Ok, full interview from anonymous third party about Wii GPU.

We should at least see X-Box level graphics soon. It should go a bit beyond that (depending on how popular the Wii gets).

 

How are they measured/qualified? I didn't see much of last gen beyond PS2, but from what I have seen there isn't much notable difference. Drop a screenshot from an unknown game in front of me and I couldn't say which platform it was from. How do you define XB level and GC level? What will be the difference between what's coming out now on average and what your expected XB level graphics will look like?

 

I think he's talking more about the top end X-box gfx.

 

Indeed.

Wii should definately be able to surpass PS2. I mean, the Gamecube alone was capable of that.

 

BTW if you dont mind can you say if nice shadows (eg XB splinter cell 3/D3/CoR like) are easly accomplished on the GC (and Wii by extention) if they tried to do such a game that are shadow intensive, I ask this because they never did a game here they pushed this althought some games like Starfox/RS/RL they did a bit and they looked good at high fremerates?

Not really, he basically said that he expected to see what we are used to see on exclusive GC games and, I guess, that at least more/better of the same in exclussive Wii games.

I have my doubts that you will see that, I mean as a straight forward as as I think you expect, I mean if you expect that you can pick any XB game (eg D3, CoR...) and say that it could be done on the Wii with everything it does have and look a bit better then I really forgot.

What games will certanly look is diferent (and depending on the personal taste of the person, they will look better or not) and that is because the two machines cant probably be looked as one being more powerfull than the other across the board because the Wii it is better in thing like filrate and polys/s but it lacks shaders and without hat will lack some (set of) fx that make a destinctive look that many times the XB games have. A example from what I mean is on the first RS trailer, it certanly lacks many XB fx (eg normal mapping) yet it looked above anything we ever saw in last gen. If Wii could do that I would expect that most people would think that Wii>>>XB but if it cant (like it seems the case for now) I think it will be down to personal taste (after all many think that RE4/RL/RS>>>>>> than anything on the XB).

 

Actually, I think Wii can do shaders. I remember some developers (or someone) saying it can, but they have a different method of doing it.

I should really start bookmarking this stuff. It always comes up again later down the line.

 

Sorry I mean the lack of both programable vertex and pixel shaders in the HW, overall GC and probably Wii cant do everything that XB can in terms of shaders (althought it can do others things better) and those are a integral part of the look of many XB exclussive games.

 

I kinda wonder if Wii has any hope of doing an engine like that in Doom3 or Riddick. Tons of normal mapping and interactive shadowing & lighting. I don't think it can and I think that is telling as to what Wii really can do. By comparison, RE4 is rather simple and static. Capcom produced some amazingly smart artwork for the game though and that's why it looks as good as it does.

On Cube, Rogue Leader, to me, looked like a highly-tuned DirectX 7 level game. Lots of polys and fairly simple lighting/shadowing spewing out of a fairly strict T&L engine. It looked really quite good though and it ran fast. Rebel Strike pushed probably the most impressive effects that can be expected from that architecture, but we saw some obvious framerate problems at times as a result.

I think Wii will impress for certain types of rendering and with a lot of very smart artwork. But it definitely is very limited in some scenarios.

 

I think Wii could have same good gfx if you want to go the bone of the machine. Look at some ps2 games, did somebody 7 years ago ever thought you could push that out of the machine? GC and xbox probably never got pushed even close to what ps2 was pushed like but still they had some of the best looking games last gen. Wii should easily be capable of some of the better looking GC and xbox games given its +/- 2 times as fast a GC, but if no dev takes the effort to build a decent engine we wont see that and we'll end up like now disussing if Wii is any faster than GC or maybe even slower...

 

Actually, from what I understand, they almost had Doom 3 working on the Gamecube. The problem was that it lacked the memory needed to play well.

So yeah, Doom III level graphics are probably very possible.

 

Any hardware can - the question is always a matter of speed. Without any shaders, PS2 still managed some good shading effects with it's approach of masses of render-passes. Wii's TEVs can also manage shader effects one way or another, and if push comes to shove, the CPU can calculate any shading effect in existence...so long as you don't care how long it takes! If necessary you could render a couple of framebuffers and combine them with the CPU. I guess PS2 did this with the opalescent paints of some of the cars in GT, which change colour with viewing angle, whereas a GPU would do this in shaders.

 

They almost had a fully featured D3 engine on the GC, being those the same features of the XB engine?

Here did you saw that? Because, like Shifty Geezer, anyone can do it but it needs to at least have the raw power to do it and I doubt GC could do it. Meybe GC could do some fx that are more or less like those but they are and look diferent (eg perpixel lighting from RS and from D3), and the implementation is completely diferent too.

 

I remember reading it as well, I think the issue was memory. I won't say it can or it can't output something like Doom3 or Riddick until a dev that has tried it say so. I also remember reading that Gearbox was trying to port UE3 to Wii in some form or fashion. The console can do normal mapping and I believe its possible on Hollywood, not just Broadway.

TEV the mysterious part of Flipper/Hollywood, seven years have passed and we're still perplexed.

 

I think some of you folks like the "untapped potential" mystery. Every console in history has had "untapped potential", if you read console threads. And that's rather ironic considering the console's universal advantage of being a known entity because it's closed platform. And all the hoopla over how easy it was to push Cube to its limits because of its low latency RAM banks.

But yeah I do think that it is very possible that the RAM size of Cube made it impossible to squeeze Doom3 into it. Not without making a totally different game with Doom3's name just slapped on, anyway. I don't think the hardware could do an engine that utilizes full scene per pixel lighting, extensive stencil shadowing, and normal mapping though.....

I am not really of the opinion that devs didn't push that machine to the limit. After years of hard work by Factor 5, Capcom, and Amusement Vision, among others. Unless you are willing to sacrifice frame rate, of course. Maybe we needed the equivalent of Perfect Dark? A game that looked amazing but ran nearly unplayable?

 

Understand, that we understand that Wii may not be able to output every effect in the same capacity. There will be trade offs, I think it would better to understand the hardware and citing TEV as untapped is not far-fetched(universally). But, I can't convince you to believe otherwise. Only games can do that.

 

If Hollywood is a doubled up Flipper (like people seem to say it is), I'm sure it will do some better things. The TEV may get more intensive use simply due to the higher clock speed.

I guess the question is whether an 8-pipe Flipper variant (supposedly what Hollywood is) means double the TEV capacity. In other GPUs, if you add a quad or whatever, you also gain shader speed because shader processing is part of the quad.

But yes, it doesn't really matter how amazing the TEV is if the devs won't go down to the metal with it and really push it.

 

As I've said before nobody said it was easy to push GC to its limits. What they said was that because of GC's very low latency memory it was very easy to get code up and running acceptably on the system. Because the memory was very forgiving of unoptimised code. That's very different from being easy to push to its limits.

 

Ok, yeah I remember it being said that way now that you remind me.

Let me ask this: Do devs prefer a hardware with quirks that gets them really involved and thinking about how to work around them and find things their dev peers missed? Or do they want something more straightforward for the most part, like Cube?

 

I never saw self-shadowing or even RL's water effects (not nearly as good as the sequel, but still had some nice glint from the sun) in DX7 games. Maybe I played the wrong games. What really seemed to hurt the framerate in Rebel Strike were the transparency effects from things like proton torpedoes and clouds.

Cube didn't have vertex shaders. It also didn't have a vector unit on the CPU, not even something like Altivec. Doom 3 and Riddick depended very heavily on programmable vertex shaders.

 

That depends on the dev. What we call top level developers are likely to prefer to poke around with the hardware. Well, we can't say they all prefer that. 'Developers' includes coders, artists, producers, etc. Among them, you'll have the super-geeks who develop engines who may well like to learn quirks and max the hardware. The rest likely want as easy a platform as possible to develop for so they can actually get home in an evening! Then you'll have the non-A class developers who just want to get a product out and sell it and earn a living and appease the publisher. For them, easy is everything.

In the case of Wii, if it has an easy development track, I expect that to be a limiting factor in it's games. The majority of development will be about making money without real love for the machine. If it does have lots of tricks and quirks that the super-geeks could do amazing things with, I do question if they'd be involved in Wii or be playing with the other machines. If the hardware hasn't fundamentally changed from GC's, I can't see there being much appeal for those who like to get down into the real meat and heart of the hardware. Would you choose TEV over Xenos or Cell?

The only incentive I can see for maxing the hardware is developer competition. You want your product to look better than your rivals, and so will want to develop better tech. That didn't hugely drive last-gen though. Alongside PS2's AAA titles, there was plenty of mediocrity. Only a tiny percentage really pushed hard, and had the talent to do so. In Wii's case I wouldn't be surprised if even less were interested in pushing it, because of the options of the XB360 and PS3. First party will, and any super-geeks told by management that they're working on Wii will make the most of it.