I am both proud and ashamed at the same time. this thread has stayed on the front page consistantly, it has got to be the largest one I've ever done probably because of the way i titled it and yet, we know almost nothing about the Hollywood GPU. One can only make speculations based on what our eyes see on the screen in Wii games.... and many of them started as Gamecube projects or on Gamecube dev kits. I suppose we could call Hollywood a Dolphin~Gamecube GPU with some of performance that was taken out as Nintendo downgraded the Flipper, or as we percieved a downgrade to Flipper, for those of us that watched Dolphin's developement very closely, reading every article and message board on the subject in 1999, and I am not just talking about the clockspeed of Flipper going from 202.5 MHz to 162 Mhz, but the overall polygon pushing power reported, unoffically, for Dolphin, about 20 to 30 million textured, lit and fully featured polygons per second. Flipper was also expected to have 8 pixel pipelines with TMU since we knew at the time that Graphics Synthesizer had 16 with no TMU. not only that but Flipper was reported (not just expected) to have at least 8 MB of embedded 1T-SRAM and upto 16 MB.
Even when Gamecube was revealed with lower specifications in August 2000, it still had yet to go through the final downgrades to Flipper core clockspeed and all of the bandwidths of the entire architechure, as well as slightly higher latency. not only that, but Gamecube's controller was pretty ordinary, even if refined. there were absolutely zero sensory controls at all, something widely expected/reported for Dolphin -- even SEGA expressed worry that Nintendo would surpass them with sensory controls that would change gameplay completely. and now you see what I'm getting at, Wii is, in a somewhat unexpected form, what the old Dolphin was believed to be in essense. some might completely disagree with me, maybe because you didn't read Dolphin news, speculation day and night like some people did in 1999 and 2000.
Wii technology is pretty old then. it's really pretty much refined versions of late 1990s tech, even if though its specific parts were designed this decade. that's ok. i'm not knocking it. I'm excited about what Wii can achieve. not in graphics, (the subject of this thread), but for gaming, and to reverse Nintendo's ever-shrinking share of the global console market. if Nintendo can do that with non-cutting edge technology, they're alot smarter than we are, even if we want more graphics, more processing power, more everything. Wii is probably has the least technologically advanced chipset for a Nintendo console for its time the Famicom's PPU (picture processing unit) was pretty damn advanced for 1983. the SNES PPU was also advanced for 1990, as was the RCP in 1996 and even the Flipper in 2001. Hollywood, not so, but Nintendo has completely shifted directions, something that's been said many times since Revolution was announced in May 2004.
/sunday afternoon ramblings.
