News Picks: February 16, 2007
Hi-Def on the Wii?
The Inquirer says a drunken Nintendo executive indicated the Wii has hi-def capabilities but that reasonable frame rates can't be maintained. As a blanket statement I personally find that hard to believe.
The GameCube ran slower than the Xbox but faster than the PS2. While the Wii's technical specs are not truly known, the Wii is considered to be at least twice as fast as the GameCube.
Given architecture differences you can't directly compare the Wii to the original Xbox but for sake of argument let's say the Wii is at least as fast (I actually believe it is faster). So then why can't the Wii do high-def? The Xbox had more than a handful of hi-def games. For example:
- Soul Calibur II (720p)
- Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (720p)
- Enter the Matrix (1080i)
- MX Unleashed (1080i)
I've been expecting Nintendo to do some form of announcement, ala Microsoft's 1080p upgrade. I'm not surprised they didn't mention it at launch since it would just bring attention to something that the Wii cannot do as well as its competitors. Selling folks on the controller and then later making the higher resolution seem like an extra bonus is a smart strategy.
So are they just waiting to keep it as a rumour until some big game is announced to support it?
Or is the Wii truly not capable of pushing things as high as the the original Xbox? I would find that hard to believe. But perhaps the visual fidelity at 720p is too far off the Xbox 360 and PS3 that Nintendo would prefer to never attempt to compete at that level.
The first thing to keep in mind is that this "interview" (which named no names) was with an *exec*. He is likely to only know the short version of the story, not all the intricate details.
That being said, there is no doubt in my mind that the Wii is capable of higher resolutions. The key chokepoint is not the GPU, but the chips in the framebuffer that convert the data into a television signal. Given that the Wii is capable of 480p, I sincerely doubt that those same chips couldn't be programmed to output 720p from a 1280x720x4 chunk of memory.
Here's the rub: All those wonderful lighting, translucency, and great color effects that the Gamecube and Wii are known for, cost GPU time. The more polygons and effects you push through the GPU, the more time it takes to render them.
Because the GCN/Wii hardware is known for all these wonderful effects, it just wouldn't do to render more textels (textured pixels) per frame at the expense of rendering quality.
Thus the executive summary is: The Wii is too slow to render HD.
The programmer summary is: HD capabilities depend on the game, number of polygons, and complexity of the effects rendered.
Could Wii Sports have been done in HD? Quite possibly. However, doing so would have made a promise to gamers that Nintendo wouldn't have wanted to keep. They know that they can't let the Wii graphics fall *too* far behind the competition, despite their blue ocean stragegy. And it's much easier to push the limitations of a machine with a smaller rendering window than it is when you triple* the amount of data being pushed around.
* The amount of data the Wii will have to push gets even worse when games use Z-Buffers. With a Z-Buffer, you add a third dimension to the number of pixels pushed, making increases in resolution exponentially more costly.
... so said 'thewiirocks' on 02/17/2007 @ 11:31:05 AM [Direct Link]
Hey wiirocks, great technical summary. Oddly, I would have thought that Wii Sports would have been one game that they could have done in HD. Far fewer textures and polygons than other games ... I can't speak for effects mind you ... though certainly, as you mention, they would have been taxing a lot more components in the system.
That said, the benefit may have been negligible given the style of the game, so any potential risk may not have been worth it.
When the Wii was coming out there were talks of them announcing something else big. I was half expecting (though thought it would have been a mistake) they were going to announce 720p.
A friend of mine actually worked on the Wii graphics chip at ATI (it was done in the San Francisco Bay Area, not up in the Toronto area). He has been pretty tight lipped about it, but I am hoping to get an interview with him one day.
... so said 'Joseph Molnar' on 02/17/2007 @ 12:54:49 PM [Direct Link]
> Oddly, I would have thought that Wii Sports would have been
> one game that they could have done in HD
As I said, it probably *could* have been done in HD. The problem is all the games that follow. If your pack-in game supports HD, then the players will tend to expect that *all* the games will support HD. Making a game in SD after the pack-in is in HD would sign the death warrant of that game.
... so said 'thewiirocks' on 02/17/2007 @ 01:11:23 PM [Direct Link]