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When Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division president Robbie Bach deemed Nintendo's Wii to be weaker than the original Xbox, console defense mechanisms everywhere were deployed. Newsweek's N'Gai Croal decided to conduct some outside investigation of his own to determine just where exactly the Wii stands on the console horsepower scale. To do this, he speaks to developers (who asked to remain anonymous) familiar with the Wii internal workings.
Their findings? The Wii is more akin to a "GameCube 1.5" thanks to a lack of flexibility afforded for key graphics operations. For those of you familiar with NVIDIA, the devs compare the Wii's graphical horsepower to the GeForce2 series GPU. That said, the Wii isn't a total slouch; with ingeniuity, it is theoretically possible to reproduce some of the programmable shader effects typical on the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC rigs for the Wii's older, fixed-function graphics hardware... to a certain degree.
So while Microsoft's Bach wasn't totally full of hot air by discounting the graphical performance of the Wii compared to the original Xbox console, that shouldn't stop developers from being able to take advantage of what the Wii can offer. They'll just need the conviction, and know-how, and budget, etc...
"The Wii's GPU has fixed functions for vertex, lighting, and pixel operations," said the source "All 'programmable shaders' means is that the code you write for the shader gets run on the vertex and pixel hardware of the GPU. This is how it works on the high-end ATI and Nvidia GPU parts. The Wii is an older fixed function design where you have lots of operations but the pipelines are not programmable in the sense of downloading shader code to run [on them]."
"A dev support guy from Nintendo said that the Wii chipset is 'Gamecube 1.5 with some added memory,'" our second source told us. "I figure if they say that, it must be true."
"Almost all the shader effects on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 can be reproduced on the Wii by re-implementing them with the fixed function hardware of the Wii's GPU. Most games just port the effect over. A few teams have gone as far as making a shader-to-Wii conversion tool. It reads the shader code and generates the fixed function code necessary to achieve the same result. Keep in mind that the Wii's GPU is not as fast or feature rich as the Xbox 360 or PS3, but that doesn't mean you can't get very close results."
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Comments
Wow, I didn't expect to hear that. Impressive.
i always underestimated the wii for some reason
Almost any GPU is capable of doing a shader if it's programmed for it, the thing is, that doesn't mean the GPU is capable of rendering it in real time with a good framerate. If you knew anything about computer graphics, you'd understand this. I could essentially get a GeForce 1 card to render 360 and PS3 shaders, but that doesn't mean it's going to be useful because it won't be playable.
Here's the thing guys almost any shader can be run on almost all types of hardware, or at least the same or similar effect recreated, as proved with Half-Life 2's Lost Coast SM2 (shader model 2) HDR. They proved you didn't HAVE to have HDR with just SM3 hardware. The point of having SM3 though is that these more advanced shaders run faster. It's not about whether or not a GPU is capable it's about whether a GPU is capable of running at a playable framerate.
While the Wii GPU might be capable I sincerely doubt it's very capable of running many at a time with a good framerate.
Sorry to be so negative, but that's the honest truth, and this article says nothing about whether or not the Wii is really capable of pulling off such effects with a stable framerate.
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