill rate by a few million polys, the Cube could out-texture the Box hands down. Keep in mind that 6 years ago, shaders were a -relatively- new thing in the console playing field, and most effects were created by texture layering. So was the XBox more powerful than the Cube? In some respects, yes. In others, no. Is the XBox more powerful than the Wii? Well, that extra .5 is on the Wii for a reason…

Raindog: The Wii doesn’t exactly “transform” any “camera data” from any Wiimotes. I wouldn’t call an IR sensor a camera, myself. All the Wii has to do to track the movement of the Wiimote is watch the movement of a couple of infrared dots, and/or the data from three accelerometers. It’s really not that complicated. How you’re comparing that to real-time motion video analysis, I really don’t understand. I’m not saying that one is a more impressive technological feat that the other; what I’m saying is that they’re completely different technologies and methods, and thusly, not really comparable at all.

Anyways, it’s facinating how far people seem to take the efforts to compare the capabilities of these three (fairly outdated) systems. It’s not that important.

I’m a Wii fan and supporter (Wii60, actually), but I tell ya, I am very, very nervous about the future. While I don’t doubt that the system has momentum and pop-culture status right now, and I don’t have any real reason to believe that it won’t be a continued success throughout the usual 5-year lifespan (unlike some, I don’t expect the seventh generation to last longer than the average 5-year cycle [lol sony, future-proof console, my ass, they’ll be making a PS4 in 2011 and they know it]), I can’t shake the nagging worry that at some point over the course of the Wii’s life, there might be a backlash in regards to it’s underpowered-ness. I know, I know, graphics whores suck, blah blah blah, but I think that whether or not people will still be satisfied with the Wii’s visuals in, say, 3 years, is a seriously worthwhile question.

Um, the “IR sensor” is a CCD. It’s an infrared camera. Don’t believe me? Go into the sensitivity screen on a sunny day, crank it up and aim the Wiimote at a window. Sure, they may use the sensor bar to make it easier to track the dots, but it’s still way more complicated than, say, an optical mouse which does all the processing internally and sends movement data to the PC.

Also, if Nintendo really does build a strong former-non-gamer consumer base, they are gonna be willing to buy another $250 console in 3 or 4 years. It will have features the PS3 and 360 have now, but because those systems aren’t really accessible to non-gamers, they’ll think Nintendo is on the bleeding edge.

Seriously. “Thanks for that Call of Duty game. Those graphics are unbelievable!” Direct quote from my brother. Only hardcore gamers know CoD3 on the Wii is graphically crap, and hardcore gamers are all buying 360’s.

Raindog: Um, no, you’re wrong, actually. The Wiimote uses a CMOS IR sensor, not a CCD. A company called PixArt manufacturers it (link: http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/newsArt.cfm?artid=11557). Get your facts straight, please.

Again, all that it does is compare the positions of two clusters of IR lights on a 2D plane (this 2D plane being the IR images it snaps multiple times a second), then it compares that data to the user-calibrated boundaries of the screen, and then it goes from there. If it sees the lights moving to the right of it’s “vision,” than it calculates that the remote is being pointed to the left. If it sees that the light on the left is higher than the light on the right, then it calculates that the remote must be twisted counterclockwise. If it sees the two lights moving away from each other, than it figures out that the remote must be being moved towards the screen. Fairly simple stuff.

I actually haven’t seen any genuine technical documents clearly stating whether the Wiimote sends raw sensor data to the Wii, which would then have to be processed into movement info by the Wii CPU, or if the sensor data is processed into movement information on-board by the Wiimote itself, and then sent to the Wii as already-prepared movement data. Either scenario is possible, technologically. However, there is considerable circumstantial evidence in the PixArt press release suggesting that the Wiimote DOES actually pre-process the raw sensor data completely on-board, and then sends ready-to-use movement data to the Wii.

Specifically, PixArt’s position as a major manufacturer of CMOS IR sensor SoaCs (system-on-a-chip; in other words, a processing unit), and the press release’s discussion of PixArt’s “motion tracking engine” (again, language suggesting that the IR sensor can process it’s raw data into another format) are the two pieces of evidence that suggest this as a major possibility for how the motion tracking is performed.

Moving on. While the former-non-gamer base that the Wii is attracting is extremely impressive, I think it’s foolish to ignore that a huge and very important part of it’s market is the same “hardcore” players who play 360 and PC games, for instance. Furthermore, I think it’s foolish to think that there isn’t a large segment of “casual” players who are largely in it for the whiz-bang factor. Just look how many people bought a PS2 near launch for the sole purpose of playing Madden 2000, which looked amazing at the time.

Again, I don’t think it’s a problem now, and I don’t necessarily think that it will be a big problem, but I can’t help but harbor a worry that, say, two years down the line, when these consoles are all in their primes, that the gap between the visuals of the Wii and it’s two competitors might start to get to some people. But again, the Wii is very unlike any system before it, so trying to predict anything about it’s future is pure extrapolation.