Compared to the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Sony PlayStation 3, the Nintendo Wii is decidedly underpowered. As a result, the Wii is not able to generate the same level of high quality graphics as an equivalent Xbox or PlayStation game. It simply is not possible to recreate some of the visuals that you may find in games like Gears of War 2 or Street Fighter IV.
In this way, video game designers who are developing for the Nintendo Wii platform must think of creative ways to overcome this lack of processing power. Just as with any other art form, artists who work in the video game design field are incredibly varied in their personalities and their respective approaches. This also speaks volumes for the artistic expression of the studios that develop these games.
Cartoon-Style Visuals
Shown above are screenshots taken from Mario Kart Wii, We Ski, and Sonic Unleashed, all games for the Nintendo Wii. For these games, the design approach was to simplify the graphics and not to worry too much about offering realistic graphics. In the case of Mario Kart Wii, no one will mistake Wario for a real person or Yoshi for a “real” dinosaur.
By taking this approach, developers are able to reduce the number and complexity of textures required, thus best utilizing the processing prowess of the Wii. Similarly, We Ski and Sonic Unleashed offer simplified characters with fewer textures and fewer polygons. The same can be said, though to a lesser degree, for the background images and other in-game objects.
Cel-Shaded Graphics
An alternative approach that arguably provides even greater artistic expression is the use of cel-shaded graphics. This is a technique that effectively places two-dimensional objects and characters in a three-dimensional space. However, none of the actual graphics are actually in three-dimensions. In this way, many people have come to refer to this cel-shaded style as offering a 2.5D experience.
Naturally, this technique significantly reduces the amount of processing needed on the part of the video game console, since it does not require nearly as much 3D processing, texture mapping, or number of polygons. While the visual style may not be quite as appealing in a racing game like GT Pro Series, it works very well for games like No More Heroes and Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution. This is because the cel-shaded look gives a similar appearance as comic books, manga, and anime.
The style was slightly altered and even further simplified in Mad World, reducing the color palette to just black, white, and red. This gave the game a look that was very reminiscent of Frank Miller’s Sin City graphic novel series.
Toned-Down Realism
What about when the video game design team calls for more realistic graphics and visuals that are truer to what they would look like in the real world? The Nintendo Wii has not yet been able to produce the intense visuals and complex mapping that we’d find in a game like Resistance: Fall of Man. As such, all attempts thus far have required the significant reduction in the complexity of the graphics.
As a result, many of the Wii games that take this approach only offer graphics that are perhaps comparable to the PlayStation 2. In the screenshot of Medal of Honor 2 above, you can see that the visuals are not very crisp and the in-game objects lack complex texture mapping. Similarly, the lighting effects in The Conduit are not as robust as they would have been on a more powerful system.
Can the Wii overcome its relative lack of processing power? Absolutely. It just takes a creative eye and some clever game design.
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Your are not being fair since you are avoiding games like Resident Evil DarkSide Chronicles, Monster Hunter 3, Cursed Mountain, Dead Space Extraction and Silent Hill, all those games support HDR+AA, and every pc gamer knows that to achieve HDR+AA is necessary the power of at least an ATI R520.
Wii may not have a powerfuk cpu, but that can be solved with the use of gpgpu, like the Floodgate form Gamebryo LighSpeed compatible for Wii.
If you want to know the specs of the ATI Hollywood I can give a very good approximation based in irrefutable facts.
I consider ATI Hollywood between an ATI Rv610 and an ATI Rv630
Why?
Fiest of all, there are many wii games like Monster Hunter 3, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Cursed Mountain, etc, that have shown both HDR and antialaising in real time graphics, and that wasnt possible until the ATI R520 came out thanks to thier new architecture and tecnology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon
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ATI’s DirectX 9.0c series of graphics cards, with complete Shader Model 3.0 support. Launched in October 2005, this series brought a number of enhancements including the floating point render target technology necessary for HDR rendering with anti-aliasing. Cards released include X1300 – X1950.
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Ok, with that we know that ATI Hollywood must be at least an R520 for doing HDR+AA, but why I consider Hollywood like an ATI Rv610, simple.-
1.- According to one of the displacment mapping patents of Nintendo(expires in 2020), the Hollywood might have a command processor and is capable of vertex texture fetch, and those features were avaiable begining from ATI R600; plus, Satoru Iwata said that Wii´s hadware woud take at least 8 more years to be squeezed, and that when the time came when the hadware started to slowdown, that would be when they would release wii2
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6980218/fulltext.html
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US Patent Issued on December 27, 2005
Estimated Patent Expiration Date: November 28, 2020Estimated Expiration Date is calculated based on simple USPTO term provisions. It does not account for terminal disclaimers, term adjustments, failure to pay maintenance fees, or other factors which might affect the term of a patent.
Command processor 200 receives display commands from main processor 110 and parses them—obtaining any additional data necessary to process them from shared memory 112. The command processor 200 provides a stream of vertex commands to graphics pipeline 180 for 2D and/or 3D processing and rendering. Graphics pipeline 180 generates images based on these commands. The resulting image information may be transferred to main memory 112 for access by display controller/video interface unit 164—which displays the frame buffer output of pipeline 180 on display 56.
FIG. 5 is a logical flow diagram of graphics processor 154. Main processor 110 may store graphics command streams 210, display lists 212 and vertex arrays 214 in main memory 112, and pass pointers to command processor 200 via bus interface 150. The main processor 110 stores graphics commands in one or more graphics first-in-first-out (FIFO) buffers 210 it allocates in main memory 110. The command processor 200 fetches: command streams from main memory 112 via an on-chip FIFO memory buffer 216 that receives and buffers the graphics commands for synchronization/flow control and load balancing, display lists 212 from main memory 112 via an on-chip call FIFO memory buffer 218, and vertex attributes from the command stream and/or from vertex arrays 214 in main memory 112 via a vertex cache 220.
Command processor 200 performs command processing operations 200a that convert attribute types to floating point format, and pass the resulting complete vertex polygon data to graphics pipeline 180 for rendering/rasterization. A programmable memory arbitration circuitry 130 (see FIG. 4) arbitrates access to shared main memory 112 between graphics pipeline 180, command processor 200 and display controller/video interface unit 164.
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Neither vertex texture fetch nor command processor were avaible in inferior series to the ATI R600.
Vertex texture fetch avaible in ati R600 but not in neither R520 nor R580
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/r600-architecture_5.html
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The Radeon HD 2000 texture processor is a highly integrated device configured like follows:
8 texture address units to calculate the address to sample
20 texture samplers
4 texture filter units
The new texture processor supports filtering of FP32 textures as well as the vertex texture fetch feature the Radeon X1000 did not support. It also supports 8192×8192 textures and RGBE 9:9:9:5 texture format to comply with DirectX 10 requirements. Besides everything else, ATI/AMD claims an improved quality of anisotropic filtering.
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2.- ATI Rv610 power consumption is very low, between 25 to 35 watts ad if we check the Wii´s power power supply, it clearly says that wii consumes 53 watts max.
http://komku.blogspot.com/2007/03/amd-ati-rv610-and-rv630-specs-amd-rv610.html
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RV610 and RV630 support PCIe 2.0 for increased bandwidth. Native support for CrossFire remains, as with current ATI Radeon X1650 XT and X1950 Pro products. AMD will also debut RV610 and RV630 on a 65nm manufacturing processor for low-power consumption. Expect RV610 products to consume around 25 to 35-watts. RV630 requires more power at around 75 to 128-watts.
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Not to mention that if the Broadway is really a g3 750cl, then it´s power consumption is that low that if it run at 600Mhz it would only consume 2.7 watts, Broadway runs at 729 Mgz, so I don´t think it can consume more than 5 watts even if it´s an upgraded 750cl.
As for the dvd drive, I can´t see it cosuming more than 10 watts
3.- ATI Rv610 was really inexpensive, was launched in the ATI Radeon HD 2400 pro with a price of just 59 dollars, and as we know, ATI Hollywood´s production cost was about $30 dollars.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=762&num=1
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Making up the Radeon HD 2400 series right now is the HD 2400PRO and the HD 2400XT, which both use the RV610 GPU and feature 40 shader units, 180 million transistors, and 256MB 64-bit memory. The Radeon HD 2400PRO has a stock operating frequency of 525MHz for its core and 400MHz for its video memory while the Radeon HD 2400XT has its core running at 700MHz with the memory doubled at 800MHz. The prices for the low-end 2400PRO and 2400XT are $59 and $79 USD respectively. These ATI/AMD cards are of course competition for the NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT.
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ATI Hollywood cost production of 29.60 dollars
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/12/18/nintendo_wii_profit_on_production/
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Nintendo said to profit on Wii production
Consoles costs under $160 to manufacture?
By Tony Smith • Get more from this author
18th December 2006 10:50 GMT
Nintendo may well be making so much profit on its Wii console it can well afford to replace broken Remote straps. According to a Japanese publication’s assessment of the machine’s innards, the console costs the videogames company less than $160 to assemble.
In a report published by Japanese business weekly the Toyo Keizai and relayed by Japanese-language site WiiInside, the most expensive component inside the Wii is the DVD drive, which, the paper estimates, costs $31. Next comes ATI’s ‘Hollywood’ graphics chip, at $29.60. The IBM-designed and made CPU, ‘Broadway’, costs $13, the report reckons.
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4.- Die size, as we know, the ATI Hollywoods has two dies, vegas and napa
vegas is supposed to be the dsp with 24 MBytes of NEC´s embedded memory and measure 72mm2
napa is the true GPU it´s die size is of 94.5mm2, but since it has embedded an ARM926EJ-S that measures like 1.45mm2 in 90nm and also other components for the SD and usb, the true gpu part most likely be about 90mm2; plus, ati imageons are about 3 to 8 mm2 depending of their complexity.
Lets also consider that napa might have just 3MBytes of embedded memory, wich is made of NEC´s UX6D(1T-SRAM-Q made of MIM2 technology), but there are rumors like those that came from an interview with ubisoft pointing that napa might have 8 MBytes
1mm2 = 0.5618 Mbytes
5.34mm2 = 3.0000 Mbytes
8MBytes = 14.24mm2
90mm2 – 5.34mm2 = 84.66mm2
90mm2 – 14.24mm2 = 75.76mm2
If we consider the fact that ATI Rv610 is 85mm2 and that ATI Hollywood´s gpu is about 84.66mm2 or 75.76mm2, then Hollywood´s gpu is very near an ATI Rv610; but wait, it doesnt end there since aTI Rv610 has a clock speed of 450Mhz, and ATI Hollywood is 243mhz, and we must remember that since more mhz means more transistors, then more die size is used, so if ATI Rv610 had a clock speed of 243Mhz, the die size should be very lower.
Here is an interview with NEC that confirms that the embedded memory in Hollywood is UX6D
http://gear.ign.com/articles/713/713254p1.html
So yea, ATI Hollywood´s GPU is about an ATI Rv610 and an ATI Rv630, and for those who consider Hollywood slightluy more powerful than xbox gou, then tell me of an xbox game that did HDR(eye, true HDR not faked like Zelda Twilight princess)
On purpose, even though the ATI Rv610 was released in the last months of 2007, it was expected to be launched in Feb of 2007, but ATI decided to delay the launch due to market strategy and to add more Windows Vista drivers. The ATI Hollywood wasn´t finished neither at the E32006 not at June 2006 and there is an article at IGN that has an interview with NEC(June 2006) that says that they would supply Embedded memory to Wii based on the last designs of Mosys 1TS-RAM technology(1T-SRAM-MIM was their current generation) and the macro that they would provide is suggested to be UX6D(1T-SRAM technology combined with MIM2).What I try to say is that the dates of ATI Hollywood launch and the ATI Rv610 are very close.
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Learn more PlayStation 3 recommendations
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