Nintendo Wii Matches the Power of the Original Xbox
Posted by William on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 12:41 am under Nintendo
According to a FIFA producer, the Nintendo Wii matches up to the original Xbox as far as power goes. Of course the Wii is an easy system to develop code for, but matching up to the power of a last generation system isn’t exactly a big deal in my opinion. People need to keep in mind that the Wii is great simply because it is original. That originality could wear off one day, but certainly doesn’t look like it’s slowing down any time soon. I honestly wish people would stop comparing the Wii’s actual system details to Sony and Microsoft’ systems. Honestly, the Wii cannot compete on a hardware level and Nintendo knows it.   The point of the article is that the Wii is pretty much what the original Xbox was. Is that really the point we need to care about? Probably not.
FIFA producer Tim Tschirner has said that he believes the Nintendo Wii matches up to the first  in terms of power.
Tschirner’s comments came in an exclusive interview with GamesIndustry.biz’s sister site, Eurogamer.net
“It’s about as powerful as the original Xbox,” he said. “The video hardware unfortunately is not as powerful. There’s just a couple of key things that you can do on Xbox like shaders which you just cannot do on the Wii… Overall though it’s pretty much what the original Xbox was.”
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June 16th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
that is the BIGGEST LOAD OF BS on the net infact all 3rd party spoksmens are talking rubbish that statment is a EA MARKETING STATMENT
market the control experiance on wii ///market hd on competition its COMMONSENCE what he is up to WORK IT OUT………….
xbox polygon count in game 12 million at 30 frames a second
gamecube not wii gc in game poly count at 60 not 30 60 frames a second NEAR 20 MILLION hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
xbox fsb system bus speed 133mhz no hardware based data compression = 800mb bandwidth
gamecube bus 162mhz plus 4to1 hardware based data compresion= 5.2gb bandwidth can you see a MASSIVE DIFFERANCE
wii bus 243mhz plus the same compression 4to1 in hardware = 8gb bandwidth
so if bus data rate and ingame polygons of gamecube out performs xbox PLEASE EXPLAIN YOUR wii COMENTS BIASED EA MAN…………
WII CPU CUSTOM OPTERMIZED 750 POWERPC MICRO EMBEDDED CPU USING COPPERWIRE AND SILICON ON INSULATOR TECH RISC BASED
XBOX CPU A CELERON OF THE SHELF AT INTEL AGAIN NOOOOOOOOOOOOO CONTEST
THERE IS NO WAY ON GODS GREEN EATH THE XBOX CAN COMPEAT WITH WII ITS TOTALLY STUPID TO EVEN THINK IT
THIS GUY IS TAPPING INTO IGNORANCE OF SPECS AND HARDWARE HE KNOWS IGNORANT TEENAGERS ARE CLOCK SPEED OBSESED AND IS FEEDING MORE LIES TO THEM AS ARE OTHER 3RD PARTYS
JELOUS OF NINTENDOS POWER IN THE INDUSTRE
HOW CAN A STANDARD SPED SHEET CELERON OF THE SHELF CPU COMPARE TO A CUSTON GAMECENTRIC POWERPC RISC SILICON ON INSULATOR 2006 SPEC MICRO PROCESSOR UNIT MPU
HOLLYWOOD GPU IS A EXTENTION OF FLIPPER , FLIPPER HAD A RICHER LIST OF HARDWARE BASED ABILLITYS THAN XGPU AND WAS VASTLY MORE EFFICANT
HIS COMMENTS DONT HOLD WATER AT ALL
WII GPU CATCH 3MB OF EDRAM-1T SRAM-R XGPU HAD A TINY CATCH OF 256K
FLIPPER VS XGPU GAMECUBE GPU
FLIPPER 8 TEXTURE LAYER 16 STAGES OF EFFECTS
XGPU 4 TEXTURE LAYERS 4 STAGES OF EFFECT ERMMMMMMM THATS GAMECUBE NEVER MIND WII
WII PATENTS SHOW
DEFORMATION TEXTURING TRICK
16 STAGE SHADER TREE
EFFICANT 3D RENDERING
ETC ETC
WII IS TIGHTLY INTERGRATED CLOCK BALANCED AND HAS BLINDINGLY FAST RAM AND A BLINDINGLY FAST DISC DRIVE SET UP NOT SLOW RAM SLOW DVD LIKE XBOX
FLIPPER GPU OF GAMECUBE HAD OVER 2X BANDWIDTH OF XGPU THE HOLLYWOD GPU IN WII IS PROBABLY 4/5 TIMES XGPU
LETS LOOK AT GPU DATA FEED
XGPU 256K GRAPHICS CATCH AND NO ONBOARD BUFFERING RAM OR EDRAM A TINY 800MB CPU TO GPU BUS AND SLOW EXTERNAL
FLIPPER GPU GAMECUBE MASSIVE 3MB GPU CATCH/BUFFER 20GB BANDWIDTH MASSIVE COMPARED TO XGPU AND A 5,2GB CPU TO GPU CATCH AS YOU CAN CLEARLY SEE GAMRECUBE KICKS ASS HERE
SO HOW ON EARTH IS WII LESS POWERFULL THAN XBOX
XBOX PEAK IN GAME POLYGONS 12 MILLION 30 FRAMES A SECOND
ROGUE SQODREN 2 BEATS THAT NUMBER
ROUGUE SQODREN 3 BITCHSLAPS THAT NUMBER
RESIDENT EVIL 4 DESTROYS THAT NUMBER
BEST LOOKING GAME BAR NON LAST GEN RES EVIL 4 GC VERSION
BEST LOOKING CELL SHADING BY FAR WIND WAKER
METROID PRIME 2 PERFECT 60 FRAMES A SECOND FALTLESS GRAPHICS ZERO BUGS ZERO LOADTIMES BUG FREE NO PATCHES REQUIRED
HALO 2 LONGGG LOADTIMES BUGGY CRASHY POP UP PATCH REQUIRED CHOPPY FRAME RATE
ARE PEOPLE MISSING SOMING HERE
GAMECUBE ALLSO OUT LOAD SPEEDED THE XBOX GAMECUBE HIT THE BEST GRAPHICS LAST GEN AND THE FASTEST STYREAMING LOADING FROM DISC
SO PLEASE EXPLAIN HOW XBOX BEATS WII
July 9th, 2007 at 2:53 am
lmao what the hell.. the GameCube was a piece of shit compared to the Xbox. A slightly faster PS2 at best.
September 11th, 2007 at 4:48 am
Cubeboy, that's just wrong. You're reading all your specs out of context.
For example, Gamecube had it's on-chip ram, but why? It's because old fashioned multi-texturing requires multiple reads from texture memory, AND multiple reads from and writes to frame buffer memory. Which requires lots of bandwidth to both to perform well.
Xbox had programmable shaders, multiple textures could be read from texture memory, combined by the shader, and applied in one texturing pass.
And you mention data compression? Nvidia gpus have used extensive data compression, that is compressed and decompressed on the fly.
S3TC = DXTC 1-5, for texture compression, of which both ati and nvidia have their own, tweaked codecs of.
You're comparing apples to oranges. As is the case throughout your post.
There are huge differences in how things are done on both platforms. That includes texture layering (of which xbox was twice as fast per clock cycle, as it has twice the texturing units), and the processing of polygons.
Xbox had two vertex shader alus. Gamecube has nothing of the sort, aside from a plain t&L unit.
And there is no bump mapping in Metroid games. Gamecube couldn't handle it.
Nor is there much, (if any) in Prime 3 for the Wii.
It was everywhere in halo. Dot3, etc..
But still, I would say that the Wii's graphics capability is under-rated.
And I agree, the cpu should be far more efficient, as well as more powerful.
September 11th, 2007 at 4:58 am
also, streaming data from a hard-drive, is much faster than off disk. Not to mention xbox had more ram. (and yes, the same types of compression technology)
Could spend time going through everything piece by piece, but I think I covered enough.
BTW, not putting your post down or anything. Sorry if it sounded like that.
(I just happen to have dealt with them before)
And I agree, many developers are making excuses. Gamecube and Wii, are well designed systems, with few bottle necks, and Wii is capable of better than most (3rd party) games show.
September 11th, 2007 at 5:02 am
ok, one more, transfer speed is faster from xbox's dvd drive, than it is from gamecube's drive.
September 11th, 2007 at 10:49 am
“It’s about as powerful as the original Xbox,” he said. “The video hardware unfortunately is not as powerful."
So in what way is it as powerful then?
I really cant see a long life for the Wii. Its selling really well but from my experience most of that is purely down to the novelty value. I know 3 people who have had Wiis for over 6 months and none of them use them any more. Initially it was fun going round there after a few drinks but that soon faded. One of my mates is a hardcore Ninty fan and even he's disappointed with it because there is absolutely no progression at all from their last console. No better graphics and no more depth to games.
To me Nintendo releasing the Wii is like Sony simply releasing the PS2 in a different case with a few upgrades and a motion controller and then calling it the PS3 and selling it really cheap. It would probably have sold faster than the real PS3 in the short term but it would have no long term legs.
To me the Wii isn't selling because it has a really strong console or really strong games but because it has a really strong peripheral. Without the Wiimote most of the software is shallow rubbish and the console is just a tuned up Gamecube. If people get bored of the Wiimote or just aren't interested in it a PS2 is a far better purchase.
October 19th, 2007 at 9:28 am
The Wii isnt selling? its sold over 11 million worldwide catching the xbox 360 idiot
December 15th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
the compression system the ram and the disc data feed on gamecube destoyed xbox thats a fact even with its hardrive gamecube exclusives ran loadscreebn free no xbox game ever did COMPARING OFF THE SHELF TO FINLY DESIGNED CUSTOM PARTS MAKES U A PC BRAINWASHED FOOKWEED
December 17th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
"Destroys Xbox"
It really did nothing of the sort. The fact that Gamecube was a customized design, is what allowed it to keep pace with xbox, despite it being inferior in many areas.
It's like comparing a decent, stock high performance car (for it's time), to a souped up Toyota Corolla. It's old technology, retrofitted with new technology to make up for it.
And they had load screens in Nintendo games. Mario was loading as you entered the level, and while you selected the Shine mission you wanted. The level shared a large amount of texture, mesh, and layout data. The only thing it needed to load dynamically after entering the portal, was what was related to the shine mission you chose. Metroid Prime just hid loading by making all the doors open with delays after shooting them, etc..
Plus, XBox had twice the ram to load than Gamecube.
Gc's disk transfer speed was somewhere between 2-3 megabytes per second, depending on where it was being read. Xbox should have been between 2.5 and 6, but again, this would be an area Gamecube might have been able to keep up on, because I would imagine the seek-time might be better on a drive Nintendo specifically chose, rather than a drive Xbox was getting a good deal on at the time.
In the end, it worked out well, and they competed fine in graphics. (last gen)
Wii may very well be capable of 2x Xbox in some cases, but it "still" doesn't destroy it in performance.
December 19th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
inferi zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz wake me up wen you stop fanboying bill gates
xbox of the sfelf celeron made using aluminium conectors
gekko customized gaming """risc"" cpu made using ""superier copperwire conectors
xbox celeron high heat non embeded cisc cpu with 128k catch
gekko tiny embedded cool running design faster than non skrunk powerpc chip with 256k catch
xbox 128k catch no compresion
gekko 256k catch 4to1 compression """decompression in realtime""" thats a virtual catch of 1mb and a virtual bandwidth of 4 times the standard 256k catch
xbox 133mhz fsb no compression 800mb to 1 gb bandwidth
gamecubes gekko fsb 163mhz (already faster than xbox) plus 4to1 data compression = over 5gb bandwidth
xbox texture read from main ram about 3.2gb the 6.4 was fake rememer the main ram in xbox allso did cpu sound and z buffers and frame buffers your left with around 3.2 for graphics
gamecubes texture read 10.4gb right off the texture catch of 1mb 1tsram rrealtime decompresion of textures 6to1 = virtual texture read of 6 times 10.4 gb clearly a 60mb texture read kills a 3.2 gb texture read
xbox ram dram= 70 nano seconds read speed
gamecube 1t sram = 10 or faster nano seconds read speed up to 10 times faster than xbox
1t sram matches l3 and l2 catch for brute speed
sdram in xbox was a slow dinosure fact sonys rambus ram was even slower
xbox in game texture layers 4
gamecube ingame texture layers 8
xbox realtime lighting 8×4 on gpu
gamecubes realtime lighting 8×8 on gpu plus custom lighting enhacments built into gekko cpu (check out gamecube 101 at ign) (check out gamecube vs ps2 ign) (checkout factor 5 on gamecube ign)
gamecube had faked tile rendering built in i.e it cud cull its texels and pixels and polygons from unseen by the eye areas this inflates your fillrate
xbox had no such abbillity
gamecube compressed its display list geomity and allmost al data at 4to1 and decompresed it in real time
xbox had no such abillity
the fact remains wii will do ingame graphics 2.5 times a xbox at a solid 60 frames and without loadtimes AT THE SAME CLOCKSPEEDS proving gamecube was superier
xbox highest ever in game polygon count in its life 12 million at 30 frames INDUSTRE FACT
GAMECUBE HIT 18 MILLION PLUS IN ROGUE SQ 3 AT 60 FRAMES A SECOND INDUSTRE FACT
BEST CEL SHADING LAST GEN WIND WAKER
BEST VISUALS OVERALL RES EVIL 4 GC VERSION
HALO 2 RAN AT 30 FRAMES AND DROPPED TO 12 FRAMES A SECOND INGAME AND HAD TREDFULL LOADTIMES BUGS GLITCHES ETC
METROID PRIME 2 RAN AT 60 NOT 30 60 FRAMES HAD NO LOADTIMES AND LOOKED GOUGOUS
GAMECUBE 16 STAGE REAL TIME TEXTURE BLENDING AND 8 TEXTURE LAYERS INGAME
XBOX HAD 8 STAGES REALTIME TEXTURE BLENDS AND 4 TEXTURE LAYERS AND NO VIRTUAL TEXTURING AT ALL
GAMECUBE SUCKED TEXTURES INTO ITS HUGE 1MB TEXTURE CATCH AT 6MB AND PROCESSED 6MB TEXTURES AT A TIME REAL TIME TEXTURE DECOMPRESION
XBOX HAD NO REAL TIME TEXTURE DECOMPRESION YES IT CUD COMPRES AT 6TO1 BUT IT HAD TO DECOMPRESS BEFORE THE GPU SUCKED THEM IN AND XBOX HAD A TINY 256K TEXTURE CATCH
256K VS 6MB HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM NO CONTEST
MARIO KART GP2 ON ARCADE IS A TRI FORSE ARCADE BOARD GAME ITS BLOOFY STUNNING LOOKING AND RUNS AT 60 FRAMES THATS IMPOSABLE ON A XBOX REMINDERR TRI FORSE IS JUST A GAMECUBE WITH DOUBLED 1T SRAM
GAMECUBE WAS HIGHLY CUSTOM XBOX WAS OFF THE SHELF LOW SPEC PC PARTS NO FOOKING CONTEST
December 19th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
MARIO GALAXY OVER 30 MILLION POLYGONS AT 60 FRAMES TRUE WIDESCREEN NO LOADTIMES
XBOX CARNT DO 15 MILLION POLYGONS AT 30 LET ALONE 60 FRAMES SO I REPEAT YET AGAIN 3RD PARTY LIES TO JUSTIFY POR GRAPHICS THRU PS2 PORTING IM CURRECT AS I WAS BROUT UP NOT TO GO ROUND BULL SHITTING FOLKS
YOUR XBOX FANBOYS TALKING CRAP
PLEASE EXPLAIN HOW ALL TRUE WII LOOKERS DESTOY XBOX VISUALS
METROID PRIME 3
MARIO GALAXY
MONSTER HUNTER
MARIO KART WII
WII HAS A DIE EMBEDDED 24 MB VIRTUAL LEVEL 3 CATCH SHARED BY BOTH PROCESSORS PUSHING DATA AT THEM AT AROUND 6 NANO SECOPNDS THATS LIKE 10 TIMES FASTER THAN PS3S SO CALLED FAST RAM
WII IS SIMPLY A DATA STREAMING DATA DECOMPRESSION TURBO MONSTER AND ITS FILLRATE IS OVERKILL AT 480P
3RD PARTYS TALKING DOWN THE GRAPHICS ARE DOING IT ON PURPOSE NINTENDO HAS BITCH SLAPPED RTHE WHOLE INDUSTRE AND MADE IT ITS BITCH WII AND DS ARE THE FASTEST SELING CONSOLES IN HISTORY
3RD PARTYS ARE DELIBRATLY DOWN PLAYING OUT OF JELOUSY AND FEAR OF A BETTER GAMING COMPANY THATS JUST DESTROYING ALL COMPETITION
THE WAY THERE TRYING TO PUT THE BRAKES ON IS BY LIEING THE WII CARNT DO GRAPHICS ITS A DAM COMPRERASY
PS2 ENGINES PORTED TO WII AINT FOOKING WII GRAPHICS AND YOU FANZOMBIESD DAM WELL KNOW IT SO STOP PRETENDING OTHERWISE
December 20th, 2007 at 12:39 am
Dude, no offense, but you spent alot of time, going over Gamecube whitepapers, and spent no time looking at modern gpus, and assume that many of those spec points you came across, are Gamecube exclusive.
And you're listing the bandwidth of texture memory, on a system (Gamecube)that recirculates it's pixels, from texture ram, to frame buffer, and back to ram again, once for every time it wants to add another texture layer. It really, really needed on chip texture ram and fram-buffer ram with high bandwidth to do that. (It just pretended the on-chip texture cache was main-ram, and decompressed from there, rather than doing all that reading and writing to main ram)
And you're comparing that, to a gpu with proper pixel shader pipelines of Xbox. (Like I said, apples to oranges, for bandwidth, blending, layering, etc..)
Plus, for textures: One texture layer can be done per pixel on Gamecube at full speed. For two texture layers, you had to read the pixel back, and recirculate the pixel through the pipeline again and add another, thus cutting it's fill rate. If you were to do 8, you cut fill rate by 8. (almost no Gamecube games are capable of anywhere near 8 of anything btw)
Xbox would only cut fill-rate by half for 4 texture layers, before having to write to ram, and read it back in for a second render pass.
As to "Visibility Subsystem: Z-Occlusion Culling"
You seem to suggest that Xbox didn't have a Z-Buffer, with Z-Occlusion culling,
When, of course it did. with 4x lossless compression, and client-side Z-Occlusion query, like is found in Nvidia and ATI gpus, even before xbox.
And as to polygons, the Xbox had the same type of gpu baes vertex processor as Gamecube, except it had two of them, and was programmable. You don't just transform polygons, you run other instructions. They're transformation, Lighting, and vertex shader instructions.
Most of the vertex shader work done by vertex shaders on xbox, would have to be emulated on the cpu. Plain vanilla T&L wouldn't cut it.
Overall, the Wii is likely more powerful than Xbox, but it does nothing to "destroy it" at anything.
Sorry, but that is the truth.
December 20th, 2007 at 3:26 am
A few random quotes from developers: First few, are from MotoGP devs, the last is from Factor5.
Multitexturing
"One texture per polygon just isn't enough any more. The PS2 has fill-rate to spare, and the dual context rendering architecture can draw two copies of every triangle for little more cost than one, so you are wasting the hardware if you have only a single texture stretched over your geometry. Xbox supports four layers per render-pass, and Gamecube eight. (although in practice you can only afford to use two or three while maintaining a good framerate)."
"Our PS2 projects are using two texture layers, with the gouraud alpha controlling a cross-fade between them. On Gamecube we usually add a third multiply mode detail layer, while on Xbox the flexibility of pixel shaders lets the artists choose any possible combine modes for their three layers, with the fourth generally reserved for the programmers to do dynamic lighting or reflection effects."
"Figure 24: Mixing three texture layers.
For performance and memory reasons, on the Nintendo GameCube™ a meta-tile is not allowed to use more than three different texture layers blended together. In the data conversion each meta-tile that has non-trivial blending, is assigned a 32×32 pixels texture image that contains the mix-map information for that meta-tile."
December 20th, 2007 at 7:58 am
Realistically, I doubt very much, that Wii's fill-rate is "OVERKILL AT 480P", given it has the same rop pipeline configurations as the Gamecube, just with a higher clock frequency.
Perhaps overkill for what the Wii could ever actually do with them maybe.
December 20th, 2007 at 10:56 am
Wii60 FTW!!!!
December 21st, 2007 at 12:38 pm
wi60 no thanks i dony buy my consoles from computer op companys engaged in a set top box war with a general electric company caled sony
i buy my console from the greatest console builder / games company on earth nintendo
d=pads aint next gen ps3 is still built around a 8bit direction invention thats lafable
360 is all micro hype and again a out dated interface/controller
wii runs loadscreen free and offers pick up and play like no other
WHY ITS BECOUSE ITS DESIGNED AS A CONSOLE CLOSED SYSTEM CUSTOMIZED FOR IMIDIATE PICK UP AND PLAY GAMING AT HIGH SPEED
PS3 IS A FAKE COMPUTER
X360 IS A FAKE COMPUTER
WITCH = LONG LOADTIMES UNNESSESARY BULK MORE MULTI MEDIA THAN GAMING OPTERMIZED AND UNIMAMINATIVE OUTDATED CONTROLS
CLEARLY PROVING THERES A WINDOWS BRAND VS PLAYSTATION BRAND SET TOP BOX WAR
ONLY WII IS A GAMES CONSOLE
LONG LOSADTIMES AND BUGS THAT REQUIRE PATCHES IS ALLLLLL A WII BIT TO MUCH PC LIKE
ONLY WII IS A NEXT GEN CONSOLE THE OTHER 2 ARE CLEARLY COMPETING SET TOP MEDIA BOXES
SO AGAIN I SAY NINTENDO IS GAMING
PS AND X360 ARE INFACT HURTING GAMING THRU NONCENCE JACK OF ALL TRADE DESIGNS
IF MICROSOFT WAS HAND ON HEART CONSERNED ABOUT GAMING AND SONY TO
WOULDNT THEY HAVE NEW CONTROLS AND FAST LOADING
GAMING WAS A AFTER THOUGHT THERE OBSESSED WITH OUT MEDIA BOXING EACH OTHER
THAT WILL NLY END ONE WAY
GAMING WILL SUFFER
December 21st, 2007 at 2:51 pm
"WII PATENTS SHOW…" recycled Gamecube patents, of texturing techniques that have been around since Geforce 256's registry combiner days.
"Emboss bump mapping" has been around since forever, lots of Nintendo fans thought it was new, or thought it was a hardware specific form of displacement mapping, etc.. And then there was the "cube mapping", and "Nurbs" etc.. All false hope, grasping at straws, hoping that those specs that were released really didn't say it all….
And technically, if you read interviews with alot of Japanese developers, they'll tell you, that Nintendo is hurting the overall development of game design and technology in Japan, with it's recycling of it's Gamecube hardware. Many see their ambitious ideas being crushed, when they can't get funding and resources for next-gen development. They see extremely cheap mini-games selling well, and sucking up potential gaming revenue from the industry.
They see publishers asking them to shoe-horn their new ambitious ideas and game design, onto hardware they thought they had washed their hands of, and were being set free from with a newer generation of hardware. They were looking forward to getting the hang of newer, better technology, and stretch their legs with a much higher performance ceiling.
Only to have Nintendo shove a platform on them, that is hardly a nudge better than last generation technology. Most gaming staff, don't particularly care about waggle. Artists, animators, programmers, etc.. severely dislike the Wii for a very good reason.
December 21st, 2007 at 3:08 pm
@wiiboy
Stop, just stop now. Never again call the wii the only next gen…360 and Ps3 do EVERYTHING better than Wii. So what, they have load times, thats because they have good games, large games that are able to have load times and still be great games. The wii has loading too…its covered by sneaking programming such as a slow part in action, or a piece of speech. If there would be only one next-gen system, it wouldnt be the wii, the wii is a gamecube with a new controller scheme. A controller scheme that is annoying to play with in my opinion, its not precise at all. Give me a real controller, implement movement detection into that, and im good to go…now if only someone would do that…hmm…oh wait, the PS3 did! well, if only their sixaxis was better than wii's….wait for it….oh yeah, it is.
December 21st, 2007 at 3:10 pm
And you can also try to spell words correctly, as well as not using caps =)…nobody is impressed by your caps, nor by your useless specs that prove absolutely nothing.
December 21st, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Akio Morita of Afterlife programming inc., comments on the "parasite of gaming" that is Nintendo.
*"It'll be years before we recover from this. We are struggling to just keep pace with the rest of the industry. We don't have a strong PC background to fall back on, and it's getting more and more difficult to stay up to speed on technology this generation, thanks in no small part, to Nintendo's "thriftiness". They have effectively crippled our industry for years to come, and perhaps now, it is too late for us…..
*sobs*
*He chokes back the tears to continue* : "The people are scared. They're afraid to speak out against Nintendo, and they are worried about keeping their jobs. It is not good to bite the hand that feeds, but I felt compelled to, because I know that others will not. Nintendo does not care about us, they refuse to put quality regulations on the software released on their platform, to cut back on the mounds of crap that is bound to be released, especially now that hell has frozen over, and their platform has somehow become popular. Any ambitious titles run the risk of drowning in a cheap, sea of mini-game crap."
"When we brought our concerns to Nintendo, they spit in our face, and told us, "let the consumers decide what they buy". And what do they care, as long as they stick their franchise characters into a games, and drop the Nintendo name unto it, people will buy it. Being lost in a sea of crap, is our problem, not theirs."
"The old Nintendo is back. Consumer ignorance has awoken a sleeping giant, and they will utilize their newfound power, and rule us all with an iron "waggle" fist once again, and perhaps this time, there is no recovery." *places revolver to his temple, and squeezes the trigger*……."
Tis very sad.
December 25th, 2007 at 10:49 am
I didn't knew about the pixel recycling in the GC, do multiple pixelpipelines fix this? And another thing, why are the fillrates so high? For example, the 360 specifies 4Gpix/s. But assuming a 64bit databus, 500MHz bus speed and 24bpp calculates to 1.3Gpix/s in my book.
@Swp64: perhaps they exaggerated a bit? I think the Wii lacks in internal memory, but think about how much lines of code one should write to get a 700Mhz powerPC to its knees… Creating game logic is all about simplifying and deducing. If it wasn't, Quake1 (software rendered) could never run on a 90Mhz P1…
December 25th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Well, all 4 pixel pipelines are contributing to it's 648 million pixels per second fill rate. They're like assembly lines. Each assembly line can add 1 texture layer at a time. You'd have a mixture of different pixels with different numbers of texture layers etc.. But it's still 1 to 1 with fill rate.
Xbox is 2 to 1.
Of course, it's not that easy to compare the two. And it's likely that Gamecube hits closer to theoretical maximums, but those are still below Xbox.
I've also heard it mentioned from a few different places, that there really aren't any cases where Gamecube can out fill Xbox. (outside of perhaps transparent pixels) And there's a significant T&L difference in favor of Xbox, as well as a large math advantage in shaders for things like dot products, etc..
(so, on paper, XBox wins, in practice, Xbox still mostly wins)
I'm not really dissing Gamecube as a whole, it wasn't a bad console, and had a few advantages. I was just saying, it certainly doesn't "destroy" xbox is all. And he Wii doesn't change much in the gpu, outside of clock rate and additional ram and bandwidth.
(also, games like Wind Waker, Pikmin, and Mario Sunshine, all ran at ~30 frames per second, not 60. And I'd be surprised if any single level in Mario Sunshine, was made up of even 100,000 polygons total. So I doubt it's doing anything with more than a few million in any given second of time)
December 25th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
**1.3?
I assume you took 500mhz x 64bit bus = 3.2 / 24 bit pixels = 1.33 gp/s.
Actually, all pixels are at least 32 bit for color. 8-bits for red , green, blue, and alpha.-(transparency usually)
-Unless you're looking at Gamecube's 24-bit. Or sometimes, it's 18- bit color that it had to use sometimes. (6, 6, 6, 6) You can see lots of color banding in those cases.
Then you've also got a Z-value (depth), which are usually 32 bits. (24 bits + 8 bit stencil for things like shadows or reflections, etc..)
So it's actually 64 total bits per pixel.
And I'm not sure they've specified what the bus width was between the main die, and daughter die. Other than to say it's 32gb/s, enough for the full 4gp/s, plus a little more for other required data.
I have read 64×2 bit bus.
You'd have a color value per pixel in a quad, and 4to1 Z compression, (which in this case, is supposedly "always" 4to1, because it's transfered over the bus before rops gets it).
As it is though, the developer discussions and presentations confirm that it is practically impossible, to be bandwidth limited for frame buffer operations.
You'd become fill-rate limited before you'd ever become bandwidth limited.
Which would verify, that it's moving 32gb's to the daughter die.
Plus, it's fill-rate is theoretically higher than that, since the rops in edram can "technically" do 4x aa in the edram module over the top of that fill rate, in addition to gpu's 2x Z fill rate, unlike other gpus, which half fill-rate moving from 2x to 4x aa, and lose their double z-rate ability.
But all that makes alot of assumptions on what the game engine looks like, and how things are organized, etc.. So it's not telling much on performance in current games.
December 25th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
@not a fan.
He was actually exaggerating when he wrote that. Mostly sarcasm.
(Akio Morita has passed away, hence the "Afterlife programming inc")
I'm sure they can make decent games on the Wii, but I also think it is inhibiting progress.
There are a bunch of developer interviews that have said pretty much that, only one blames Nintendo specifically though.
But plenty of developers have said they're falling behind in programming in Japan. Partially just because of their culture being different from the west. They're new to middleware tools for example, and many of those, are English based. So it's frustrating to them.
Last generation, they had handhelds, and they had consoles. They were pretty separate items to make games on. Consoles were all somewhat close in power and what could be achieved on one, could "pretty much" be done on another, without changing much. So the idea that they had to stick to PS2 most of the time, wasn't "that" big of a deal.
Now, they have the handhelds, and they have the Wii and the other consoles. The Wii is the odd man out as far as game engines and power, etc.. go.
But it's also selling really well in Japan, while 360 probably never will, and PS3 hasn't caught on enough to get funding for anything but well known games. So, publishers are quick to push developers to put many of their ideas on the Wii. Typical programmers are techies, and really don't like the idea much. Nor do the animators, designers, or artists, etc..
Not all that different from the developer on Spore calling the Wii a "piece of shit" at the last GDC.
Couple that, with the fact that, because the Wii is doing so well and the others not so well, they can't push for better funding and support for r&d on newer technology, the way they did the last generation of hardware.
Publishers are cheap and like money, and developers pretty much have to do what they want, when they want it.
December 27th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
the xbox fans need to wake up the guy is simply telling the truth
xbox frontside bus = 133mhz no built in compression trick= 1gb bandwidth
wii frontside bus = 243mhz plus 4to1 data compression realtime decompression built in = 8gb
CLEARLY 8 TIMES MORE
WII cpu risc/copperwire/customized/silicon on insulator/256 k l2 catch 4to1 compresion data read realtime decompression
xbox cpu shitty aluminium celeron cisc cpu 128k catch no compression trick abbilitys..
wii gpu huge 3mb extreamly fast 1tsram edram graphics catch reads textures at 6 to 1 compressed in real time
xbox crappy 256k graphics catch no compression reading abillitys textures need to decompress before reading futher botlenecking the xbox
wii texture read = 16gb plus 6to1 compression = 64gb plus easy virtual texture read
xbox texture read only whats left in main memory after cpu sound and buffering taken there tole = 3.2 gb if that texture read that has to decompres before hitting the gpu…
xbox slow dinosure sdram at 200mhz clock doubled to 400mhz in memory controller
crappy slow latency issues
wii two main memorys extreamly fast 1t sram 24mb on die extreamly fast eficent catch like performance 5 nano seconds read speed 10 TIMES FASTER PLUS THAN XBOX DRAM
64MB GDDR3 seperate dedicated bus clock balanced to fsb and 1tsram etc better all round performance than xbox whole main memory
88mb of fast optermized ram plus custom compression in hardware
vs 64mb of slow ram and only half as much compression tricks
wii dedicated sound bus xbox all data shared on a slow 133mhz bus
broadway cpu is easy 2.5 times a off the shelf celeron xboxchip FACT
BROADWAY is copperwire silicon on insulator micro embedded design clock balanced risc cpu with added compression abillitys internal bandwidth is easy 4/5 times the xbox cpu
do your math
December 27th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
aparantly xbox out fillrates a gamecube IDIOT IDIOT IDIOT
YOU JUST DIRECTLY COMPARED PEAK TEXTEL PIXEL FILL RATES ON PAPER
1 FLIPPER WAS VASTLY MORE EFFICENT THAN XGPU AND WIS HOLLYWOOD IS MORE EFFICENT AGAIN
2 FLIPPER AND HOLLYWOOD ARE CUSTOM DEFERRED RENDERING GPUS XBOX IS TRADITIONAL EXPLAINATION FOLLOWS
VIRTUAL TETUREING= CULLING OF TEXTURE IMAGE AT TEXEL LEVEL I.E WHAT ISNT SEEN ON CAM ISNT RENDERED AKA DREAMCAST AND CUBE ONLY XBOX CANNOT DO THAT
PIXEL CULLING= WERE AS XBOX AND MORE SO PS2 HAVE TO RENDER A PIXEL FOR EVERY RENDER LAYER GAMECUBE AND WII MULTI RENDER TO ONE DRAWN PIXEL I.E PIXEL EFICENT JUST LIKE TEXEL EFFICENT
POLYGON CULLING= POLYGONS THAT ARE SEEN ARE DRAWN POLYGONS THAT ARE NOT SEEN ARE NOT DRAWN AKA GAMECUBE AND DREAMCAST ONLY XBOX CAN NOT DO THAT
HOLLYWOOD IN WII DOES IT EVEN BETTER
XGPU WAS BOTTLENECKED IN MANY WAYS POOR EFFICENTCIE JUST LIKE ALL PC CARDS
POOR LATENCY OF MEMORY
TINY CATCH PERFORMANCRE
FSB BANDWIDTH BOTLENECK
NOT DESIGNED FOR 480I 480P IT WAS DESIGNED FOR PC MONITORS NOT TV SETS
NO REALTIME COMPRESSION
EFFECTIVE IN GAME PIXEL TEXEL FILLRATE WAS BETWEN 300M/P M/T TO 750M/P M/T
IN GAME
FLIPPER IN GAMECUBE INFLATED ITS FILRATE THRU DEFERRED RENDERING
AND MATCHED IF NOT BETTERED XBOX FILLRATE
FACTOR 5 ROGUE SQODRON 2 60 FRAMES 15 MILLION POLYGONS NO FILLRATE ISSUES PRO SCAN 8 TEXTURE LAYERS 512X512 TEXTURE SUPPORT
SAME GAME ON XBOX WOULD HAVE HAD TO CULL ITS FRAMES TO 24FPS AND HAVE MUCH LONGER LOADTIMES
ROGUE SQODRON 3 NEAR 20 MILLION POLYGONS NEAR PERFECT 60 FRAMES AND 512X512 TEXTURES SUPPORTED
REAL TIME LIGHT SCATTERING FAKE HDR LIGHTING SHADING BLENDING BUMP MAPPING ETC
TWILIGHT PRINCESS GAMECUBE / WII GAMECUBE GRAPHICS ENGINE BETTER LOOKING THAN ANYTHING ON XBOX
WIND WAKER BETTER CELL SHADING THAN AYTHING ON XBOX
FLIPER AND GEKKO HAD 2.5 TIMES THE INTERNAL BANDWIDTH OF XBOX CHIP SET
CLEarly wii has 4/5 times internal bandwidth than xbox
gpu supports custom deferred rendering plus high bandwidth low latency realtime compression catch custom effects and a real; time 16 stage shader tree called TEV
mario galaxty has better graphics better animation better phsyics and faster loading than anything ever on cube or xbox
so how again is wii a xbox galaxy has no loadtimes or frame drops and clearly supporting muti texture layers and real time shaders plus hdr lighting etc
monster hunter 3 clearly shows graphics that are high end in this new generation and will be rendered at 480p so apart from resolution theres simply no graphics war is there
xgpu was inefficent fact //// xbox system was simply ineficent fact and compared to wii simply much less powerfull and optermizedf for 480p rendering
wii is a version 2 of gamecube gamecube was more effective and efficent than xbox and wii is more effective efficent than gamecube so its clear the xbox brigade are talking out the wrong end of there bodys
custom deferred rendering AKA FAKED TILE RENDERING combined with fast ram highly efficent system performance = INSANE FILRATE
FACTOR 5 ON WII WII IS MORE THAN 2X XBOX SPEED
CLEARLY WII IS 2X XBOX GAMECUBE LEVEL CHIP SET AND AROUND 3.5 TO 4 TIMES THE RAM PERFORMANCE
2.5 TIMES PLUS A XBOX CUBE LEVEL MACHINE
December 27th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
long story made short
xgpu 120 million polygons on paper = ingame 12 million polygons at 30 frames clearly a huge gap between on paper and in game same applys to pixels and texels xbox was inefficent…………
gamecube around 90 million polygons on paper= near 20 million polygons in game at allmost perfect 60 frames a second clearly the gap between the on paper spec and in game real performance was vastly superier ingame were it matters………
wiis hollywood is not only higher clock and spec than gamecubes gpu its allso more effective eficent so accual in game performance clock for clock is higher again
wii can near match 360 minus hd native resolution FACT
LOOK UP THE WORDS CUSTOM EFFICENT
LOOK UP TILE RENDERING
DO YOUR HOMEWORK
December 27th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
GUYS!!!!!!…..Who gives a flying flip?????
seriously
Why don't you all go outside and find girlfriends…….
December 27th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
shut up wii fanboy, the wii is a pee shooter next to next to the nuke that is the ps3 and 360.
even if it does *some how* outperform the original xbox, it is still not very powerful compared to the same generation consoles released around the same time.
new gen console + old gen technology = not very good.
December 27th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
"VIRTUAL TETUREING= CULLING OF TEXTURE IMAGE AT TEXEL LEVEL I.E WHAT ISNT SEEN ON CAM ISNT RENDERED AKA DREAMCAST AND CUBE ONLY XBOX CANNOT DO THAT
PIXEL CULLING= WERE AS XBOX AND MORE SO PS2 HAVE TO RENDER A PIXEL FOR EVERY RENDER LAYER GAMECUBE AND WII MULTI RENDER TO ONE DRAWN PIXEL I.E PIXEL EFICENT JUST LIKE TEXEL EFFICENT
It's as though you guys don't read anything that is written to you.
http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:TXaryQQ0gdgJ:www.activewin.com/reviews/hardware/graphics/nvidia/gf4ti4600/gf2.shtml+%22Z-Occlusion+culling%22+hardware+surface+removal%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a
And you're speaking of the virtual texturing that takes place, to move textures in and out of it's texture cache, of which it needed, for the way in which it handled multi-texturing effects.
It's not RENDERING the way Dreamcast did. It's just rendering to it's framebuffer, which just happened to be on chip.
And neither Gamecube, nor Xbox are as efficient at HSR as the Dreamcast.
And as I said, Gamecube can add ONE texture per pixel, additional pixels cut fill rate. FACT.
Xbox can add 2 texture layers without halving fill-rate. Gamecube cannot.
You keep bringing up points out of context, and continue to misread your info, and assume most of those points you think you have found about Gamecube, are some awesome new Gamecube exclusive technology.
For example, Xbox uses "single pass multi-texturing", just like the Gamecube did. All that means, is the gpu doesn't have to recalculate the POLYGON, every time it wants to add a texture layer.
You're confused. The re-rendering of a polygon in "multi-pass rendering", i.e = PS2 issue, and it's not as big of a deal on PS2, because the PS2 can calculate more polygons than Xbox and Gamecube combined. It just has to keep recalculating them for every texture layer.
Adding a texture layer over 1, cuts the Gamecube's pixel fill-rate in half. That is the way it is, the way it was, and the way it will continue to be for the Wii.
""EFFECTIVE IN GAME PIXEL TEXEL FILLRATE WAS BETWEN 300M/P M/T TO 750M/P M/T
IN GAME""
Yep, sounds exactly like the benchmarks I've seen, and fits with what the paper specs say. But, here's why.
Xbox = 1 texture layer = ~700 million pixels per sec.
xbox = 2 texture layers = ~600 - 700 million pixels per sec. (1.2-1.4 texels)
Xbox - 3 texture layers ~300 -400 million pixels per sec
Xbox = 4 texture layers = ~300 - 400 million pixels per sec.
Gamecube (assuming maximum efficiency)
1 texture layer = 648 million pixles per second.
2 texture layers = 324 million pixels per second.
3 texture layers = 162 million pixels per second.
4 texture layers = 61 million pixels per second.
That is the truth in how it layered textures.
I put the important points in quotation marks, in case you guys want to look them up for once.
December 27th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
And Xbox's cpu + 2 vertex shaders > Gamecube's cpu + generic T&L unit.
It's not even close. Even if I assume we falsly assume that flipper had more power at everything.
And you guys keep copy and pasting compression numbers, and bus width numbers, on issues you don't even try to understand.
****"gpu 120 million polygons on paper = ingame 12 million polygons at 30 frames clearly a huge gap between on paper and in game same applys to pixels and texels xbox was inefficent…………"*****gamecube around 90 million polygons on paper= near 20 million polygons in game at allmost perfect 60 frames a second clearly the gap between the on paper spec and in game real performance was vastly superier ingame were it matters***
90 milion = lol
And these numbers are simply based on the traditional matrix x vector calculation. In other words, it takes 4 clock cycles for the t&l processor to calculate a simple vertex transform. So, for every vertex processor you have = 1/4 the clock frequency. Same is true on every pc gpu's spec sheet.
SInce Xbox has 2 vertex shader processors, it can theoretically transform 116.5 vertices per second.
Gamcube hss 1 generic T&L unit. Theoretiaal maximum is 1/4 its clock. or 40 million vertices per second. Of course, Xbox was far, far superior in math calculations in respect to vertex work, and could drive it's pixel shaders directly. (normal mapping, etc..)
Gamecube would need it's cpu to similar things (and its fsb), of which it wasn't powerful enough to do so.
Gamecube has simplified lighting model, so apples to apples comparison isn't possible. But overall, Xbox still had the advantage in T&L processing, and a huge advantage in what could be done in them.
And, as I'm sure you know, vertex shader are more complex than simple transforms, especially on Xbox. And vertex processing is assessed based on that processing power. The number you wind up with on screen, is only part of the equation.
Overall,
Xbox > Gamecube
Every developer that has ever touched them both, will tell you the same thing.
You guys just need to learn to accept that, and move on.
December 27th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Edit, probably more like this.
I probaly made the Gamecube even more feeble than I should have.
Sorry about that.
Xbox = 1 texture layer = ~750 million pixels per sec.
xbox = 2 texture layers = ~650 - 700 million pixels per sec. (1.2-1.4 texels)
Xbox - 3 texture layers ~300 -400 million pixels per sec
Xbox = 4 texture layers = ~300 - 400 million pixels per sec.
Gamecube (assuming maximum efficiency)
1 texture layer = 648 million pixles per second.
2 texture layers = 324 million pixels per second.
3 texture layers = 216 million pixels per second.
4 texture layers = 162 million pixels per second.
December 27th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
The Wii is a "piece of shit", compared to the other two. At everything.
No amount of misinterpreting specs data, caps locked copy and paste arguments are going to change that.
Even if you stick to 480p. The power is just not there.
A geforce 4 is more powerful than the Wii, and significantly more flexible and versatile. That's just the way it is.
\No need to add to why your specs are wrong cubepeople, it's been said a half dozen times now. You can keep right on assuming Gamecube was magically several times better than Xbox. And ignore games like Doom 3, Ninja Gaiden Black, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Half Life 2, DOA3, Forza, 720p Soul Calibur 2, etc..
And keep comparing a closed corridor (non-bump mapped) game like Metroid Prime, to a much more wide open (bump mapped) game like Halo 2, and somehow draw some sort of conclusions on power from that. That's cool, "keep the dream alive".
(note, no one is saying the Gamecube wasn't capable of good looking games, you don't need a ton of bump-mapping with good art direction, and working within your limits)
Realistically, the only thing Nintendo games have going for them this gen, is the fact that they're well made. Controls, Graphics, animation, story, etc..
Sure, Mario Sunshine had crappy low res textures in most places, and a limited number of polygons in it's levels, but it stayed around 30 frames per second, and it's limitations fit the art direction well. They just over saturated the color on everything, and kept everything clean, and it looked good.
Same for Galaxy. Nothing to complain with those. Same will be true for future titles as well. But people holding out for a miracle, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.
****wii can near match 360 minus hd native resolution FACT***
There really are no facts to support that. In game, on paper, in theory…etc..
December 28th, 2007 at 9:32 am
@branH. Thanks for your answer. Yeah, that's the way I calculated. But to be honest, I think Microsoft specifies 360's fillrates in 8BPP w/o z buffering. I mean, even if it could do 2 memory transactions in one clock cycle it wouldn't be enough. Plus the memory must support that as well in non burst mode (or is burst mode prehistoric these days:) requiring a 1GHZ memory bus. As far as I know, the 360 only has 512MB of shared memory, right?
Same goes for the 500M polygons they spec, sure I believe that GPU can calculate one poly per clock cycle, but how many pixels will it consist of: 8 neighboring on a single line, 256 colour pixels at a maximum! The 8 bit alpha you are talking about doesn't necessary need to be stored in memory BTW: the GPU can use the alpha value of the *new* pixel to blend it with the framebuffer's pixel. That's my experience with nokia phones at least.
Did you benchmark the gamecube's fillrates BTW? Say that it does z-buffering and pixelrecycling for 2 layers. It means we need 2 texture reads, 1 z-buffer read, 1 z-buffer write, 1 recycle read and 1 framebuffer write. Wouldn't this mean the extra texture only requires 2 additional memory transactions on top of the other 4, making it faster than 324Mpix/s? Also, if flipper has separated framebuffer and texturecache databusses, it can recycle a pixel AND read a new pixel at the same time which makes your statement a bit questionable. Are you sure about its architecture? (I can't think of any reason why it has 3MB on die if it already has 24MB memory clocked at the same speed as GPU)
@Swp64: how about titles such as Conan, NFS pro street and darkness. Those will run on Wii, 360 and PS3. Perhaps those titles are least GFX, RAM and CPU demanding but aren't released on last gen systems. As for your last sentence: If I'm right about 360's fillrate being 8BPP, Wii's fill rate is on par considering 480P.
December 28th, 2007 at 10:14 am
GUYS!!!! Girlfriends……Go Outside………Get Girls…..simple concept…..
December 28th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Fill rate isn't the definitive measure of a gpu. Shader instructions have taken over texture instructions. The level of vertex and pixel shader instructions, physics, etc.. Just puts alot of it out of the Wii's reach, for things like mesh deformation, etc.. You can't do alot of things newer hardware does, when it doesn't have the hardware for it. You can replace things with cheaper methods, but you could technically do that on Xbox, or Dreamcast, or even Gamecube. Doesn't really mean it matches them.
And Gamecube's fill-rate with multiple texture layers, are just base numbers based on it's blending ability, to compare generically to XBox numbers.
Texture read, combiner op, combiner op, texture read, combiner, etc.. Things may be higher or lower under different circumstances on XBox as well, but that's generically how it works out, with Gamecube being more efficient with what it has, Xbox being more powerful.
Xbox having 2 to 1 texel/pixel rate, Gmaecube having 1 to 1.
Which matches what most developer say. And you can see it in games. Where reflections are moving on helmuts in Madden, but baked into the texture on Gamecube, etc.. Xbox generally has 1 or more texture layer than Gamecube.
(Also depends on what is defined as a texture layer too i"m sure)
December 29th, 2007 at 11:46 am
@swp: yeah completely true. But that doesn't take away that both 360 and Wii are on par doing 1 layer textures. I don't think the GC's, nor the Wii's, nor the XBOX1's main CPU is fast enough to calculate cheap "texture effects" anyway. The amount of pixels to process is too much. An all software renderer might do it faster since it only processes the pixels that are actually displayed. So I agree, hw support is a must. However, developers must care to put in the extra time and cash to actually use it. If I was Microsoft, I'd demand/pay 360 developers to do so.
On the other hand, I'm still stunned by RE4 for example. I like its hi-res textures and static lightning. Now if they would use phong or gauroud shading instead of flat shading it would be enough for me. (of course, I haven't played any games since Quake 1 so I'm easily impressed).
BTW, the XBOX came out later than gamecube didn't it? That makes it very likely they made it more powerfull than other consoles.
@ManOfTeal: my GF has a Wii… But perhaps you should go out yourself instead of wasting your time on this thread
December 30th, 2007 at 3:57 am
@not a fan.
You're assuming they claim their peak fill-rate, based on 8 bit pixels, with no Z-buffering? Of what use is that really?
Thing is though, they haven't really gone into detail on the bus between the main gpu, and the edram. Other than to say, it's "32 gbs per second".
Someone at NEC had said once, that the bandwidth between main die, and daughter die, is 22.4 gb per second. But someone from Microsoft corrected it,
with: "Reply:32GB/s is the correct (original) BW from parent to daughter die.
This is 8 pix/clk * (4B(32b) color + 4B(32b) z) == 64B/clk * 500MHz è 32GB/sec. It is actually a little higher than that, but that is close enough and simple enough to go with. If NEC is claiming 22.4, that is wrong."
Which mirrors most developer comments, in that you'll become fill-rate limited, before you become bandwidth limited in regards to frame-buffer ops.
If the rops provide 4 gigapixels, but were bandwidth limited at 1.3 gigapixels, then everyone would be saying it's bandwidth limited, as that would be the limiting factor.
(in that sense, they consider frame-buffer bandwidth to be pretty much infinite)
As you have the (write only) bus between main die and edram module,(supposedly 32 gbps) and separate busing from there, between rops and the edram itself, (256 gbps) which is where all the z-testing, alpha blendng, 4xaa takes place etc. Then it's resolved, and flushed to main ram as a frame, part of a frame, or data to be used as input for the gpu again)
That's how/why they stuck with a 128 bit bus to gddr3. Because the gpu itself, only sees main ram as read only for texture and vertex data, rather than putting all the read, write, read/modify/write traffic on it.
December 30th, 2007 at 5:56 am
@NotaFan - Well, I meant replace one type of mapping technique with a cheaper method, or reduce polygon count and complexity, animation, etc.. and you can emulate vertex shaders on the cpu to some extent, not much you can do for pixels though.
And as a theoretical benchmark.
360 can "technically" render each pixel:
"with 4x anti-aliasing, a z-buffer, 2 texture fetches, 6 shader operations, at the full 8 pixels per clock." (of course, this is assuming bs maximum efficiency)
But Wii can't do any aa without cutting fill-rate at 1 texture (unless they changed their method of aa), so it's already well below 1/4, without considering much else. And that's to cover only 1/3 the resolution, and it's all down hill from there as well.
@MoT - My gf also has a Wii, of which I bought her, and play more than she does, but still. (There is no Animal Crossing yet)
December 30th, 2007 at 6:24 am
you guys arnt gamers,
YOUR NERDS!
December 31st, 2007 at 11:01 am
@BranH: Ok, so basically you are saying that the GPU has a cache that supports the required bandwidth and uses main mem for reading purposes only? That would be an interesting setup and fully explains what this machine can do. (Damn, today's technology goes too far:) Thanks for your explaination.
@Swp: You are right. I haven't seen any AA in Wii games. The downcatch is that graphics keep on looking "computer generated" with sharp edges and stuff. What exactly do you mean by other means of AA? Are there cheap alternatives available?
@havoc of smeg: go learn how to write some proper English first, you dyslexic buttplug. In between you could learn some good stuff by just reading this thread instead of posting meaningless comments.
December 31st, 2007 at 2:47 pm
@not a fan
if you dont like my english, you can f**k off to russia or germany, where they dont speak or write english.
as for the console tech spec posts, i would, if they were interesting and didnt send me to sleep.
just not as interested in how consoles work as i am with the games you can play on them.
December 31st, 2007 at 5:43 pm
@Not a fan - From what I recall of the Gamecube, the way the pipeline was set-up, it could do aa behind 2 texture layers. i.e, aa would half fill-rate, but if you're multi-texturing, it's hidden behind that.
December 31st, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Yep, using 2 tev stages cuts fill-rate by half and hides the effects of aa.
But doing aa, required dropping to 16-bit color, and 16-bit z, And it's maximum resolution was 640×264, as opposed to 640×528 for no aa.
I would have thought they'd change at least that in the Wii though.
And in case anyone wanted to look it up, I'll highlight some important parts in their patent.
And keep in mind, that this patent was written, back when Gamecube's gpu was expected to be 202 mhz, hence, the higher peak fill-rate figures listed.
(It was later clocked back to 168 mhz before release)
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:fmFqDVMovkkJ:www.freepatentsonline.com/EP1182617.html+%22include+an+on-chip+texture+memory%22+%22embedded+frame+buffer+(EFB)+has+a+memory+capacity+of+approximately+2MB%22+%22anti-aliasing+also+reduces+peak+fill+rate+from+800Mpixels/s+to+400Mpixels/s%22+%22using+two+TEV+stages+also+reduces+the+fill+rate+to+400Mpixels/s%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a
December 31st, 2007 at 7:21 pm
Ok, looks like the url is to long to be posted, so i can't highlight everything at once.
I'll try again.
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:fmFqDVMovkkJ:www.freepatentsonline.com/EP1182617.html+%22anti-aliasing+also+reduces+peak+fill+rate+from+800Mpixels/s+to+400Mpixels/s%22+%22using+two+TEV+stages+also+reduces+the+fill+rate+to+400Mpixels/s%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:50 pm
the above gamecube fillrates have compleatly ignored the abillity flipper had that xgpu and ps2 gs unit didnt YOU ARE USING STANDARD NUMBERS AND STANDARD ARCITEXTURES ON A DEFERRED RENDING CUSTOM CHIP PROVING TO mii YOU DONT KNOW A DAM THING YOUR ON ABOUT
DOUBLE THOSE FILLRATE NUMBERS PLEASE THEN THERE CURRECT
PIXEL CULLING NON REPEAT PIXEL RENDERING
POLYGON CULLING THE ABBILLITY TO CULL THE POLYGONS DRAWN
VIRTUAL TEXTURE DESIGN CULLING AND TRIMMING OF REALTIME TEXTURES
READ UP TILE RENDERING ON DREAMCAST AND DAM LEARNS YOURSELFS
DREAMCAST PEAK FILL WAS 100M/P BUT ITS """""""""""INGAME EFFECTIVE FILLRATE THE FILLRATE THAT MATTERS AS ITS ON SCREEN NOT ON PAPER WAS 300M/P DUE TO FILLRATE CULLING AKA TILE RENDERING""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
APLY HALF THE FILL ADVANTAGE OF DREAMCAST TO HOLLYWOOD GPI IN wii
hollywood fillrate is over 900m/p and 900m/t peak on paper
1 hollywood gets much much much much much closer to that figure than xgpu got to its peak figure BECOUSE HOLLYWOOD IS INSANLY EFFICENT IT CAN ACCUALLY NEAR ATTIVE ITS ON PAPER FILLRATES """""EFFICENTCIE""""" LOOK IT UP
THEN ADD TO THOSE NUMBERS
PIXEL CULLING
POLYGON CULLING
VIRTUAL TEXTURE DESINING
ALL SUPPORTED IN HARDWARE AKA """"RIPPED OFF TILE RENDERING ABILLITY""""""
LETS SAY HOLLYWOOD WIIS GPU WAS ABILE TO HIT 972 M/P M/T IN GAME
ITS ON SCREEN FILLRATE EFFECTIVENESS WOULD ACCUALLY BE 2X 972M/P 2X 972M/T
AS THE DEFERRED RENERING TRICK APPLYS
EVEN AT 4 PIXEL PIPES AND TEXTURE UNITS WII9 IS A NEAR 2GPIXEL 2GTEXEL MACHINE
THATS A HIGH 720P FILLREATE BEING USED ON A 480P CAPPED CONSOLE
AKA IN YOUR FACE I KNOW WHAT IM TALIKING ABOUT """""INSANE FILLRATE @ LOW RESOLUTION"""""""
JUST LIKE FACTOR 5 SAID INSANE FILLRATE
THERE TALKING IN GAME NOT ON PAPER
TWILIGHT PRINNESS ON GAMECUBE HAD BETTER GRAPHICS AND FASTER LOADING THAN ANYTHING EVER PRODUCED ON A XBOX
SO DID WIND WAKER SO DID RESIDENT EVIL 4 SO DID FZERO SO DID PRIME 2
ALL THE ABOVE TITALS OUT GRAPHIC-ED AND OUT LOADING SPEED-ED ANYTHING EVER ON XBOX
SO AGAIN """"AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHHHHHH"""""""
EXPLAIN HOW WII IS ONLY A XBOX
IT AINT SINKING IN IS IT COUGH FANBOYS
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:56 pm
972M/P AND 972M/T PLUS DEFERRED CUSTOM RENDERING = NEAR 2G PIXEL 2 GTEXEL IN GAME FILLRATE
THAT IS INSANE AT 480P
PLEASE DO YOUR MATH
GAMECUBE 600 PLUS MPIXELS AND 600 PLUS MTEXELS PLUS DEFERRED RENDERING= 1200 PLUS PIXEL TEXEL FILLRATE
FLIPPER AND FLIPPER 2 AKA HOLLYEWOOD RENDER IN A HIGHLY EFFICENT EFFECTIVE WAY THEY DONT RENDER IN THE LAME ASSSED BOTTLENECKED WAY THE XBOX RENDERED
I WIN PROVE MII WRONG
Wii is clearly a 2.5 times xbox cube level machine
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:08 pm
effective in game numbers are real the xbox fans are basing there opinions on …on paper numbers and clockspeeds..
wiiboy cubeboy who ever he is is basing the argument on ingame "effective performance" the performance that we all will acualy see in are games.
sorry he clearly wins this it reminds me of the xbox fans that tried to say xbox 1 had a pentium 3 in it when infact it had a celeron
or the xbox fans that said xbox cpu was more powerfull than gamecubes amasing gekko cpu when infact it wasnt
celerons are totally shit and xbox 1 had a bog standard celeron 733mhz cpu with a bog stanard outdated 133mhz buz
gamecube had a highly shrunk highly optermized gamecentric custom version of a 750powerpc cpu it was risc not cisc it was copper not aluminium it had 256k catch plus compression the list goes on and on
xbox had a off the shelf low end spredsheet cpu celeron 733mhz THATS ONE CRAP CPU
xbox 733mhz 128k catch standard cisc cpu with 133mhz bus………
gamecube gekko custom designed micro design and copperwire and gamecentric custom optermized with 163mhz plus 4to1 compression
163mhz bus plus 4to1 compression
why look at clock numbers when the arcitexture clearly proves you wrong
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Lol, monotonous. I am not interested in Microsoft as a company, as a hardware manufacturer, or as a console. Same is true for Nintendo, Sony, Nvidia, ATI, etc..
Keep making things up, and using terms you clearly do not understand. If you did, you'd have noticed the Gamecube does not render the same as the Dreamcast. You keep making the assumption, that because the Gamecube uses a form of "hidden surface removal", that it's Dreamcast in nature.
They aren't the same thing. They do the same "type" of thing, but not the same efficiency.
Whoever told you that, lied to you.
And as I think has been pointed out, and has been explained, and has been quoted to you, you can see it in games, in developer comments, everywhere, all of these magical compression techniques, bus and bandwidths, etc.. that you continue to quote out of context, does nothing to prove anything of what you claim.
And as I think has also been pointed out, the Gamecube cpu would have to attempt to step in and help, assuming you wanted to run the same scenes an Xbox could. Gamecube had no vertex shaders, and it's cpu was nowhere near powerful enough.
(and btw, no one said Wii was a piece of shit compared to Xbox)
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Wiiboy, you clearly thought the Gamecube only rendered 1 pixel, and added textures to it, and the other did the opposite, when in fact it does not.
You clearly made the assumption that "single pass multi-texturing" was Gamecube exclusive, when in fact it is not.
You clearly assumed Gamecube and Gamecube alone used Z-occlusion, early z-checks, and compression, when it clearly is not.
You continue to give framerates, and figures, and flailing your arms, with your cap-locking responses, and you clearly don't even try to understand any of what you write. You clearly seem to think it "blows Xbox out of the water", when it clearly does not. Most developers have also said, "it clearly does not". And in many cases, the advantage is the other way around.
No one was saying Xbox "destroys Gamecube", (those were your claims the other way around), just that you are attempting to significantly exaggerate your claims. It clearly "does nothing of the sort", and you seem to assume anyone that disagrees with that, is a fanboy.
You're completely blinded by rabid irrational fanboyism. (clearly)
And I wonder why people waste their time with you.
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:52 pm
@xboxmodder = "why look at clock numbers when the arcitexture clearly proves you wrong"
At what point did I use clock numbers to claim anything? Did I bring up the fact that Xbox's cpu was clocked nearly twice as fast? Did I bring up clock frequencies of ram? Nope.
You're using typical responses designed to counter people using generic figures such as those, in order to defend the Gamecube's honor. I used it's architecture to imply that it does nothing to "blow the Xbox out of the water".
If this were a situation where Gamecube and Xbox were relatively equal on paper, only Gamecube was customized, and XBox was "off the shelf", it would be easy to say Gamecube > Xbox. But that is NOT the case here.
I even said specifically, that overall, Gamecube is more efficient, but that that efficiency is what allowed it to keep pace, not overtake Xbox.
The architecture "clearly" proves me "right", in that you're numbers out of context, and there's nothing you can say to prove otherwise.
And it matters not to me, which cpu was more powerful. I did say, Xbox cpu + two programmable vertex shaders > Gamecube's cpu + generic T&L. That is reality.
(and keep in mind, that I'm not disagreeing with Wiiboy, for the sake of fanboyism. He simply made statements that I find to be incorrect, from simply checking up on what he claimed. (in a very condescending, fanboyish way)
I'm not interested in pumping up one company over another. If I had a choice, the Wii would have been powerful enough to run modern game engines as is, but targeted at ntsc. They could have gotten all the ports from the other systems, and still had it's own unique games as well. I would likely have been happy with JUST that, for the remainder of this generation, as I don't mind the standard tv at the moment.
As to Wiiboy, every gpu and their momma does indeed use HSR. None of them draw textures and effects to all pixels. Xbox had hardware occlusion query, occlusion culling, compression, etc.. Not as if it didn't.
All of your posts are hyperbole, designed to worship the capabilities of the Gamecube and Wii. I care not for any of these companies. You assume anyone that doesn't feel the same way about the Gamecube and Wii, to be fanboys positioned on the opposite side of the isle. (If that were the case, the entire gaming industry is on the same side, including Nintendo to some extent)
@the nerd comments. This is no different than a typical baseball or football discussion. You don't have to be a loser to wonder and investigate how things work. Especially if you were looking into a job that might employ such things.
And as to fill-rate and texture rate, etc.. Most developers I have seen comment, the one I know personally, (whom only worked on Gamecube directly, but had all the internal Xbox docs, and was in a position to comment) have said the same thing. And there are plently of developer comments that mirror that. The most you will get, is Gamecube = Xbox, and that will be a very specific narrow circumstance. Not an overall statement. And of course you'll find a few things that Gamecube could do better.
But overall, developer consensus is Xbox > or = Gamecube. With most just going with the >. On paper, in practice, in theory, etc.. And none of completely "out of context" specs quoting will change that.
There's nothing wrong with that. Nintendo competed well in all areas. Gamecube was a fine system. (for last generation hardware)
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:40 pm
And to add to the response to Xboxmodder, if I were using straight clock frequencies to determine fill-rate, I would have said 933 million pixels per second, for 1 or 2 texture layers. But I didn't. I used Wiiboy's own quotes, and benchmarks I've seen posted, to get the 350-750 million number I listed for Xbox. Not theoretical maximums. I just assumed full, theoretical maximums for Gamecube.
From Erp, known developer on B3d.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/archive/index.php/t-2168.html
Keep scrollong through the thread. I would mark it up with Google's cache, but it won't let me post the link here, and I don't think this place allows html.
Plenty of other known developers that imply the same things, (as I've already done in this thread) They all come to the same conclusions regarding Xbox and Gamecube.
And just a side note: I would assume the Fifa developer in the original topic of this thread, described Wii's video hardware as, "not being as powerful as Xbox", in regards to capability, rather than performance.
Sort of like saying, Photoshop is a "powerful" tool in editing photos. Or 3dmaya is a powerful modeling tool, etc.. He's just using "powerful" in the context of what it can and cannot do, rather than actual performance with what it's capable of.
I doubt he means the Xbox could outperform the Wii, at something made specifically within the parameters of the Wii hardware.
So, don't imply that I have said Xbox = or > Wii. I "clearly" agree that it isn't. Just based on ram alone, and ignoring anything else.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:50 pm
GAME OF THE YEAR 2007 GAMESPOT/EDGE MAGAZINE/GAMETRAILER ALL OTHER RESPECTED REVIEWERS ETC WIL ALL FOLLOW SUIT
GAME OF THE YEAR 2007 OVERALL ALL FORMATS
M-A-R-I-O G-A-L-A-X-Y
OUCH DOSNT THE TRUTH HURT
THE 1ST XBOX ZOMBIE TO SAY MARIO GALAXYS ZERO LOADSCREENS AND HIGH LEVEL PHYSICS AND GRAPHICS ARE CAPABLE ON A XBOX 1
IS A BORN LYER
THE PHYSICS ALONE IN GALAXY ARE AMASING
NO LOADTIMES AND 60 FALTLES FRAMES A SECOND AND CLAss leading platforer graphics
on a so— called xbox level machine
what a long winded thread when all alone post 1 was the truth EA LIED it was a marketing/policical statment
NOT A STATMENT OF FACT ON WIIS POWER
PLEASE LEARN THAT EA FEAR NINTENDOS INDUSTRY LEADING POWER
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ XBOXFANSZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
FUNNY M,ARIO GALAXY LOOKS 100% NEXT GEN AND RUNS AT A SOLID 60 FRAMES AND IS THE BEST VIDEO GAME THIS YEAR AND A GENUNIE TOP 5 OF ALL TIME GAME
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:52 pm
WERE IS THE X360 ALL FORMAT WINNER UPS THERE AINT ONE
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:37 pm
I thought Mario Galaxy was an awesome game. Not all from a technical perspective, but in general. It likely deserves game of the year.
But it's graphics and physics, aren't a testament that the Wii is as powerful as a PS3 or 360, just that a game that's well made and designed is a good game, regardless of power. (no one is disagreeing with that)
And the physics and graphics are far more interesting, than they are amazing, as far as processing power goes.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Xboxmodder - technically, (if I recall correctly), it's a 777mhz Celron with the same 8-way associative cache used in Pentium III. (according to the Linux profile on modded XBoxes)
Of course, you only have 128kb cache, etc.. But it's not the same as a stock Celeron either. As it is, most hyped comparisons between G3s and Pentiums,was between G3 and Pentium II anyway. "up to" twice as powerful at the same clock rate. With particular emphasis on "up to". i.e, in certain cases they cherry picked, other cases not so much, and in a few others, the other way.
But, then again, Gamecube used a custom modified G3, so it may very well have been 2x at the same clock rate in many, if not most cases. Bringing it's cpu up to at least Xbox, if not superior.
But, as I think has been stated, Gamecube used tradition T&L, XBox had vertex shaders, which puts more load on Gamecube's cpu. (and bus)
@Xboxmodder–""effective in game numbers are real the xbox fans are basing there opinions on …on paper numbers and clockspeeds..wiiboy cubeboy who ever he is is basing the argument on ingame "effective performance" the performance that we all will acualy see in are games.
sorry he clearly wins this""
Lol, you clearly didn't read many of his posts. It's quite clear he's the one shoving the paper specs and numbers around "out of context" to prove some kind of point. Tech discussions are fun and informative, fanboy driven arguments are not. Too many people with agendas to be interesting.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:27 pm
@Swp64-"Tech discussions are fun and informative, fanboy driven arguments are not. Too many people with agendas to be interesting."
Lol, "said the pot to the kettle(s)". Mr. "Nintendo's new found market leadership + lack of processing power = crippled programming innovations from Japan = Seppuku. (Hara-kiri)"
But yeah, much of what can be done with Xbox's vertex shaders, would have to be job shared between the geometry engine and the CPU on Gamecube to achieve the same thing.
And it wasn't anywhere near powerful enough to do the same things most of the time.
(but to be fair, overall, there are some of things you could do on Gamcube, that you couldn't do on an Xbox, but that list was very short and specific. The list gets pretty long the other way around)
January 11th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
wii and gamecube physics in the lead
YOU TUBES ALL FOLLOWING VIDEOS
PS3 PHYSICS DEMO /PS3 INGAME PHYSICS
VS
GAMECUBE MARIO 128 DEMO / ELIBITS WII /MARIO GALAXY
GAMECUBES INTERACTIVE MARIO 128 A.I /PHYSICS DEMO IS MORE IMPRESSIVE THAN PS3S NON INTERACTIVE DEMO
ELIBITS IN GAME PHYSICS MORE IMPRESSIVE THAN PS3S NON INTERACTIVE DEMO
MARIO GALAXY IN GAME PHYSICS AGAIN MORE IMPRESSIVE
COMPARE PS3 TO WII VIA YOU TUBES WATCH GC AND Wii HAND ON HEART KICK SOME physics ass
BROADWAY IS A RISC OUT OF ORDEWR SUPER SCALLER OPTERMIZED FOR GAMING FUNCTION ADD TO THAT ATIS GPU BASED PHYSICS = WII KICKS OUT HIGH END PC PHYSICS
WATCH AND LEARN CELL IS A INLINE OVERHYPED DUDU PILE
January 11th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
did you realize wii has dual geomitry and light engines (T&L) ENGINES…..
hollywood on board T&L fully supports compression and real time decompression 4to1 data compression
broadway cpu on board support for fully programmable geomitry and lighting (T&L)allso fully supporting real time compression decompression at 4to1
gpu t&l plus custom effects plus TEV unit programmable 16 stage shader blender
cpu fully programmable (T&L) CUSTOM GEOMITRY AND LIGHTING SUPPORT
thats some serious t&l g&l hardware suppot
January 11th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Yeah, I've seen their whitepapers explaining the cheap (inexpensive, not crap) lighting in Gamecube, and heard developers comment on it. It's probably the same for Wii, and they did some cool things with it. Resident Evil 4 for example.
Gamecube could blend lighting into a pixel, in a texture stage. So, you could read a texture, blend it with the next texture, then blend in a lighting calculation, then blend a texture with that.
Since it writes the result to its on chip cache, and reads it back for every stage, that's cheap, since you don't have to re-render the polygon.
Xbox calculates it's lighting, reads all of it's textures at once, and runs combiner ops on those, which is pretty fast, and you're not re-calculating the polygon to do it.
But if you wanted to blend texture layers, then blend in a lighting calculation into that, and blend the resulting texel with another texture, you'd have to resort to multi-pass rendering. i.e, you'd have to write the resulting pixel back to ram, and read it back, after re-rendering the polygon. So in that sense, Xbox could probably not run something like RE4 in the same way Gamecube did, with any kind of speed.
But at the same time, there's a list of situations where Xbox could do things Gamecube couldn't. The level of normal mapping in Chronicles of Riddick for example, wouldn't be doable on Gamecube. Or the per-vertx lighting in Splinter Cell, or the texture mapping in Doom 3, etc..
And I still don't get what you are referring to with 4to1 compression. Lots of things are considered compression. Z-compression, DXT, etc.Rendering a curve using B-spline in the gpu would be considered considerable compression, since you aren't reading all the polygons that make up a curve, you're just tessellating them based on an equation on the gpu itself, rather than storing them in ram, and moving them over a bus, or tessellating on the cpu, and moving them over the fsb etc..
Xbox could compress volumetric textures, Gamecube couldn't, etc.. But they both comress and decompress everything they move from one place to another on the fly, in hardware.
It's all relative as it is.
Not degrading your argument btw, but I've never heard of gpu based physics on Wii, outside of a bunk developer interview, of a guy who didn't fully understand what he was talking about. Ati could do physics in unified shader gpus, because the shaders are more general purpose, and can run math related to physics, because they're more versatile, and can compute a wider variety of computations. From all I've seen and read, that's not the case on Wii, that's 360 and up.
And really, physics is one of those things cell is actually really fast at. And they had some interesting demos. "Cups", the fish demo, the one showed involving Heavenly Sword, The water demo Highmoon studios had and made a minigame out of etc.. And it can do those physics, in addition to other things.
Calculating bones, mesh deformations, blending one animation with the next, etc.. Those are things Cell could outrun Wii at considerably, especially on things like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdImUIhbG9E&feature=related.
Not to say Wii is week at physics, I'm sure it's capable enough, it's just not gonna outrun something like Cell.
January 11th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Yeah, I recall the "textured lighting" they did for RE4. That was pretty cool.
Overall, I think if Nintendo had updated to more conventional hardware, and targetted NTSC, they would have been destroying PS3 and 360 right now. (more so than they are)
Plus, it would have had the potential to run things like Bioshock, straight ported. And pretty much any other multi-platform game would have the potential to be ported with little effort. Then, toss in Nintendo first party stuff, and it'd have been game over.
HD won't really matter much until next gen. Especially in Japan. Hopefully their next hardware is Gamecubesque level. (in terms of relative power to their competition)
That would be awesome.
*I've seen many of those physics demos. It performs the way I'd expect a decent cpu to do, given there's no OS running in the background, etc.. Not bad, not awesome.
This demo was impressive though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
January 12th, 2008 at 8:03 am
Pfff too much to read since the last time I posted! Technical discussions are fun indeed. Thanks for all the answers and insight. Still have too read all though.
Some comments from my side. In game performance doesn't say anything unless the very same game is run on multiple platforms with the least and most performing code behind it. Rogue squadron does 20M polies? Ok, but how many pixels does it render? Horsepower is torque times speed, so (bare) GPU horsepower should be polies times pixels. Only knowing the number of polies doesn't say anything.
Still some questions though: We discussed fillrates but how about texture reads? Multi layer textures do require multiple texture reads per pixel don't they? So how can a Wii achieve 2Gpix while has to read pixels from memory and its bus is only 240Mhz and how does the 360 do that? Or does 2Gpix only apply if it has those textures in texture cache (or "catch" as some try to refer to it:)?
@swp's last post: Yeah, I think having more memory (256M external) would have been enough already. I would buy a game such as assassins creed even if it doesn't have real bump mapping or realistic lighting (though Zelda has very good lighting IMO (looks like specular), much better than RE4).
@BranH: I think you are right about that fifa developer. Either he developed the J2ME version of fifa and doesn't know anything about hardware or performing code (like a lot of java devs:), or the writer of this article misunderstood what he exaclty meant. It is quite obvious that the Wii has better memory speed, better CPU speed, better (bare) fillrates so claiming it is on the same level as XBOX wouldn't be too bright. Though I still wonder, the Wii has newer hardware, so can't it be possible that it supports the same shader technology as XBOX? I mean, ATI must have based the Cube's GPU on technology that existed those days. Perhaps they were able to extend the Wii's GPU with newer technology? Or would that require a completely different architecture?
@havoc, perhaps I was a bit harsch. BTW I already live next to Germany so it wouldn't make any sense to move (other than cheaper BMW's haha). But my point is, if you are not interested in this topic, you are free not to post at all instead of calling people nerds (unless you add a smiley to that ofcourse
).
January 12th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Well, as it was explained to me:
On 360, you have 48 unified shaders, in 3 mimd blocks of 16. Capable of processing either pixel shader, or vertex shader instructions.
A block of 16 texturing units, decoupled from shaders, so they can fetch and filter, without stalling the shaders. A thread arbiter that keeps hundreds of threads in flight, that organizes threads of pixel shader, vetex shader, or texturing tasks.
You have 8 rops, located in a block of 10 megs of edram. Rops can process 8 pixels per clock with both color and z values, or, they can do 2x Z only. (i.e, no color, just "depth" value)
An ideal game engine on xenos, would run a z-only pre-pass first. In other words, it would process nothing but the geometry of a scene. Perhaps pre-cull, run back face culling, clipping polygons outside the view, etc..
Anyway, you write all geometry to the scene first. All 48 shader alus are capable of process geometry, so that runs several times faster than it would on a gpu that only had 8 vertex shaders for example. In older gpus, the pixel shaders sit idle, while vertex shaders work, because there's no pixel shaders being run in this pass.
The polygons are made up of pixels with only z values, no color, so rops can process them twice as fast. (16 pixels per clock)
When you;re done, you have a frame with the top most pixels as determined by their z-values, (so there's no overdraw) which then get processed in a second pass by pixel shaders. (in this case, the same processors that just ran the geometry)
It adds textures, runs shader programs, etc to those. (you don't add complex texture and shader effects to any pixels that can't be seen in a frame)
You have 48 shader alus, and 16 texture units. The thread arbiter, can keep 64 threads in flight, and hands out tasks to the different blocks of processing units. So, if a pixel shader needs textures for something, that haven't been fetched from ram yet, the thread arbiter can swap out that thread, and give it a math process that needs done anyway, until the textures are there to process.
In other words, hide texture latency with math operations.
That's why ati gpus are good at folding at home, while Nvidias haven't been. They don't stall as much with texture fetching from ram or filtering, because those tasks are decoupled from the shader units, and they can just do something else while they wait.
Of course, that's simplified, and ignores how you get 4x msaa over the top of full fill rate, ignores tiling because a 1280×720p frame with 4x msaa won't fit into edram at once, etc..
I also left out the filling the Hierarchical Z-Buffer in that first pass, the fast Zclear, z-compression, and other hardware functions.
Then there are things like, the fact that you can get HDR at the same cost, bandwidth, and storage as a normal pixel, because it can process a native FP10 HDR format.
Which, allows pixels to have a 10bit value for red, green, blue, and 2bits alpha. = still 32bit pixels.
10.10.10.2, rather than having to double the pixel's color value with fp16, etc..
And other theoretical things you could technically do with memory export, or with the tessellation unit, etc..
Point is though, that's where they get the theoretical, 8 pixels per clock, that includes a z-buffer, 2 texture layers, 6 shader ops, and 4x mass.
in other words, there are 8 rops, that can do 2x z only, 16 texture units, 48 shader alus, and hardware 4x msaa that doesn't cut into fill-rate.
(of course, the mix of instructions would likely be far different overall, but it's a generic benchmark)
Block diagram:
http://img253.imageshack.us/img253/9563/xenoszf6.jpg
January 13th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
IGN GAME OF THE YEAR MARIO GALAXY
NO LOADSCREENS NO LOADING WAITS NO GLITCHES NO PATCH REQUIRED 60 FRAMES GOUGOUS GRAPHICS
XBOX 1 RAN HALO 2 LIKE SHIT AND AVERAGED 14 FRAMES A SECOND PLUS LONGGGG OUTRAGUS LOADTIMES POP UP TEXTURES MANY BOTTLENECKS
YET WII IS A XBOX
IT AINT SINKING IN IS IT
January 13th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
xbox 360 10mb off chip edram buffer 32gb read 50 nano seconds latency
wii 3mb on chip embedded edram 1tsram-r 28gb bandwidth plus great compression decompression 28gb @ 480p vs 32gb @720p wii clearly far more capable per pixel and resolution to fillrate/bandwidth ratio
32gb buffer @720p poor latency issues vs
28gb catch/buffer @ 480p amasing latecy perfromance of 5 nano seconds wiis catch buffer is better @ 480p than x360s is @ 720p FACT
MAIN RAM LETS SAY 48MB FOR TEXTURES 48 x 6 COMPRESSION =288 MB OF TEXTURES thats 288mb of sd resolution textures 3 times smaller than 720p
so 288mb of textures @ 480p = shit loads of textures and texel fillrate at 480p
wii 1mb texture catch = 16gb bandwidth 16gb x 6 for compression= 96gb texture virtual bandwidth @ 5 nano seconds ON CHIP
TEXTURE READS OF 96GB BANDWIDTH VS AROUND 3.2 GB BANDWIDTH XBOX 1
CLEARLY WII IS A 480P 360 NOT A 480P XBOX
DO THE MATH
January 13th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
TEXTURE READ WII 1MB TIMES 6 = 6MB VIRTUAL TEXTURE CATCH WITH 24 MB OF ON DIE 1T SRAM-R INSTANTANIUS READ VIA SUPER FAST 1T SRAM 10 TIMES FASTER THAN 360S RAM FACT
January 13th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
HD TEXTURES TAKE 4 TIMES MORE RAM SPACE FOR THE SAME TEXTURE AS A 480P TEXTURE
40 MB OF TEXTURES WII X 4 = 160MB ADD 6 TIMES COMPRESSION YOU GET THE PICTURE WIIS A 480P BEAST
DO THE MATH
January 13th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
WII FILLRATE 2XPLUS XBOX ///WII LATENCY 10TIMES PLUS XBOX ////WIIS BANDWIDTH 5 TIMES XBOX//// WIIS DISC TWICE SIZE OF XBOX PLUS GREATER COMPRESSION AND MUCH FASTER LOADING SPEED
WII CLEARLY NO XBOX
January 13th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
xbox sdram slowwwwww frontside bus = 133 mhz = 1gb bandwidth
wii 1t sram-r edram 1tsram-r die embedded ram plus clock synced gddr3= dam fast
wii front side bus 243mhz plus 4to1 compression = 8gb bandwidth
again wii is noooooooo xbox
January 13th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Wiiboy, you're a delusional, irrational fanboy, and you don't even try to understand even a fraction of what you type about. It's obvious you have no interest in this discussion, or the subject in general, outside of fellating Wii hardware.
I would hate to see the forums you frequent, as I'm sure you think you "know stuff". The ones in which you aren't banned from of course. And I'm sure people just blow you off as I'm about to do, or just don't start tech discussions, just to avoid your cap-locked bs.
But I'll help you with a couple of your "issues" since I've typed this much.
***32gb buffer @720p poor latency issues vs 28gb catch/buffer @ 480p amasing latecy perfromance of 5 nano seconds wiis catch buffer is better @ 480p than x360s is @ 720p FACT ***
the 32gb's bus, is write only. It's not addressable by the gpu. It just moves data across it to rops (located on the edram die) in one direction, it makes no requests from it directly. The bus between rops and edram, is a separate 256 gigabytes per second. You don't store textures there, or game code, etc..
Your latency claims are wrong, in addition to being meaningless.
As is the vast majority of what you write. It's not even worth discussing.
FACT
January 14th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
FACTOR 5 working on wii exclusive ps3 dropped like hot potato reports of crying at nintendos door tail between legs not confirmed but likly
WIIADD FACTOR 5 = XBOX GRAPHCS BLOWN AWAY
GAMECUBE ROGUE SQODRON 2 15 MILLION POLYGONS 60 FPS 8 TEXTURE LAYERS REALTIME SHADOWING SHADING BLENDING
GAMECUBE ROGUE SQODRON 3 NEAR 20 MILLION POLYGONS NEAR SOLID 60 FPS LIGHT SCATTERING HDR ETC
BOTH GAMES SUPPORTED 512X512 TEXTURES AND 5 TO 8 TEXTURE LAYERS INCLUDING DOT 3 BUMP MAPPING
HALO 2 XBOX MAXED OUT 4 TEXTURE LAYERS ZERO 512X512 TEXTURES SUPPORT BUGS GLITCHES ETC LONG LOADTIMES CRAPPY SUB 30 FRAMES
NBO XBOX 1 TITAL SUPPORTED 512X512 TEXTURES ONLY 256X256 """FACT"""
NO XBOX GAME BETTERED 15 NMILLION POLYGONS AT SUB 30 FPS
XBOX SUB 30 FPS AND SUB 15 MILLION POLYGONS
GAMECUBE NEAR 20 MILLION POLYGONS NEAR SOLID 60- FRAMES HOW IS WII A XBOX
WATCH FACTOR 5 ON WII WATCH CAPCON ON WII MONSTER HUNTER
YOU BELIEVE XBOX CAN DO WHATS COMING """"FANBOYS TALKING CRAP THE LOT OF YOU"""
GAMECUBE OUT GRAPHIC=-ED XBOX MANY TIMES OVER
WIND WAKER TWILIGHT PRINCESS
PRIME 2/3
RES EVIL 4
ETC
ALL NO LOADING TIMES
WII SHALL KICK OUT 2.5 TIMES THE VISUAL POWER AT 480P THAN XBOX OR CUBE EVER DID AND STILL RUN LOADSCREEN FREE
DONT BELIEVE MII PUT YOUR MONEY NAME AND PHOTO WRE YOUR NET POSTS ARE IM WILLING CUZZ I KNOW ILL WIN
SILLY XBOX FANS TALKING CRAP
January 14th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
COMING WII GAMES IN 2008 WILL PROVE WII AQ 480P OPTERMIZED 360 LIKER MACHINE NOT A XBOX1 OR SUB XBOX 1
FANBOY ALERT SOUND THE XBOX FAN ALARM THERE TALKING SHIT AGAIN
January 15th, 2008 at 1:27 am
January 15th, 2008 at 6:34 am
lennel- yes, i agree partially with that. And I pointed that out in this wall of text thread. I did say, and this is agreed upon by nearly all developers, that overall, Xbox > Gamecube, in both flexibility and overall power. It doesn't have to be superior at "everything" to be superior overall.
I am not of the opinion that Wii is no better than an Xbox. It's probably not as flexible at some things, but overall it's more powerful. The only one that's passionate about it is wiiboy. I really wouldn't mind if Nintendo hardware were proven to be awesome, I just don't see that.
lol, Wiiboy calling other people fanboys, hilarity ensures.
Anyway, you keep comparing x-game to Halo 2, of which you know little about as it is.
Gamecube would choke and die running Halo 2. It couldn't keep up on the bump-mapping alone.
And you throw around goofy polygon numbers for what? You do know that for every vertex attribute you add to a polygon, the fewer you could actually transform, right? Your assumption that in any of the more ambitious Xbox games, the geometry processed would somehow run better on a Gamecube is flawed. Keeping up with bones, and weights, and animation, etc. would be too much for it.
On a Gamecube, you'd simply not try to run such things as much, nor would you attempt the level of bump-mapping, etc..
You'd do what they did in Prime, and use a bunch of generic effects, with good art direction. So what if you don't have bump mapping anywhere, on walls, characters, etc., as long as it looks good. (better than most) And there are fewer glitches involved in the "generics".
And so what if in Nintendo games, the polygon count on character drops when they run, or you lack aa, or are you're forced to use lower color precision at times and you see ugly banding everywhere, as long as fans don't complain too much, and the frame rate stays ok, it's fine.
And I didn't say cube couldn't do dot3 bump mapping, just that it doesn't have efficient hardware to compute it, and couldn't use it anywhere near as much as an Xbox could. Gamecube is good at older multi-texturing, but it's not going to keep pace with an Xbox in that area.
And you're mentioning things like Windwaker, RE4, and Prime as examples of what?
They're very nice looking games. But they don't do much to prove graphical superiority, considering an Xbox fan could just as easily list Riddick, Doom 3, NG Black, Splinter Cell PT, DOA:U, Wreckless:Yakuza (which was on Gamecube, sans bump-mapping) etc..
As well as having superior looking versions (and sometimes at much higher resolution), of nearly all multi-platform games.
And you continue to misunderstand texturing. Gamecube can do "up to" 8 texture layers. Sure, you could pile up 8 onto a single pixel, on some of the surfaces in a game. But you'll notice the comments about limiting a metatile to 3 texture layers because of performance and memory reasons, was from Factor5. In addition to other devs mentioning that,in practice, you're pretty much stuck to ~2-3.
And your assumption that Xbox "maxes out" at 4 textures is wrong. It maxes out at 4 texture layers "per rendering pass".
No rules that say you can't do a second or even third render pass to add more textures, blendiing, etc..
Doom 3 did several render passes on geforce3/4, and had 7+ texture layers, and a list of blending effects. It would simply cost in things like geometry processing. (which is more powerful than Gamecube's, especially at dx8+ level programming)
In closing, Gamecube/Wii 4Life, yo.