14 DAY TRIAL // During a recent interview with eWeek, the president of Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices Division, Robbie Bach, said that Nintendo and their Wii "...don't have the graphics horsepower that even Xbox 1 had," making comparison quite difficult. However, Nintendo earlier claimed that their console was actually more powerful than the first Xbox. N'Gai Croal tries to find out who is right and who is wrong.
Speaking with two developers on the full extent of the Wii's graphical prowess, the following details emerged:
"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."
So basically, what the developers are saying is that Nintendo has achieved almost the same results as Sony and Microsoft with their PS3 and respectively Xbox 360, using half or less than half of the resources its rivals did. It's true that the Wii doesn't live up to its rivals' capabilities, but Nintendo's intentions weren't to make exceptional looking games, but fun games primarily.
So had the whole "horsepower" issue been true, that still doesn't present Nintendo with a problem. No one's complaining about it anyway.