Farid, formerly Vysez, said something about such a thread here. Having followed the thread since the beginning, I thought I'd summarize:
There have been a couple interviews, both translated, one from Nintendo and one with Ubisoft (not the spurious one I posted a while ago, sorry about that) that indicated that the WiiGPU does not have modern shaders. We are likely dealing, then, with either a fixed-function T&L or something programmable, but not as powerful as a vertex shader.
As for games, every Wii game that was introduced in some clip or another with advanced-looking self-shadowing completely lacked it in the final build, and we are seeing way more bullshots than we ever saw for Gamecube (a bullshot meaning a devshot that isn't even running on the game engine with game assets, not just something in high-res with 16x FSAA). The devs of Heatseeker claim that the final build will have self-shadowing; likely it will be Factor5's implementation--or the devs could be BSing us. We have yet to see more than a few effects in Wii games that we haven't seen in Gamecube games, and what few we have seen have mostly been in Red Steel. But what we have seen are substantially more fillrate-burning effects like motion blur, depth of field, light bloom, and various transparency effects that make use of indirect texturing, more than we'd expect from a 50% overclock. We're seeing pretty consistent 480p and widescreen, and framerates are mostly OK. Unfortunately, we're not seeing FSAA or AF. We're not seeing fully-normal-mapped (or even detail mapped) scenes, and we likely won't. IGN has been rather useless, as Matt C seems to be completely unaware of what Gamecube was capable of in the first place. Julian Eggebrecht has expressed disappointment and just how poorly developers seem to understand the hardware.
Fanbois continue to crawl out of the woodwork with dreams about GPUs in USB dongles, extra RAM in flash cards, secret untapped potential to be unlocked in a future firmware update, advanced vertex shader effects being magically done with a texture unit, and so on. They are summarily ignored.
The big mystery in all this is what the extra transistors in Hollywood are for. Flipper was 106 mm^2 on a 180 nm process. Hollywood is 72 mm^2 on a 90 nm process, making it too big for just a process shrink. So what's in there? Extra pipelines and texture units? A more complex T&L engine? Registers for 32-bit color? We don't know. Upcoming titles to look at are Heat Seeker and Metroid Prime 3. Also, at 19 mm^2, Broadway has a little more die space than the 16 mm^2 PPC 750CL.
Edit: This prose summary has been followed by charts, facts 'n' figures, pictures, links, quotes, and other stuff by StefanS below. Think of this as an abstract.
There have been a couple interviews, both translated, one from Nintendo and one with Ubisoft (not the spurious one I posted a while ago, sorry about that) that indicated that the WiiGPU does not have modern shaders. We are likely dealing, then, with either a fixed-function T&L or something programmable, but not as powerful as a vertex shader.
As for games, every Wii game that was introduced in some clip or another with advanced-looking self-shadowing completely lacked it in the final build, and we are seeing way more bullshots than we ever saw for Gamecube (a bullshot meaning a devshot that isn't even running on the game engine with game assets, not just something in high-res with 16x FSAA). The devs of Heatseeker claim that the final build will have self-shadowing; likely it will be Factor5's implementation--or the devs could be BSing us. We have yet to see more than a few effects in Wii games that we haven't seen in Gamecube games, and what few we have seen have mostly been in Red Steel. But what we have seen are substantially more fillrate-burning effects like motion blur, depth of field, light bloom, and various transparency effects that make use of indirect texturing, more than we'd expect from a 50% overclock. We're seeing pretty consistent 480p and widescreen, and framerates are mostly OK. Unfortunately, we're not seeing FSAA or AF. We're not seeing fully-normal-mapped (or even detail mapped) scenes, and we likely won't. IGN has been rather useless, as Matt C seems to be completely unaware of what Gamecube was capable of in the first place. Julian Eggebrecht has expressed disappointment and just how poorly developers seem to understand the hardware.
Fanbois continue to crawl out of the woodwork with dreams about GPUs in USB dongles, extra RAM in flash cards, secret untapped potential to be unlocked in a future firmware update, advanced vertex shader effects being magically done with a texture unit, and so on. They are summarily ignored.
The big mystery in all this is what the extra transistors in Hollywood are for. Flipper was 106 mm^2 on a 180 nm process. Hollywood is 72 mm^2 on a 90 nm process, making it too big for just a process shrink. So what's in there? Extra pipelines and texture units? A more complex T&L engine? Registers for 32-bit color? We don't know. Upcoming titles to look at are Heat Seeker and Metroid Prime 3. Also, at 19 mm^2, Broadway has a little more die space than the 16 mm^2 PPC 750CL.
Edit: This prose summary has been followed by charts, facts 'n' figures, pictures, links, quotes, and other stuff by StefanS below. Think of this as an abstract.
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