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

I wonder what about the long term, I mean there are things that once we get used it is hard to go back, eg I think that the "start anywhere" feature of MoH:A will be blast and I do not want to lost that because the console cant handle the AI, polys/s...

I wonder if that will backfire on the future.

There is great simple games but that doesnt mean that we cant play and love great but that need more evolved (from a spec pov) HW for more/better features.

 

I think that besides Nintendo's R&D capabilities (as I said, due to the incompleteness of Connect24 at launch and how long they took to get full devkits out, it doesn't look like they had lots of engineers and facilities lying around with plenty of time to construct a new system and new development tools), you also have the huge risk factor of Wii. Wii's currently selling like gangbusters, so we just take it for granted that Nintendo could have designed and built a much more powerful machine and still sold it for profit or breaking even at $250. No way would they have adopted MS's strategy of losing billions of dollars in the hopes of some day making a profit on a future machine. So even the best $250 machine would have been far enough below 360/PS3 for graphics to not be a selling point, not with Microsoft effectively selling you a $400 machine for $299. The remote and price still would have been the main selling point.

But it was a risky machine. What if it had an anemic launch similar to what PS3 is experiencing? What if $250 had just been too much money? What if MS had managed to get the production costs on 360 low enough to slash the price of the Premium to $250 or $229 right when Wii launched? Nintendo isn't just in this to sell consoles, but also to make money. I think they were also strongly considering the possibility of a hasty pricecut in case the thing didn't do well at $250.

 

I agree, we can wish Nintendo chose modern hardware. It's pointless now, the console is in gamers homes and on store shelves. What I wish, is that Julian Eggebhret would explain how certain shader based are effects performed using Hollywood.

I'm assuming the water in Rebel Strike is a TEV pixel blending operation, as well as the sub surface light scattering.

 

While I understand your point the fact is that being so underpowered it may be the main reason of the risk. Plus everything is a risk in the bussiness look to the PS3 that 2 years ago everyone thought that it would do just great once it is more powerfull and have a BR, yet it is selling less than the GameBoy being just a big failure and how knows if it will ever catch what most people expected.

I mean I do think that if they had, planed from the begining, released a 250$ but with upgrade on the level of a tri core CPU (gekko based), 128MB... console (which really seem it could be possible) would, in fact, been a lower risk than the Wii (also a lower prize), the more power for the less money would always been a lower risk.

Anyway we have to aplaud Nintendo for such a move.

The R&D cost is also a interesting argument because I still wonder why they didnt put (as long as we know) at least some small DSPs for the most interesting features.

 

I disagree on two points. First, the hardware is profitable by a good margin and we know confidently that better hardware could be sold at no loss. If instead of selling gangbusters sales of Wii were anaemic, that'd be zero loss for Nintendo on hardware still, instead of small profits. The truth is a console lives or dies on install base, and no matter what it costs to make, if you can't get the sales, you're jappered. If Wii cost only $50 to make but Nintendo couldn't sell the thing, it'd flop. The only benefit of a lower production cost is lower price on the market, and Nintendo didn't follow that. I guess there is a case as you suggest that they wanted a low price and originally were targetting a <$200 pricepoint on cheap hardware, but decided from public reaction they could charge more. However, the major issue here is an opinion that the cost of improved hardware wouldn't be that much, which leads me to my second disagreement.

I don't think anyone was expecting Nintendo to invest the same amount of money as Sony and MS to create a comparable machine. It's the fact that for little more money they could have had better hardware. A 9800 derivative at 90nm would probably be sized about the same as Hollywood, using my quick Googling and back-of-the-beer-mat calculations. Getting Wii level graphics with 4xMSAA and proper alpha blending is not an expensive thing. Had Nintendo done this and Wii flopped, they'd be in no worse of a position, bar perhaps $20 per unit, than if the current Wii design flopped. Sure, if they had invested $2 billion in custom hardware and the machine flopped, that'd be bad. But we're talking a theoretical pricepoint not that far removed from Wii's current price, but with noteworthy advances. The real financial impact of improved hardware comes with gangbuster sales, and many millions in lost hardware profits. It could be Nintendo hedged their bets with room for a very low price. It could also be they expected good sales and penciled in hardware profitability in their design choices. As gamers we're used to console companies putting in better hardware at initial cost, where they make the money back on the software. As gamers, it'd have been nice for us if Nintendo had kept with that tradition, rather than go with an Apple model of making money on hardware and software combined.

Anyway, as Ooh-videogames says, what's done is done and there's no point lamenting it. I was only posting to point out to some that there isn't really any price/cost consideration for Nintendo's choices. They could have, at perhaps slight extra cost and some impact on hardware profitability but nothing catastrophic, produced Wii with Wiimote and better capabilities than the machine they chose to produce.

 

Well I guess if Nintendo had made it close to but not quite up to par with the 360/PS3 it would be inferior port after inferior port compared to the 360/PS3. By being so different it ensures unique games and when there are ports they are from PS2 and the Wii version should compare favorably.
The PS2 is clearly the most popular home console right now,and having a product that compares favorably to that is not a bad place to be in.

 

How moreso than dodgy port after dodgy port of PS2 titles? As long as developers target the Wiimote properly, ports won't be an issue. And if devs are just going to port software, it'd be better to port down from PS360 to high-quality AA'd SDTV res games, than ported upwards from PS2 to low-quality jaggied games, no? Well, TBH it doesn't make any difference. If Wii just get downports, you'd be better off with an XB360. And if it just gets PS2 ports, you'd be better off with a PS2. Wii's only good for the custom software that use it's motion controls. For me personally, I'd be happy with taking Wii's abilities as they are, adding 4xAA, losing any dithering, upping the poly counts on characters a bit and providing some great per-pixel lighting effects. It's doesn't need a 48 pipe, 500 MHz GPU to manage that!

 

There's so many variables to consider, the majority of them on our part would be half educated guesses and half speculation built on dissatisfaction. The only variable that stands out is BC, the console turns into a GC.

Me, personally I'm curious about what visuals can be achieved on hardware that had only one major dev to take on the mysterious TEV. The potential excites me more, I know 360/PS3 can perform this and that shader based effect. The architecture of Hollywood/Flipper is intriguing. I was more impressed with God of War1-2 on PS2, then Gears of War because it was obvious that what was being shown early on was possible on 360.

 

I'm pretty sure Nintendo decided to put it at $250 after seeing both PS3 and MS price theirs so high. No way in hell I was thinking Nintendo would sell it for more than $200. Sony and MS gave Nintendo some leverage to do so.

 

I like to put into a perspective the cost of a new gpu architecutre.

source: http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/11/116466/ProxyMay07.pdf
the financial details of the nvidia corporation.I don't wasted my time for the ati, due to the amd business.
the R&D staff of the NV was 1230 in 2005 jan, and the 2005 budget of the R&D was 348 million.
So, if somebody think that the development cost of a customised architecture is 2 billion $...so,that is a mistake.If the full staff of the nv (or ati) did nothing else just the architecure of the xb2 for 6 year, so in that case the calculation is good.

The biggest part of the story have to be the tooling.But the interesting thing is in the case of the wii gpu the tooling cost have to be as expensive as if they use an 9800 in the wii.

 

This is what I'm interested in. After all, the PS2 was weaker than the both the Cube and the X-Box. What can a system that is two to three times the power of the Gamecube alone do?

 

Just remember that the CPU is not even twice as fast and the RAM size is less than doubled. The GPU may be twice the clock speed, but it isn't much more impressive in feature set apparently. So be prepared for some Cube-like graphics with maybe more polys and slightly better texture resolution. I just pray that every game won't be cursed with ordered dithering artifacts.

Unless we get some quality devs in addition to N, who put effort into it, Cube-level may be the best we see for the most part. I'd wager that Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3 are the machine's peak. After all, it's basically a Cube arch and people know it well. It's not like it's a weird, quirky design ala PS2. Cube was praised a zillion times for its leniency with bad code and so we saw it get fully utilized rather quickly.

 

Square-Enix seems to be trying if FF:CC is any indication.

I think they'll push the Wii farther than people think.I also still don't believe we've seen the bes even the Gamecube could go. Resident Evil 4 was probably the closest, though.

But that also begs the question. What is that extra space on the CPU for?

 

Anyway, I've played HD games on non-HD TVs and HD tvs. As long as the Wii plays in SD, it should look fine, even in comparison to the others.

 

I'd say that Twilight Princess, RE4, FZero GX, and Rebel Strike each push the Cube to it's absolute limits. Unless you wish to sacrifice framerate. But Rebel Strike did that too, actually.

 

Twilight Princess... I can't say yes to that, but it was damn close.

Now, Metroid Prime and the other two you mentioned. Oh yes...

I think the trick with the Wii will lie with the developer's graphics designers and artists. While it can't push what the other two can, it can still do some mighty pretty games.

http://www.konami.jp/gs/game/Dewy/index.html

Above is a good example.

 

Difference being, Rebel Strike has the sharpest textures, (custom)shader based water, Rogue Leader in co-op visually enhanced, volumetric fog, sub surface light scattering, bump mapping, self shadowing, projected shadows, reflection mapping and a unstable 60fps.

Now give the developers 64MB of higher bandwidth memory, including the 24MB of 1T-SRAM. Broadway and Hollywood, all of this should lend devs more waggle room to play with when it comes to the TEV and its 16 stages.

Check out the latest vids Harry Potter for Wii on IGN. Impressive for EA/Wii game.

http://media.wii.ign.com/media/842/842199/vids_1.html

 

Metroid Prime: Corruption should show off what the Wii can do.

The question is if they used the old Prime engine, or a new "Wii" prime engine?

 

The demand so far for the Wii tells us that low market price is not the only advantage of having low production costs. I believe the profit margin is so large that the machine itself brings insane amount of money to Nintendo, even without any software sales Nintendo software however is selling also...

I'm quite sure that they are getting the maximum revenue not just profits with the current pricetag. With lower tag they would be selling slightly more units, but not enough to catch up the price cut, as Europe seems to be the only place where you can actually find units easily. (atleast in some parts of Europe) Low production costs makes a ton of difference in this current situation on their bottom line Of course this is possible due to the higher priced competition, but Wii in itself seems to be extraordinaly desidered product and the price tag alone doesn't create something like that.

I agree with you that the machine could have been a lot more compelling and desidering with minimal extra cost and effort, I'm just not sure that the average consumer cares about that at all. It's a pity, but it's reality, atleast that's how I see it and Nintendo probably saw it too, they also saw the $ attached to it...

 

No.