A Summary of the Huge Wii Thread

[Shifty Geezer]

Not 7-8 years old for a start...

'New' can mean 'newly introduced' rather than 'new technology'. Take two old GPUs, squeeze them onto the same die, and hey presto, you have a new GPU that's old technology. It can also mean Hollywood is new for their engine - their engine wasn't created for Flipper (was it?). IMO the statement 'new graphics card' is still compatible with the notion of a doubled up Flipper. Such a GPU will require targetted engines to make the most of it (in a way Flipper seemingly wasn't targetted on the whole).

 

[Turok]

Carmack already stated a while ago that the Gamecube could handle Doom³. Hollenshead said it couldn't, but I think I'll believe Carmack over Hollenshead.

Yeah... I highly doubt he said that. Now the Doom 3 engine, that's another story, but Doom 3? Maybe if you take out the normal mapping, per pixel lighting, and stencil shadows it could run it.

 

[bomlat]

For me ,there is two possibility:
1.,The wii has the flipper.Nothing is changed, the nintendo miss a good oportunity.
2.They improved the chip,more effect,bigger speed ,stencil buffer,who now?

Second thing:timing

For the nintendo,the graphics side of the machine was not a first priority :the machine sell itself with the GC graphics capability right now.But in the future,the situation can change.
But , you want to keep the cost on a low level.How you can do this?
You have a comon resource pool(sdk developers and programmers+testers),and you have three area:
1, controller
2, network
3,graphics

The pripority is the same as above.
The 2.1 dekit isn't conatin any network code,and not conatin any graphics (except the gamecube gfx ).
The second thing that have to finish the network part of the sdk.The last is the graphics,because that will be an issue in 2008.
The 2.1 devkit is a gc devkit from graphics standpoint.The game development take 1 year at least , with the testings.After the 6th month , the new gfy implementationis nearly impossible.
For me this, and the 2.1 (2006/08/21) devkit mean that the first game (if the gfx devkit was released at oct-nov) that will utilise the wii gfx will released not earlyer than the midle of this year.

The Nintendo is not released any big name for it, except the zelda,but it was in box one year ago for the GC.Why?For me the answer is simple:to be able to do same gfx fine tuning .

 

[The_legend_of_drtre]

Yeah... I highly doubt he said that. Now the Doom 3 engine, that's another story, but Doom 3? Maybe if you take out the normal mapping, per pixel lighting, and stencil shadows it could run it.

If Shiny was able to squeeze all that normal mapping out of the ps2 with path of neo, I'm guessing the Gc could handle alot normal mapping as well. Especially if Carmack said it could. The guy is a genius.

 

[Teasy]

the statement 'new graphics card' is still compatible with the notion of a doubled up Flipper. Such a GPU will require targetted engines to make the most of it (in a way Flipper seemingly wasn't targetted on the whole).

I don't really disagree with any of that to be honest.

 

[Fox5]

Carmack already stated a while ago that the Gamecube could handle Doom³. Hollenshead said it couldn't, but I think I'll believe Carmack over Hollenshead.

And "older technology with stuff added here and there" could mean pretty much anything. Source is basically "old id technology with stuff added here and there" as well...

Doom 3 ran on geforce 4 mx's as well. A stripped down doom 3 would have been an easy fit on the cube.

However, judging by the quality of the doom 3 port on the xbox, and how well rebel strike turned out, I think a reasonable port of doom 3 could have been done on the cube (though it may have required a complete reworking on the engine). IMO, doom 3 on xbox and rebel strike on the cube are about on the same level graphically (though you could choose to give the nod to one or the other), and neither compares to what a good PC could do with Doom 3.

 

[swaaye]

Xbox Doom3 is obviously the closest to an easy port as one can probably imagine. But, even then the Xbox had memory size issues. And guess what? Cube lacks a lot of the 3D functionality and a lot of memory.

I don't think the machine could do the same level of shadowing cuz it has so little fillrate in comparison to Xbox. And its geometry engine is so much less sophisticated. Never mind that like everything is normal mapped. And the per pixel lighting.....

I'd bet Doom3 would look awful on the machine. No matter how much they rewrote it. It's just using too many advanced techniques that chew up RAM and fillrate.

I don't know how many of you have seen Doom3 on a GF4MX.......ick. Basically I think the Cube could run it, but it wouldn't look much like the Doom3 we're used to.

I've played a good bit of the Doom3 expansion on Xbox. It actually isn't all that bad, IMO. I could probably see myself playing it through on the console. If the game was more entertaining, that is.

 

[Oblivion]

Okay, I have a question about memory in general. I'm assuming having more MB of memory means you can have more room for higher res. textures and such. But what does faster memory (speed) do exactly? Shorter load times?

 

[Corwin_B]

Okay, I have a question about memory in general. I'm assuming having more MB of memory means you can have more room for higher res. textures and such. But what does faster memory (speed) do exactly? Shorter load times?

You can have the fastest GPU (or CPU) in the world, if it's memory isn't fast enough, then you will stall its pipeline waiting for memory accesses (framebuffer R/W, texture reads...). For load times, the speed of the memory is generally not an issue, the bottleneck will in all likelihood be with your optical media (the decompression of compressed data stored on the disc). Memory speed could be a bottleneck if you stored compressed data on the drive, and the decompression was slowed down by memory access. I doubt it would happen in real world situations, though.

 

[The_legend_of_drtre]

Carmack already stated a while ago that the Gamecube could handle Doom³. Hollenshead said it couldn't, but I think I'll believe Carmack over Hollenshead.

Do you have a link to that ?

 

[Turok]

If Shiny was able to squeeze all that normal mapping out of the ps2 with path of neo, I'm guessing the Gc could handle alot normal mapping as well. Especially if Carmack said it could. The guy is a genius.

All that normal mapping? I played the game, and the only normal mapping in the game was some very low res brick textures, and they're far and few in between.

 

[swaaye]

All that normal mapping? I played the game, and the only normal mapping in the game was some very low res brick textures, and they're far and few in between.

Uhh, just about everything is normal mapped in Doom3. Every single model, for example. Otherwise they'd look very angular because they are fairly low poly. That's what normal mapping does - simulate high poly detail with texturing.

 

[Turok]

Uhh, just about everything is normal mapped in Doom3. Every single character, for example.

The Matrix: Path of Neo for PS2 is the game I was reffering to.

 

[swaaye]

The Matrix: Path of Neo for PS2 is the game I was reffering to.

Oh..oops. Sorry.

 

[rezuth]

id Software currently considers creating an engine for Wii (or, more precisely, the most powerful engine for Wii), based on older technology. From an interview with Steve Nix:

"A fairly new graphics card" doesn't really sound like an overclocked Flipper...

 

[bomlat]

Xbox Doom3 is obviously the closest to an easy port as one can probably imagine. But, even then the Xbox had memory size issues. And guess what? Cube lacks a lot of the 3D functionality and a lot of memory.

I don't think the machine could do the same level of shadowing cuz it has so little fillrate in comparison to Xbox. And its geometry engine is so much less sophisticated. Never mind that like everything is normal mapped. And the per pixel lighting.....

I'd bet Doom3 would look awful on the machine. No matter how much they rewrote it. It's just using too many advanced techniques that chew up RAM and fillrate.

I don't know how many of you have seen Doom3 on a GF4MX.......ick. Basically I think the Cube could run it, but it wouldn't look much like the Doom3 we're used to.

I've played a good bit of the Doom3 expansion on Xbox. It actually isn't all that bad, IMO. I could probably see myself playing it through on the console. If the game was more entertaining, that is.

Oh,possibly you want to say:"the xbox have more better filrate on papaer,but the GC real fillrate is bigger by one magnitude"

The only one problem with the cube is the lack of the stencil buffer,but this property the key to the extremly high frame rate.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

[Librarian]
These Wii threads meander worse than the Mississippi. Most of what's posted, such as the question about RAM speeds, are independent threads in their own right. If the thread isn't going to be kept clean and focussed on known information and hardware discussion, is there any point in keeping it open?
[/Librarian]

 

[MDX]

[Librarian]
These Wii threads meander worse than the Mississippi. Most of what's posted, such as the question about RAM speeds, are independent threads in their own right. If the thread isn't going to be kept clean and focussed on known information and hardware discussion, is there any point in keeping it open?
[/Librarian]

Thats why the original thread shouldnt have been locked. We could of used that to speculate, discuss, analyze new info and use this thread keep of a summary of the facts.

 

[Teasy]

[Librarian]
These Wii threads meander worse than the Mississippi. Most of what's posted, such as the question about RAM speeds, are independent threads in their own right. If the thread isn't going to be kept clean and focussed on known information and hardware discussion, is there any point in keeping it open?
[/Librarian]

Because otherwise you get all these questions posted in seperate threads which would clutter up the forum. To be honest I don't see a problem with keeping everything to do with Wii tech discussion here, even if it includes a lot about related subjects like GC. What's the down side?

The thread could certainly do without nonesense posts though rezuth..

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Because otherwise you get all these questions posted in seperate threads which would clutter up the forum. To be honest I don't see a problem with keeping everything to do with Wii tech discussion here, even if it includes a lot about related subjects like GC. What's the down side?

Questions like Oblivion's regards RAM is not Wii specific, nor even relevant to the discussion (what is Wii). Then you have talk that keeps reappearing about GC versus XB. The relevant discussion would be centered on new info regards the hardware from interviews etc., and talk about how to interpret that info, I think. Everything else, like how Wii compares to XB, could and should be left out.

I come to this thread looking for new info, and it's more and more general discussion with very little info on what Wii is. It looks set to continue as a generic Wii discussion thread like the original Wee Gee Pee Yu thread with whatever info that does appear getting buried in a lot of noise.

Whatever, I'll leave the mods to decide how to play it, including removing this discussion on what the thread should be!