Wii has received a punch or two from both enthusiasts and the competition because of its weak hardware. To begin with there were quite a lot of rumors and speculations that Wii would only be a minor upgrade of the GameCube, but Nintendo has refused to answer or release any kind of detailed specifications to confirm or deny this. When Robbie Bach dismissed the Wii in a recent interview blogger N’Gai Croal at Newsweek decided to dissect the console and take help from two industry experts. They take a dive into the hardware and investigate what kind of hardware we’re dealing with. Even if nothing is 100% certain they manage to, once and for all, conclude that the Wii is indeed slower than the other two.
Most important, Wii uses a graphics circuit, dubbed Hollywood, which is a lot less complex than both Xenos of Xbox 360 and RSX of PlayStation 3. The fact is that it doesn’t even seem to use a programmable shader structure, but according to the two experts this is not an obstacle for multiplatform games.
It seems that developers have already found ways to work around the static shader and convert the effects used by Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and even recreate them with a surprising similarity. No one can deny that Wii is built around inferior hardware, but that hasn’t stopped it from outselling the competition and developers from jumping at the idea of making games for it. Even the conservative Electronic Arts, which wasn’t interested at all, has made a u-turn and started making games for the console.
The entire report can be found at Newsweek.
