Is the Wii more powerful than the Original Xbox?

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This is something that I have yet to really see yet. Hopefully when the system comes out we will see screen shots of both games that have been released on multiple systems like Madden and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. So far I cannot really tell and I use my Xbox more than any other system currently and I don't even have my GC hooked up anymore. Was waiting for the Wii to possibly play some other GC games I missed.

Also almost all the Xbox games say HDTV 480p while I am hearing not all the Wii games has that standard. I think that is somethign that Nintendo really has to enforce.
 
Launch games, where most of them appear to be ports from the GC, will not look better than Xbox games.

It doesn't help that most developers didn't get final devkits until this past summer.

Give it some time, they'll get better. Zelda now looks pretty awesome, so imagine what happens by this time next year.
 
Considering how powerful the gamecube was, and how close it was to the original xbox, im pretty damn sure that the Wii is more powerful. Much like the 480p/widescreen support, its up to the devs to get it working right. At least this time the third parties look very interested in programming for the console.
 
[quote name='Strell']Launch games, where most of them appear to be ports from the GC, will not look better than Xbox games.

It doesn't help that most developers didn't get final devkits until this past summer.

Give it some time, they'll get better. Zelda now looks pretty awesome, so imagine what happens by this time next year.[/quote]

Zelda doesn't even look as good as GC at it's peak.

I really do hope they get better looking.
 
I dunno, I think it looks good, I'm not that picky. In pure horsepower I'm pretty sure it's more powerful than the xbox, but how that's used is a different story.
 
The fact that this question exists shows that Nintendo really skimped on the Wii hardware. The Wii wasn't designed to have the horsepower of PS3, but 4 years is an assload of time for technology to naturally progress exponentially. It's almost as if they purposely "stunted" the growth of the Wii's technology to make it look similar to GC games.

Note that I am not complaining about the graphics. I'm just trying to look at this via a scientific route. How is it that games look only marginally better than 4 year old hardware? Launch games or not, regardless of the fact that Nintendo isn't trying to make the most powerful hardware, shouldn't natural evolution of technology at least make a noticeable difference?

The jump from NES to SNES was huge, and yet I doubt Nintendo was trying to make the absolute end all graphical machine (not like these days where companies make them so powerful they lose $200 per console). The SNES was just a great console that wasn't designed with cutting edge components, its graphical power just came along naturally.
 
Nah, they just made it slightly more powerful and ridiculously more efficient. That was their goal, and they succeeded. Energy efficiency isn't something that's generally very noticeable. But the fact that it doesn't need a fan while in standby is pretty cool.
 
Regardless who wins the console war...PC Gaming has shown us that graphics are coming to a point where they will be no longer able to improve. Maybe Nintendo is delaying that time as long as possible. We haven't hit that point yet, but when we do, how will games evolve if they are all photorealistic at good framerates? Physics? Alright what then? Games will have to evolve in gameplay, much as the Wii is doing. I thought it would happen AFTER graphics hit this point, but Nintendo would rather do it now.
 
They were trying to make a cheap console. The more powerful you want to make something, the more money you have to spend developing it (Sony dropped 1 billion on the Cell). If they made the Wii technology as good as Xbox 360 the Wii would likely cost like 500 bucks.
 
i read that the wii was supposed to be 1.5 to 2x the strength of xbox, about.
ill try to find the article again
 
[quote name='Reaggo']i read that the wii was supposed to be 1.5 to 2x the strength of xbox, about.
ill try to find the article again[/quote]

on moment
 
Wii is more powerful in some ways than Xbox. More memory bandwidth, faster cpu (primarily due to lower latency memory), and slightly higher pixel fillrate. It also has more memory. However, it has lower texel fillrate, and doesn't seem to have the pixel shading abilities of the xbox, so you probably won't see games that look like Halo 2 or Splinter Cell Chaos Theory on the Wii, but its games should look better than equivalent xbox games that didn't really use pixel shader.
 
Well, I was pondering the same question since I am deciding to buy Marvel Ultimate Alliance either on the Wii or the Xbox. I looked at the screenshoots they have at the back of the game cases and it looks like the Nintendo Wii is a bit better looking.
 
[quote name='doctorfaustus']Well, I was pondering the same question since I am deciding to buy Marvel Ultimate Alliance either on the Wii or the Xbox. I looked at the screenshoots they have at the back of the game cases and it looks like the Nintendo Wii is a bit better looking.[/QUOTE]

Marvel Ultimate Alliance is one of those cheaply made (in comparison to something like splinter cell) games that didn't make use of the exclusive abilities of any console or really pushed them, so it will likely look best on the most powerful general purpose console. In the case of the Wii or the Xbox, the Wii. It's possibly wii may never have a game as good looking as chaos theory or halo 2 though, but it likely will have games that still look pretty good, and don't run at 20fps. Like the gamecube, I expect the Wii to keep high, stable framerates better than competing systems. There's less power in the wii/cube for developers to work at bringing out, but it has more easily accessible power than any last gen console.

Of course, you could try to get one of the $100 Xbox 360s Toys R Us will be selling on Thanksgiving and use that for all your multiplatform game needs.
 
[quote name='Arsonide']Regardless who wins the console war...PC Gaming has shown us that graphics are coming to a point where they will be no longer able to improve.[/QUOTE]

Hahahahaha, I remember back when Half-Life came out, and people were saying the same thing. Hell, go back to anything before that, all the way back to Quake, and even farther back then that (hi Doom!), and people honestly believed that things could NEVER get better than they were at the time. And the same arguements come up again and again, stuff like: "Well, we were looking through rose-tinted glasses at the time, but things are different now; graphics really are approaching true realism now!," and nonsense like that. It's the same thing time and time again.

I remember a post on some message board I frequented back in 1998, when the Pentium III came out. It went something along the lines of, and I paraphrase:
"500 mhz is just rediculous. Nothing will even need that sort of power, ever. I don't think it's going to get any more powerful than that for a looong time. Graphics power and technology will really have to hit an impassable barrier very soon, because honestly, it can only get so good."

Graphics coming to a point when they are unable to improve, eh? You'll be saying the same thing in 10 years, I guarantee it.
 
Graphics will obviously improve until they look real (and then they'll up the resolution past the ability to see with the human eye, but somehow still sell it....). VR technology will have to improve also and then eventually you'll basically have VR with graphics that look real and robots you can fuck, that is the pinnacle of video game power.

Provided we don't just kill ourselves off before we ever get there.
 
[quote name='SpazX']robots you can fuck, that is the pinnacle of video game power.

[/QUOTE]

I second that notion
 
Video games will never look "real" since you can always just expand the scope of the world. Grand Theft Auto style games are nowhere close to looking real, and no game has things that even look kind of real once you get really close up.
Not to mention that physics and animations are still way way far behind.
And even if games did look real, is that the end all be all? What about artistic expression? It could be possible to create something more beautiful than anything encountered in life. (of course, artistic expression is largely the reason why some games can be mistaken for real, when in actuality we're still way far away from that)
 
[quote name='Arsonide']Regardless who wins the console war...PC Gaming has shown us that graphics are coming to a point where they will be no longer able to improve.[/QUOTE]

That's just stupid. Until games are completely photorealistic, graphics will be able to improve.
 
[quote name='SpazX']robots you can fuck, that is the pinnacle of video game power.

[/QUOTE]

Yeah, but how long until they're robots you'd WANNA fuck. I mean, I'm not too keen on shoving my weiner into a cold steel box. I guess that'll be the "next-gen step-up".
 
the day I see a first person Jedi Knight type game using the Wii-mote to its full effect, I will be totally blown away...that or the next Resident Evil title :p (or perhaps another remake of the remake to 1 and Zero)
 
[quote name='boyward']I've been playing Zelda (my Wii came a day early) and I would say it looks slightly better than Fable did.[/QUOTE]

Overall, or on a frame by frame basis? Zelda should have a higher framerate than Fable (much higher if at 60 fps, or just higher if at a stable 30, fable was kind of crappy) so if it's more impressive per frame then that's good.
 
[quote name='evanft']That's just stupid. Until games are completely photorealistic, graphics will be able to improve.[/QUOTE]

Photorealism is not the pinnacle of game graphics.
Movies have always been photorealistic, think about that.

It's all about the creativity and talent of the artists and designers
at this point. The hardware is not the barrier.
 
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