Nintendo didn't say anything about how much eDRAM there is in Wii AFAIR. If your assuming that just because Wii doesn't support 720p that means it can't have more then 3MB eDRAM then that's a bad assumption IMO. I do agree in that I don't think it has more then 3MB of eDRAM, but not for that reason.
WiiGeePeeYou (Hollywood) what IS it ?
- Thread starter Megadrive1988
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Nintendo didn't say anything about how much eDRAM there is in Wii AFAIR. If your assuming that just because Wii doesn't support 720p that means it can't have more then 3MB eDRAM then that's a bad assumption IMO. I do agree in that I don't think it has more then 3MB of eDRAM, but not for that reason.
I say that it can not have more than 2 megs of embedded frame buffer.
They simply didn't designed the product for HD.
Yes and what I'm trying to say is that it doesn't need to be designed for HDTV resolutions to make more then 2MB of frame/Z buffer space useful. It could be utilised simply for higher precision (32bit) and anti aliasing. Though as I said I don't believe it has more eDRAM at the moment anyway since we haven't seen any noticable anti aliasing in Wii games.
If you have more ram,you can make a choice between the higher resolution and the AA.
Or simply do higher resolution and scale down for easy AA.
You need at least 8MB of memory to support 720p though. With 5MB of memory and a fraction of the fillrate you can use 2x anti aliasing. Also if its so easy to downsample for SDTV's then why don't 360 games do it?
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4 megs is enought if you use the 48 bit (24 bit RGB+24 bit Z) wide memory modell of the GC framebuffer.(960*720 res)
The GC AA method is a 96 bit wide pixel group in a triangle , that contai 5/6/5RGB+16 bit Z three times.
But it can bring only 240 line resolution.
Sot,if you have 4 megs of memory you can make a choice between 640*480 AA (with crapy colors,but max you will avoid the multi texturing in the frame buffer ) or the 960*720.
And the downscale is not a big business.The big issue in the case of the xbox2 can be the texture emory,and that fact if they use 1360*1024 (or 1820*1024) resolution they haven't have enought "oversampling" for the visible diference.(quick calculation:1700*1280 can make diference,but it is just 4:3 and there is not enought memory for that.)
The big proble is it can do AA only in 640*240 resolution.I don't think that the filrate can be a problem in this case.
We aren't talking about GC though, Wii doesn't have to have the same anti aliasing technique (and I'd hope it won't use the same 24bit colour either).
Wii doesn't have to have the same anti aliasing technique as GC though. Thinking about it they could actually do 2 x AA at GC's colour depth with only just over 3MB embedded buffer space (24bit frame and 16bit Z). Though I'd hope for more then 24bit with Wii, then again I suppose they could just leave the option of 24bit with AA or 32bit without.. uneccesarilly limiting though considering how much eDRAM they could get even on a small 90nm die.
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We were getting quite a few 16bit colour screenshots prior to launch. How are things now? Checking Elebits, which I remember as being clearly 16bit colour, it seems to be dither free. Can we ascribe those earlier Wii-shots 16bit colour to running on GC type dev kits, and guess the Wii actually has more eDRAM so that's not a problem?
I believe it's standard, even for PC drives, for DVD drives to have 2MB of ram. Yes, it helps with caching, though it'd be interesting to see if devs had control over what got cached.
Couldn't the external ram in the cube already be used to store the framebuffer, or at least the secondary and third buffer? I don't see why it couldn't do at least that on the wii.
The gc is designed by this way.You create the frame,and the swap of the backbuffer and the frame buffer is not just a logical move,but an actual data transfer to the external ram.
Oh,and you can't reconfigurate the 1megs tex cace to anything else.Even the configuarion is assymetric,and you can't do Z in the text buffer.I'm sure about it in the case of wii too.
1 megs of additional frame buffer.Iy you re-desing the memory why don't you put 2 megs and get a free 720p resolution?(even with 16bit in 16:9,and 48 bit in 4:3)
What the point of having 720p if ( from what we currently now) they will look, at the best, as good as, or even worst than, a GC game (specialy with a 16 bit, which in old PC HW I always tryed to get the 32bits instead of higer rez)? Wouldnt be, overall, a much better image with 32bit and (other form of) AA? IMO it may be very possible once that (according to ATI) hoolywood is a new architeture.
Anyway we do now that Wii will not render games at anything beyond 480p,so the question is if there is 32bits and/or AA, but couldnt they just use some form of compreension to get thiswithout adding edram?
No way.You need more memory to be able to de AA.The other possibility is that to render two or three times the scee,but since the days of the T&L it is wasting the TNL resources too.
720p using GC's colour depth would require 3 times the fillrate and bandwidth of 480p though, that's hardly free (also it'd need 4.6MB eDRAM). Wii's GPU just doesn't have the power to do that unless you want games that look the same or worse then GC games at high res.
Games Seem to be Cached
My kid was playing GC Animal Crossing on the Wii the other night and her younger brother "accidently" pressed the eject button to remove the CD. Well she managed to continue playing the game for another 20 mins (with some shopping, selling and exploring) and also save her game without being asked for the game CD. I thought this was pretty interesting figuring the Wii was caching the game somewhere in system.
My kid was playing GC Animal Crossing on the Wii the other night and her younger brother "accidently" pressed the eject button to remove the CD. Well she managed to continue playing the game for another 20 mins (with some shopping, selling and exploring) and also save her game without being asked for the game CD. I thought this was pretty interesting figuring the Wii was caching the game somewhere in system.
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