Native Wii Resolution?

[michaeljamesjohnson]

What is the native Wii resolution?

I have read 16:9 480p, but does this translate to 852x480, 853x480, 854x480 or something else?

Also, does anyone know of a display with the same native resolution that also supports component in?

Any rumors of a HDMI Wii?

Just seeing if 1:1 is possible with the Wii and a display.

 

[vazel]

Anamorphic widescreen 854x480 which you have to stretch out with your television to get the correct aspect ratio. Some games don't use up all that Metroid 3 is supposedly ~825x470 according to IGN. If you want 1:1 get a widescreen CRT.

 

[Bohdy]

Most games are probably anamorphic 16:9 640x480 or similar. I happen to know that Metroid Prime 3 renders at 640x448, by way of the methods that Quaz51 made popular.

 

[Fafalada]

Most games are probably anamorphic 16:9 640x480 or similar

I can't say if the CRT controller even goes over 640, but from pure resource usage, anything but the simplest games would be crazy to go higher anyway.
GC VRam is extremely scarce as it is, no need to make things worse. If you got VRam to spare IQ would be better served by upping the color depth anyway.

 

[Quaz51]

games like mario, metroid... are 640x448 or 640x456 in 16/9 mode, i have seen any wii game with more than that

 

[destroyer_of_knights]

Can the wii even to anything higher than 480p, you know like 720p?

 

[Bohdy]

Even if the video controller supported that resolution there is not enough embedded framebuffer space to do it..

 

[destroyer_of_knights]

Even if the video controller supported that resolution there is not enough embedded framebuffer space to do it..

couldn't they do tiling?

 

[Bohdy]

Hollywood has no hardware tiling support.. but I suppose they could do multipass rendering, at the cost of rendering parts of the scene several times of course.

 

[destroyer_of_knights]

Hollywood has no hardware tiling support.. but I suppose they could do multipass rendering, at the cost of rendering parts of the scene several times of course.

so take a game like SMG which runs at 60 fps at 480i/p, if it was dropped to 30fps could it then render SMG at 720p with nothing else changed apart from the frames per second and resolution?

 

[AlNom]

The rate at which the GPU spits out frames has no bearing on the frame buffer size. However, the framebuffer size may indirectly affect the framerate.

 

[destroyer_of_knights]

The rate at which the GPU spits out frames has no bearing on the frame buffer size. However, the framebuffer size may indirectly affect the framerate.

so what I get from you is that the wii could do 720p but it would affect the frame rate. So theoretically speaking if a Wii where to output at 720p would that translate into 1,5, 10, 20 fps because of the performance hit on the GPU?

and if you where to make an educated guess, what would the frame rate be if the wii rendered in 720p?

 

[AlNom]

Changing the framerate from 60 to 30 or to X will not have any direct effect on the framebuffer size. There's no extra storage associated with higher frame rate (unless you consider triple buffering, but that's not what you're talking about)

The framebuffer size is a product of the resolution and pixel depth. The number of pixels will affect the framerate when GPU limited (be it memory bandwidth, fill rate, shader etc).

But yes, software tiling would incur a performance hit.

 

[Bohdy]

Very pie-in-the-sky guestimates, but rendering 4x 640x360 quadrants of the screen.. 80% the pixels each.. lets say 1/3 the scene geometry... so perhaps 720p at 30fps for Mario Galaxy may be possible. That's if the video DAC can support 720p...

Perhaps someone can help me out with a more realistic estimate, though

 

[Quaz51]

Even if the video controller supported that resolution there is not enough embedded framebuffer space to do it..

it's 2MB embedded framebuffer like NGC?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yep.

 

[vazel]

Well I should've known better than to open my yap on this forum on anything technical. But everywhere else I read said it was so! Now I'm not knowing better here in opening my yapper once again on matters technical but Wiki and this site claims the embedded framebuffer is 3MB?

 

[StefanS]

Well I should've known better than to open my yap on this forum on anything technical. But everywhere else I read said it was so! Now I'm not knowing better here in opening my yapper once again on matters technical but Wiki and this site claims the embedded framebuffer is 3MB?

embedded memory!= embedded framebuffer

The embedded framebuffer is 2MB. There's also a texture cache (1MB) and a vertex cache (0.1 MB). So technically all in all there's 3.1MB of embedded memory.

 

[AlNom]

Do they keep the front buffer in the eDRAM as well?

 

[Bohdy]

Front buffer is in the main ram in YUY2 format, and Flipper/Hollywood has hardware support for swapping buffers.