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Some Truth to Wii as GameCube 1.5?
Newsweek's N'Gai tackles the allegation that the Wii is a glorified GameCube. He specifically looked at recent comments by Microsoft's Robbie Bach saying that '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. ... They don't have the graphics horsepower that even Xbox 1 had. So it makes sort of the comparison set a little bit difficult.' LevelUp spoke with a pair of technical experts at third party publishers and learned that, essentially, Bach's comments about horsepower are accurate. However, "the 'Gamecube 1.5' moniker, while accurate, doesn't mean that gamers won't see graphical improvements on the Wii. 'There are three main differences which will result in graphics improvements. One, the increased memory clock speed, from 162 megahertz to 243 megahertz, means that it is easier to do enough pixels for 480p mode versus 480i. Two, the enhanced memory size of the Wii gives much more room for image-related operations such as anti-aliasing, motion blur, etc. The performance to these memory systems from the graphics chip is also improved. So full-screen effects and increased texture usage seem likely as a result.'"
Who cares, the thing is fun to play, so maybe the Wii's wee isn't as big as the xbox 360 or the PS3 -- does that really make such a big difference?
I'm surprised a suit would say that comparison is 'difficult', when sales figures are readily available. Maybe what's difficult is having to explain them to billg?
"Cry more n00b!" I'm pretty sure that he said that at one point.
Regards, Ian
He specifically looked at recent comments by Microsoft's Robbie Bach
A competitors review of a product, real informative.
Though I think the real issue is that the Wii is getting the market share of consumer attention in spite of the superior graphics processing power of the XBox and the PS3, and maybe they should do an article on not the resolution and frame rates but on the human interaction and game play of the consoles.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Isn't this something people were saying before the Wii was even released? I don't understand why this is news again, almost (or possibly more than) a year later.
Did you know that my AMD64 is really just a Pentium III 1.5? I heard it on the Internet, so it must be true!
I wish people would get a grip. Especially since these specs have been know for... oh.... EVER. Get over already, will you? Yeah, it's the first console since the 80's to perform upgrades to components rather than replacing them outright. That's not a big deal. The console still has more than enough power to play games like Zelda, Super Paper Mario, and Red Steel.
Let me put it another way. In the Super Nintendo generation, it was less powerful than the TG16, the 3DO, the Phillips CD-i (pardon me while I die laughing), and the Neo Geo. But it was also worlds less expensive. Its only real competitor in that generation was the Sega Genesis, a console that was less powerful than the Super Nintendo!
The lesson to learn from this is that graphical power != better games. Better games == Better games, and damn the graphical power. The sooner people realize this, the better. (Or should I say, the sooner they get over their insecurity at having purchased a PS3?)
As for the Gamecube "1.5" nonsense, it's two Gamecubes duct taped together. Get it right, will you?
* Critics can shaddup about this one, too. If you can't get past learning the controls, well, that's too bad for you. But many of us actually find the controls to make the game. And the graphics aren't nearly as bad as they're made out to be. Sure, there are some dull hallways and whatnot, but there are also rooms full of steam, radiosity from windows, and other nice effects that help draw you into the game. And drawing me into the game is all I care about.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Blah blah blah. What do you expect them to say? "Oh, the Wii kicks our ass. It's cheaper to build and is selling more. We're fools?" Give me a break.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Yes, the Wii architecture is fundamentally the same as the Gamecube architecture, but so what?
All the way up the PC scale, each improvement is an incremental improvement on what went before. Does anyone complain about that? No.
Fundamentally, computers all do the same things. As long as you can perform the fundamental turin operations, you can do anything. Yeah, multi-core machines can do these same operations at a greater rate, but there's nothing different that what they are capable of (apart from making programmers worry about race conditions and such like).
People don't complain about the similarity between upgrades in PC processing power for a good reason, you don't have to spend many months training your programmers in how to get started and them watching them spend years before they are capable of fully utilising the system. With a similar architecture as you are already used to, the learning curve and associated costs are much much lower, programmers are more productive and happier.
Microsoft and Sony find themselves out of the boat in pushing high end rendering machines as game consoles when what people really want is fun games.
Wii wins with a new way to interact with the machine making it fun and for having the standard Nintendo appeal of social games that involve a group of people vs the solo sniper approach.
Nintendo has a winner, Sony and Microsoft have dogs, very pretty dogs, but dogs. Of course Sony and Microsoft are going to point out their dogs are pretty. But they are not popular.
Things learned from this
1) group games have more mass appeal than solo games
2) interaction with the game can be fun
3) game play is more important than graphics
4) cheaper is better
5) make a console that is not a loss leader
So Microsoft is upset with Nintendo because they were smarter? After spending huge amounts of money MS ended up with a new machine based on making everything faster while nintendo spent their money on researching new ways to play games and applied them to what they already had.
I have a 360, it has some great games, but its still just a prettier version of the xbox that is barely backwards compatable. I cant get my wife or relatives to play the 360, but all of them seem to gravitate to the wii. I came home from work yesterday and caught my wife bowling at 3 in the afternoon, I can guarantee I've never come home and caught her playing halo.
So perhaps MS feels like they wasted money and resources? Have we finally reached a point where the old argument about graphics vs gameplay is actually a legitimate one?
Why is dvd playback such a selling point? Does anyone NOT have a dvd player that will buy a wii? A dvd player is 30 dollars!
s p . So now we're around 85 percent; factor in old people and I'm sure we're just left with luddites and the margin of error.
As of the end of 2006, over 80% of households have dvd players http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=12220 . Do you think the other 20 percent are choosing between a console or dvd player? 3.5 percent of households are below the poverty line http://www.soundvision.com/Info/poor/statistics.a
What are they going on about?
NJ Local Music Scene
If you wish to make the processing power of the Wii your main concern, then yes, you might be able to make an argument that the Wii is only 1.5 gamecubes. Unfortunately, you'd be entirely missing the point of the Wii.
If you consider a new control scheme to be more interesting, then the 360 is more like Xbox 1.1. The PS3 has some motion detection added in, so we'll call that a PS2 2.0, but they couldn't manage to get the rumble back in, so we should probably dock them something for that. Let's just say it's a 2.0 that shipped before it was really ready. Nintendo, on the other hand, has shipped an entirely new product line.
And the best part for Nintendo is that this isn't just some BS excuse that they're making up for not being able to keep up in the technology race, it's a very deliberate strategy that they've implemented in both their handheld and living room consoles, and sales have proved it to be extremely successful. Good for them.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Why do people keep saying "in another year or two, when the novelty of the motion detector has worn off"? This statement just doesn't make any sense to me at all. That is like saying "well, in a year or two when 0-60 in 4 seconds of your sports car wears off", it isn't going to. It isn't just a gimmick. It is a true advancement in the way interact with games. Sure, there are going to be games that implement motion control in crappy ways. The key is that there are going to be amazing games as well that simply aren't possible with a standard controller.
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There's more to creating beauty than polygon fill rates and shader algorithms.
I think a game like Super Paper Mario, for example, is absolutely gorgeous; it's obvious that a huge amount of effort went into the art direction for the game. Who cares if the graphics could have been generated by a last-generation GPU? They're still beautiful.
I really think Nintendo approached the Wii intelligently. When trying to shake things up in the gaming world and going with a whole new control scheme, using a revved-up Gamecube might not be a bad thing. Think of the risk involved. If they put out a platform that rivals the Xbox or PS3 with a new control scheme, the console would be expensive and people would not take the risk of learning something new. Nintendo is dead in the water.
But if Nintendo bumps up the specs on the gamecube (small risk, graphics are decent) while introducing a new control scheme (big risk) while keeping the price cheaper than the other two consoles (still making a profit on each console), people can afford to take a risk...and they have. The Wii is a success so far, and caught the game makers with their pants down. They weren't prepared for this and now they have to shift too.
What is really interesting, in this experiment by Nintendo, is that because the Wii is so far a success, this lowers the risk of incorporating higher end graphics, HD, 720/1080, etc for Wii 2.0.
Case in point: when you watch old movies, you sometimes think to yourself "those are computer graphics", and they're still better-looking than today's consoles (and yes I'm talking about the Xbox360 and PS3 in this case, or even the most expensive consumer-grade 3D card). So if your brain can make the difference between real things and 3D things in movies that took months to render, imagine how long it will be until 500$ consoles can do it in real-time.
Nintendo are smart to stay away from that "photorealistic 3D graphics" race. The finish line is still decades away.
So in a way was/is the DS. It was in fact claimed by Nintendo themselves that the DS was NOT the full sequel to the GBA.
The Wii is NOT a next generation console as we have come to expect. It is decidely underpowered, even compared to last generation.
The lack of a dvd player is trivial, anyone who wants one can get one so cheap nowadays it is pointless to have it as a feature and either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray just wouldn't fit with its low price point.
The simple fact is the the Wii is an attempt to go a different route. Can Nintendo succeed in selling games that despite not being able to compete on graphics terms are considered fun enough to be bought? Or perhaps an even simpler bet, that not enough people will have HD tv screens to notice the higher res graphics of the PS3/360? After all, unless your tv is HD ready you won't see much improvement anyway.
But does anyone else find it ironic that Microsoft who has made billions in the last decade selling point upgrades to their OS is commeting on someone else doing a 1.5? Could windows 98 be considered a full .5 upgrade to 95? How about XP to 2000 and 2000 to NT4 etc etc?
The simple fact is that right now the Wii, no matter how underpowered is the one console still sold out. No I don't see why. I do NOT like its games. Then again, I in general don't like consoles. But for a 1.5 console, Nintendo ain't doing bad. If anything MS and Sony should be really worried because with the cash Nintendo is taking in they could be the ones who in a couple of years could launch a 2.5 console that will truly blow the PS3 and 360 out of the water while these consoles by then will be considered old.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If i recall, the Nintendo CEO had something to say about that. It was something along the lines of, art and paintings reached the point of photorealism hundreds of years ago, and yet people are still painting, and few of the best paintings of all time are photorealistic. If graphics had any bearing on the enjoyment of a medium, then Claude Monet would have been run out of town, people shouting, "What is this fuzzy crap? Haven't you ever heard of anti-aliasing?!"
You have to keep in mind that the gaming press is biased, misleading, and easily duped into marketing. They're the worst segment of the online press besides political blogs. They're the reason everyone was once obsessed over "8-bit" and "16-bit," because those amateur journalists didn't understand what the terms actually meant, so neither did we. They bought Sony's PS2 hype, and they made Halo out to be the greatest game ever played by the entire world (even though the XBox only tied with the Gamecube at 15% marketshare). Now they're having to take notice with the Wii and come to grips with the realization that they really are a small, hardcore segment of the market that is outnumbered by everyone else.
The original NES used an old 6502 chip, a cheap processor that came out in the 1970s. The NES was underpowered compared to some of its competitors but was so well-designed that it got the good games. It appealed to the wider, mainstream market like the Wii. Remember the track pad? The educational games? The Zapper games, the puzzle games, the side-scrollers, the RPGs, and so on? It appealed to everyone, not just sugar-high kiddies playing a neverending series of XBox 360 first-person shooters.
"Sufferin' succotash."
What do you think SIXAXIS is, if not an attempt to steal Wii's thunder with a motion sensitive controller?
But you know what? It actually isn't that easy to throw something together like the Wiimote, to write the software libraries so developers can make the most use of the input, to tune those first-party games so that the controller feels as natural as possible.
Sony chose to spend their development time integrating the Cell while Nintendo decided to spend their development time on the controller. That was the bed Sony made, and now they must lie in it. They had your idea, to try to hack something together quick-like to try to "stillborn" the wii, and the best they could do was acceleration detection only in a two-handed controller, which is only used to good effect in games like Flow.
So how well did this strategy work for Sony? How many Wii sales do you think were lost? Is it clear that the Wiimote is an integral part of the console, while it is the SIXAXIS that is the gimmick? And do you really think that rushing off to make a full-fledged wiimote ripoff so it's ready by the end of the year would have even the slightest chance of making the Wii "stillborn" when it's already sold several times more than the PS3 and is likely to be even further ahead by christmas 07?
The enemies of Democracy are
I get so sick of reading these Wii-bashing articles. The only complaints they ever present are "wahhh graphics" or "wahhh processing power." The moron in this article even complains about Wii not being able to play DVDs. COME ON! Who doesn't have a freakin' DVD player by now? Obviously, people like this haven't sat down and considered why Nintendo is doing so well... I guess they are just too caught up in trying to downplay Nintendo's success. Psssst, idiots. Graphics don't make a game fun.
God, just reading this first excerpt makes me ill.
Soooo... basically he comes out and says it's a nice product for a very SPECIFIC audience? For a system that's supposed to have universal appeal? Mmmmk. Then he contradicts himself by saying the product "is actually not a great product." Mmmmk. And what entails his reasoning? Graphics, processing, and lack of DVD-playing capability... oh, and "a lot of down-line components." Lawl!
Hey, Robbie! Keep fighting your fight, bro. One day you'll wonder why your market share slowly reduced itself to zero. Until then, enjoy your imaginary high horse.
The PowerPC Processing Elements in the XBox360 and PS3 are very similar, and are not developments of IBM's PPC4xx or 6xx series. They're SMT in-order cores that run at 3.2GHz and support two threads.
Cell: "It's a PPC4xx controller keeping 8 single-pipeline cores (6 integer, 2 FP/Integer) full of properly-scheduled instructions. "
Your Cell information is so incorrect that I feel sorry for anyone that has read it and now believes it is true.
The Cell is a PowerPC Processing Element (i.e., 1/3rd of an XBox360 CPU) coupled to 8 (7 active in the PS3) SPEs on a very fast and wide ring bus. Each SPE has two pipelines, and each pipeline operates on 128-bit vectors, i.e., each SPE is a dual-issue in-order SIMD processor with 256KB of local memory.
"It has FP, which is more than can be said for the PPC400-series (and all but two of the specialized cores in the PS3)"
Cell's PPE has a standard PowerPC FPU unit, and a VMX128 unit capable of 25.6GFLOPS (single precision). All 8 SPEs of course can also do 25.6GFLOPS (single precision) each. These are at the Cell's 3.2GHz clock rate in the PS3.
I was wondering if you got your information from Wikipedia, but you didn't. Wikipedia's article is also massively incorrect though (indeed it is now less correct than it was a few months ago, weird).
The 750CX derivative processor in the Wii is about as powerful as a 1.5GHz PPE, i.e., the Wii has about half the standard CPU processing power as a PS3 (although the PPE will get better use due to being able to run two threads, and the SPEs are icing on the top for physics and similar). The Gecko CPU in the Gamecube had special media instructions that may have been SIMD-like, and as the Wii is backwardly compatible, I assume the Wii's CPU has these in it as well.