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The Wii's Brain Exposed
Posted by
Zonk
on Wed Nov 01, 2006 04:57 PM
from the delicious-brains dept.
from the delicious-brains dept.
Jon Stokes, at the Opposable Thumbs column, discusses a final revelation of the Wii's technical prowess. Though it's been assumed since the early days of the marketing push that the Wii is basically a super-charged GameCube, a post to Acer's Hardware boards would seem to confirm that. Not, as Mr. Stokes says, that that is a bad thing: "I'm no longer nearly as upset about the implications of this move as I was back in August. In fact, thanks in large part to my DS Lite, I've gone from being disappointed at Wii's underpowered hardware to actually anticipating the new console. I plan to pick one up when they become generally available, and I'm even hoping to hook my (nongamer) wife on it."
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Wii Graphics 'Better Than At E3' 400 comments
Gamespot and GameDaily have additional details on Nintendo's upcoming console. Gamespot reports on comments by Nintendo President Iwata that they were specifically not going for high-end graphics with the Wii. He goes on to say that some of their staff initially disagreed with the adoption of the Wiimote, but public and internal reaction has allayed the fears of detractors. GameDaily reports on comments from ATI, who says there is still a lot left to see from Wii's graphical output. What was shown at E3 was 'just the tip of the iceberg.' From the article: "Industry sources have said that the Wii GPU would be moderately more powerful than the GameCube's GPU, but how much more we don't know. Conservative estimates from developers have placed the Wii console as a whole at 2 - 2.5 times more powerful than the GameCube."
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Wii will take over the world. (Score:3, Funny)
Supercharged! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't care much about what a system's floating point performance is, I only care what it can do. There has been far too much discussion on how powerful the Wii is with very little focus on what it means for games.
Re:Supercharged! (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, none of what you've mentioned matters at all. The PSP is light years better than the DS from a technological point of view, but the DS is mopping the floor with the PSP. Why?
In the end, it all comes down to games.
If Nintendo has the games that are the most fun they will sell the most consoles. The same is true for MS and Sony... If the controller is gimmicky and the games are not very fun, it will become very clear in due course. How anyone can declare winners and losers in the console war at this point is beyond me. The party is really just getting started.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
On the rational end of the issue... As long as it gets the job done who the hell cares.
Re:Supercharged! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, not really. The ISA may be the same, but the microarchitecture is completely different. Your PC's CPU looks nothing like a 386, it just happens to speak the same language (and certainly some new instructions, if not entire operating modes like 64-bit, besides).
The point of the article is that the Wii's CPU is really microarchitecturally similar to the Gecko, down to the number of FP pipelines and such, and is basically a 90nm shrink of the old chip with higher clock speeds.
Now personally I find it hard to believe that IBM would go through the trouble of shrinking the chip to 90nm (which isn't as easy as just applying a scaling factor to your old mask) without tweaking the architecture even if there were no major changes planned. I guarantee there were improvements that they either wanted to add to Gecko but didn't have time/resources for, or flaws in the Gecko that they discovered after it was produced that they would like to fix. The shrink to 90nm is the perfect time to get some of those changes in, so I'm betting they did.
Which brings me back to your point, which was: So what? Indeed, so what? So it's the same chip, only at a much higher frequency and probably with a small percent boost in IPC performance besides. How is that bad? It isn't. It just isn't a super brand new highly experimental chip that requires new (or, going back to mainframes with slews of I/O controllers, old) programming methods. So for anyone who was hoping Nintendo would have some incredible hardware specs for them to drool over, dissapointment may ensue. Oh well, there's still a good chance it will be good enough.
Look at the last generation: The Xbox and GC were fighting for best graphics (xbox winning mostly, but GC showing some astounding performances from time to time), and also fighting for 2nd place. 1st place went to the console with the worst graphics, but they were good enough to be part of that generation, and it had the games. The Wii will certainly be representative of this generation of graphics, even if it will be the worst in that regard. Personally I, like anyone who favors a PS2, just hope it has lots of fun games.
Parent
Backwards compatibility means no changes (Score:3, Insightful)
To back your more general point up, although people seem to have a low opinion of what the Gamecube hardware was capable of it's unwarranted. It's true that many games
Re: (Score:2)
That's more than slightly disingenuous. Maintaining the x86 instruction set does not, in any way, even remotely imply that the processor you're working on right now is just a 386, but faster. There have been fundamental, major evolutions in CPU technology between that 386 and your current CPU, which make them completely different animals that just happen to look (sort of) the same from the OS' point of view.
This isn't true for the Wii hardware vs the GC hardware
Call me when I can turn off in-order writes (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not a single pet feature, it's an example (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want a laundry list, I can provide one, but we can start with this small list of things, which were also true of the i386 as well, making the current CPUs hopped up 386s:
o Too few general purpose registers (this one's glaringly obvious, and compared to dumping another 2M of cache onto a chip, it's relatively easy to fix, but it's only been partially fixed in the 64 bit implementations, and there it was more or less a matter of maintaining binary compatib
Wii isn't underpowered except (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Wii isn't underpowered except (Score:4, Funny)
I don't know. The PS3 has a very low ecstasy to glow stick ratio.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Nintendo DS uses OpenGL (Score:5, Interesting)
True of the GBA, but Nintendo DS uses a subset of OpenGL, similar to the "GX" API used by the GameCube.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it's going to be limited by the controller. The Wii's controller is the most fun.
Or maybe not.
My statement is only slightly less absurd than yours. "Fun" is most certainly not going to be limited by graphics. Is "Super Mario Bros" less fun than "Charlie's Angels" simply because its graphics are very modest compared to the more recent 3D game?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What I have the problem with is the people who appear to be insisting that no one "needs" the better graphics hardware and, ironically, that we do "need" the interesting controller hardware of the Wii.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Just look at the numbers. Many people were screaming about how Live and other online services were going to be the bread and butter of consoles last generation. All three systems launched with promises about their online support. Only one of the three consoles delivered, and it was the one which arguably was the worst when it came to online that won out.
Today we've finally reahed a point w
Nothing "underpowered " about the Gamecube/Wii (Score:2)
While I absolutely love the visuals from the 360 and PS3, given the still relatively paltry penetration of HDTV sets in North America, the new ma
It's been said before... (Score:2, Interesting)
The difference in required processing power to properly render the larger textures and more detailed models at 1080p versus what the Wii needs to do at 480p is huge. All that processing power that Microsoft and Sony will throw into 1920*1080=2073600 pixel is going to be much more than Nintendo has to worry about at 640*480=307200
2073600/307200 = 6.75. Sony and Microsoft need to be 6.75 times as powerful as Nintendo's console to ma
This sounds interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
The Wii's Brain Exposed (Score:3, Funny)
Power isn't the problem (Score:2)
But I think to make that argument would take some serious rhetorical gymnastics. The problems with gaming clearly lie in the ideas, the general difficulty of executing complex ideas (programming complicated things, gaming or otherwise, is hard), the overemphasis on 3D graphics, and the stereotyping of controls.
All of these interrelate; in particular the emphasis on 3D graph