A Summary of the Huge Wii Thread

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fearsomepirate said:
Do the math: 650 MP/sec / 162 MHz * 243 MHz = 975 MP/sec, only half of XGPU's fillrate. And that's without the hardware MSAA that XGPU has (XGPU does 3.7 GSamples/sec). You'd need to double the pipelines to achieve XGPU's fillrate.

We will see more real-world geometry, primarily because the T&L unit won't be used to run special vertex shader effects. We just...won't have those effects.
Click to expand...

XGPU ran at 233Mhz and had 4 pixel pipes, giving it a fillrate of 932mpixels/s. Its texel fillrate would be close to double that of Flipper at 243Mhz because it had two TU's per pixel pipe. But remember that we were talking about a doubled up Flipper at 243Mhz. Which would have more then twice the pixel fillrate of XGPU (1950mpixels/s vs 932mpixels/s for XGPU) and a higher texel fillrate (1950mtexels/s vs 1864mtexels/s for XGPU).
 
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DeadlyNinja said:
Heard the game was nothing but a merely GC port with tacked on Wii controls. The graphics won't be updated at all. Whatever banding that's there in the GC version will most likely be in the Wii version.
Click to expand...

If Wii did support new Framebuffer formats using them would require a minimal amount of work. Of the order of change a constant and recompile .......

Even quick GC ports would likely use them.
 
ERP

Assuming what as been said about Wii, ie, 2,5xGC can you say what do you think that are the chances of self-shadowing as standard in Wii games. Or what about other fx that are likely to become standard in such console (ie it seems that every game is using bloom and a nice number of others are using bump mapping (emboss))?

Thanks in advance.
 
I hope you guys don't mind if I go slightly off topic, but a thought hit me about why they're so secretive about the Wii specs. I think Nintendo's trying to prevent emulation of the system (or perhaps a bonus they gain by keeping it a secret). I mean, look how easy it is to hack the Wiimote and make it work on the computer. Assuming people can't figure out the Wii specs just by taking the system apart, how are they suppose to emulate what they don't understand? If people can figure out the Wii specs simply by taking it apart, I think we wouldn't be going in cirlces 3 months after it's release.
 
As far as I know its not really all that important to know actually how fast hardware is to build a emulator for it. What you want to know is how to translate the wii software to something x86 can understand. But you dont need hardware specs for that in terms of clockspeed.

Besides that isnt the reason why nintendo wouldnt tell hardware specs. The amount of people using emulators is really really small anyway and I highly doubt pc hardware is fast enough to emulate the Wii at a good speed. As far as I know there arnt any decent ps2/xbox/gc emulators so I doubt you'll see a good working wii emu anytime soon. It'll takes years to build a good emu and nobody will care about at wii emu by then if you can buy a wii for 100bucks and have it play anything will your emu will probably always be having some problems.
 
Well, I just happen to know a little (ok... VERY LITTLE) about GC emus and according to the GC emu community, there's a beta out there (still being tested) that could make it THE GC emu to beat. I'm not too sure on the details though. What I told you is what I know.
 
Yes and how long did it took them to build? GC is out for 5 years already. And ''The emu to beat'' is still something different than ''perfectly working gc emu''. Not that I know much about it so I might as well be wrong but still keeping things like clockspeeds secret just so people would take longer to build a emu sounds pretty much like the most unlikely reason to not disclose specs. I think nintendo just doesnt release specs because it doesnt matter. What good will it do to them? we know its going to look pathetic compared to ps3/x360 so its only going to give the potential bad rep on the web because you got all the 13 year olds screaming Wii sux0rz.
 
Wii Textures

I have been following this thread, and the WIIGEEPEEYOU one since the beguining.

Much has been said, and few has been proven, but something remains as a fact, and although this is a reality, i´m not seeing anything out of the ordinary. Let me explain:

The PS2 had 32 mb of ram. This was all it´s main memory, and had to be shared for IA, Code, and textures.

Xbox showed much better textures. This was due to it´s memory beeing 64 mb. Not discussing gfx effects, and only texture quality, this was because the space left available after all the code and IA was much larger.

Now the wii has 24 mb+64 mb = 88 Mb ram, and yet i´m seeing no real improvements in textures. GODZILLA for instance seems impressive, but textures are real weak.

Some could say that memory is not all, and I would agree. RE4 in the gamecube, although it only had 24 MB ram is the most impressive version of them all (Including the PC version).

But this only serves to show a point in favour of the Gamecube and Wii. The gamecube hardware proved that it was possible to do better than the PS2 even with less memory. So, Wii games if properly programmed could be amazing, since there is 2.6x more memory.

Why then are we not seeing this?
 
Metal_Spirit said:
I have been following this thread, and the WIIGEEPEEYOU one since the beguining.

Much has been said, and few has been proven, but something remains as a fact, and although this is a reality, i´m not seeing anything out of the ordinary. Let me explain:

The PS2 had 32 mb of ram. This was all it´s main memory, and had to be shared for IA, Code, and textures.

Xbox showed much better textures. This was due to it´s memory beeing 64 mb. Not discussing gfx effects, and only texture quality, this was because the space left available after all the code and IA was much larger.

Now the wii has 24 mb+64 mb = 88 Mb ram, and yet i´m seeing no real improvements in textures. GODZILLA for instance seems impressive, but textures are real weak.

Some could say that memory is not all, and I would agree. RE4 in the gamecube, although it only had 24 MB ram is the most impressive version of them all (Including the PC version).

But this only serves to show a point in favour of the Gamecube and Wii. The gamecube hardware proved that it was possible to do better than the PS2 even with less memory. So, Wii games if properly programmed could be amazing, since there is 2.6x more memory.

Why then are we not seeing this?
Click to expand...
You're forgetting the Gamecube's ARAM, which is 16MB extra. So actually the Gamecube has more memory than a PS2. The ARAM pool is not as fast and not as straight-forward to use, but it's there.

I agree with the overall sentiment though. On the Gamecube there has always been a large discrepancy between quick multiplatform ports and exclusives, or the few ports where a real effort has been made. E.g. Tomb Raider: Legend is a port, but it still looks amazing.

There's a good chance that the unique positioning and strong sales of the Wii could bring it a much larger number of exclusives that come close to what the machine can do.
 
GODZILLA for instance seems impressive, but textures are real weak.
Click to expand...

That's because the screen shots are stretched beyond it's normal resolution. I don't know why people like to do that with Wii screens nowadays. I see nothing wrong with presenting them as they're suppose to look. The stretching just makes the textures look blurrier and worst. Think N64!
 
zeckensack said:
You're forgetting the Gamecube's ARAM, which is 16MB extra. So actually the Gamecube has more memory than a PS2. The ARAM pool is not as fast and not as straight-forward to use, but it's there.
Click to expand...

A-RAM should be forgotten when talking about system/graphics memory since it wasn't fast enough to be used for anything like that. What it was used for was sound (2-4MB) and as a cache to speed up load times. So it really doesn't compare to PS2's 32MB of memory in any way (appart from the small amount of PS2's system memory used for sound of course).
 
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I´m appreciating your thoughts on the matter. But I would go for unoptimized engines and specially lack of study on the textures.

Although stretched textures are giving us an incorrect perspective of things, we must consider that our HDTV 32" or superior TV´s will also stretch the image a lot.
On a 4:1 compression (and I believe more can be achieved, like 6:1), we can get 352 Mb of textures in the Console memory. Even is not all memory is used, and we only use 25 MB, with that compression it would make 100 MB of textures, it´s a lot of space for 480p textures. In total a lot more than Xbox ever had. A optimized 640*480 jpeg image with no compression uses less than 200 kB. With compression of 4:1 we could place 500 of those in 25MB of the Wii memory. Why crappy textures then?

About the ARAM, I forgot mention it,and considerer it. That would make 40 Mb RAM, part of wich would be running at 486 standards (81 Mhz). Although better than the 32 MB from the PS2 we must considerer that only part (the 24 mb) had full potential.

But the wii has replaced the 16 mb for a brand new 64. And speed went from a lacuster 81 Mhz to a full fledge 650 Mhz DDR3 like the one used in XBOX 360. We are talking about a huge increase in ram, and specially in RAM Speed. If my calculations are correct, something in the order of aproximate 24 times faster.

After these extra considerations, I cannot feel diferent from what I already expressed early. The Wii is not been exploited as it should.
 
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