Wii graphics worse than first Xbox says Microsoft
Once again Microsoft doesn’t get the point of the Wii. They are trying to disregard it’s graphics capabilities:
“The video graphics on it aren’t very strong; the box itself is kind of underpowered; it doesn’t play DVDs; there are a lot of down-line components [that] aren’t actually that interesting,” Bach said in an eWeek interview. “They don’t have the graphics horsepower that even Xbox 1 had.”BachÂ’s comments meant no disrespect to Nintendo, as he stressed heavily his admiration for the rival companyÂ’s innovation and even predicts success for the Wii. What has raised a few eyebrows, however, is his comment that the Wii wouldnÂ’t even be able to produce graphics that we saw from the original Xbox – a system released five years ahead of the Wii.
J. Allard-dreadlock-pusher N’Gai Croal of Newsweek sought to test the validity of BachÂ’s claim and polled a couple third party developers for their anonymous comments. One of the original XboxÂ’s greatest strengths was its NVIDIA GPUÂ’s programmable shader capability – something that the WiiÂ’s ATI GPU does not have.
“The Wii’s GPU has fixed functions for vertex, lighting, and pixel operations,” said one of the developers. “All ‘programmable shaders’ means is that the code you write for the shader gets run on the vertex and pixel hardware of the GPU. This is how it works on the high-end ATI and Nvidia GPU parts. The Wii is an older fixed function design where you have lots of operations but the pipelines are not programmable in the sense of downloading shader code to run [on them].”
The point of the Wii is that it doesn’t need super-powered graphics to be fun. The gameplay is what matters. Graphics are always secondary to gameplay (not that graphics don’t matter, but they aren’t the most important thing).
