Robbie Bach, President of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division, (he’s a step above Peter Moore, and is the head of the “tri-force” [wink wink] that brought together the Xbox and 360), recently made this statement on being questioned about the undisputed success of the Wii
“I’m actually not–the product has gotten more broad-base acclaim that I would have expected. It’s a very nice product, but it actually has a relatively specific audience and a fairly specific appeal, frankly, based on one feature, which is the controller itself. And the rest of the product is actually not a great product–no disrespect, but…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”
This was only the beginning of his string of rambling thoughts he went on say which I quote, “The challenge they have is that third parties aren’t going to make much money on this platform because Nintendo is going to make all that money, and their ability to compete with something like a Halo or produce an experience like Madden on their system is going to be tough. They don’t have the graphics Horsepower that even Xbox 1 had. So it makes sort of the comparison set a little bit difficult.”
Both these statements showcase that the popularity, which translates into the commercial success of Nintendo’s Wii, is pinching both Microsoft and Sony’s pocket, it’s not only eating into their share of their market but big shot developers are setting up exclusive production houses to develop ex-cloosive games for Nintendo’s console (E.A. being one of the many), the “Army of Two” may not be enough to upstage this family entertainment channel.
The lackluster of the Wii in the graphics and processing department has been the favorite attacking ground for the opposition and it is true that the console is grossly underpowered than current generation systems and relies on its innovative controller and its bunch of games to cover this up to an extent, but Nintendo’s true incarnation of the next generation is due as we speak.
The statement of Bach was a little hard to digest, maybe it was just another part of the unstable rambling or did it hold ground and could be proved with substantial evidence, I smelt a mystery in those words of Bach and went hunting for clues on the internet and was somewhat able to come to a conclusion.
Well, the verdict is that the Wii has more processing speed than the original Xbox and can allocate more memory with its 24 Mib internal programmable memory whereas the original Xbox had only 64 Mib memory to play around with. The problem with the Xbox’s Power P.C setup was the fact that even though it clocked at higher speeds than the G.C. it was far less efficient to work round with, it would take a considerable amount of time and resources to actually understand the working architecture, so a game as fluid and beautiful as Ninja gaiden took a long time in the development room.
A Wii is technically 1.75 faster than a GameCube. making it easier for developers to understand what they have to work with, this debate applies to the current generation as well even though the PS3 has a really powerful Cell processor but the way the developers are able to milk this power depends on time, F.E.A.R is a classic tale of this epic power struggle. it looks like a horrendous port of the original P.C. and the 360 versions, even Resistance has been tagged as Ps2.5 game rather than being a full fledged PS3 game, second generation PS3 titles like MGS4 and Killzone 2 will perhaps show off the true power of the PS3.
In a nutshell the X-box may pull off a Twilight princess (hypothetically speaking… no need to butcher me on this) but it will take a longer time to develop, more time equals more money and less profits.
Coming onto the GPU, there is not much known about the Wii’s GPU capabilities but the developers on the condition of anonymity have this to rant about the star spangled “Hollywood” chip
Developer 1 had this to say:
“The Wii’s GPU has fixed functions for vertex, lighting, and pixel operations, 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. Almost all the shader effects on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 can be reproduced on the Wii by re-implementing them with the fixed function hardware of the Wii’s GPU. Most games just port the effect over. A few teams have gone as far as making a shader-to-Wii conversion tool. It reads the shader code and generates the fixed function code necessary to achieve the same result. Keep in mind that the Wii’s GPU is not as fast or feature rich as the Xbox 360 or PS3, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get very close results.”
Developer 2 said:
“The fixed-function design to that of the Gamecube is basically pretty similar to Nvidia’s seven-year-old GeForce2.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. Three 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…”
Prior to Red Steel’s release their Lead Team member admitted to the fact that the Wii was more powerful but the Xbox could pull off certain things that it can make which is difficult to make on the Wii.
So the lowdown on the graphical front was that the even though the Wii can pull off certain games with striking detail as the Xbox but certain real high end games like Doom 3, Half life 2, Ninja gaiden might not be able to make an effective transition due to the lack of the shaders and the lack of 720p. Its easier to find faults in the realm of High Definition (Halo 3 is a perfect example, the whole world is up in arms with the whole jaggies bit from the Beta version) so a developer may have to spend a lot of time on the board to make every tiny detail as clear to the gamer who’ll go grumbling if he sees the slightest signs of Polygon tear.
I did have a look at a couple of multiplatform games to assess the so called glaring disparities between the two consoles and found that it was pretty difficult to notice any apparent differences amongst certain games, barring The Godfather which actually looked far better on Microsoft machine than the Wii. The Left ones are from the Xbox version and the Right ones are from the Wii version of the game.
I’d be honest to admit that if we’d go Red Steel Vs Halo, then Halo would win hands down but if we were to stack up Halo against Twilight princess, the award would go to the latter. On the other hand The Godfather on the Xbox looks miles better than the Wii edition, why are there such discrepancies in the games being developed.
Dev process plays a huge role in squeezing out the juice from the given hardware, the whole point of the discussion revolves around the amount of effort being put in the development of Wii games to make the most efficient allocation of its scarce resources as compared to its feature rich current generation counterparts. Hey, if they can pull of a game as fast and visually furious like God of War II on the ageing PS2, Wii has miles to go in that context (2010 is my bet before it releases its next gen). Metroid Prime 3, Super Mario galaxy and a bunch of other games will show it ain’t far behind. Micro$oft can feel free to take pot shots at gaming most revered company but everyone’s favorite joke at one point of time has sent Nintendo laughing all the way to the bank.
(Readers are advised to make a mental note of a couple of things before jumping to irrelevant conclusions. Effective utilization of a consoles hardware takes time and the comparison charted out here is between the original Xbox and Wii and NOT the 360 and PS3.)
–Neelesh Mukherjee