Any insight into Wii High Definition capabilities?

[Squeak]

But what do you really need an alpha channel for, with the TEV and all?

 

[darkblu]

well, for what it's worth, if wii's wide-sceen support goes as far as 720x480, that amounts to 720x480 = 1.98MB (@ 6 bytes/pixel); if it's 854x480 (IIRC the WVGA standard), that's 2.35MB; now, IIRC, flipper used to have something like ~2.1MB in the embedded framebuffer pool, so if hollywood does not have some more of it, 'full' WVGA would be a tad too much for it.

 

[Rodéric]

well, for what it's worth, if wii's wide-sceen support goes as far as 720x480, that amounts to 720x480 = 1.98MB (@ 6 bytes/pixel); if it's 854x480 (IIRC the WVGA standard), that's 2.35MB; now, IIRC, flipper used to have something like ~2.1MB in the embedded framebuffer pool, so if hollywood does not have some more of it, 'full' WVGA would be a tad too much for it.

They may have upgraded the memory a bit, it's not too much to add, and definetly worth it.
854*480*RGB8 = 1.17MB
854*480*RGBA8 = 1.56MB...

*skip that*
At 6 bytes per pixel you suggest RGB16 or RGB FP16 ?
Not read anything hinting about that...
*/skip that*

[EDIT]
Yeah RGB8 + DEPTH24 = 6 bytes, as does RGBA8 + DEPTH16; which could be RGBE8 + DEPTH 16 for HDR...

 

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

No love for depth buffers?

 

[Rodéric]

No love for depth buffers?

no they suck memory and fillrate, I hate them !
(What ?!? It's the morning and I'm sick since 2 weeks already, and rather pissed off by some stuff at work.)

Would be better off with specs, anyway, doesn't change the point, they may have upgraded embedded memory to fit the new resolution, and so it won't be an issue.

(Or are people around here still thinking it's only a NGC overclocked ?)

 

[darkblu]

BTW, speaking of widescreen aspect ratios, a word of warning to those intending to use the wii with a widescreen TV sets:

make sure the set has a 3:2 aspect ratio mode. the 720x480 widescreen DVD content does not use square pixel aspect ratio, and is intended to be stretched to 16:9, hence it looks correct when viewed at 852x480. not the case with widescreen console output though (all widescreen console output i've seen so far, includingly ps2) - there the pixel aspect ratio is square, and when you stretch that to 852x480 you get a ~1.18 horisontal distortion. which may or may not be a big deal for you, depending on your sensitivity to those things.

ed: seems i was not quite right - there are after all some widewscreen titles that take into account the requirement for non-square pixel aspect ratio (PAR) - GT4 is such one. it remains to be seen if wii devs will be prudent enough in their widescreen support.