Nintendo consoles over the years
Before we dwell on further, let's put into perspective Nintendo's home hardware and graphics performances over the years.
2D is King era
| Famicom (JP) NES (US/EU) | Super Famicom (JP) Super NES (US/EU) | |
| Year | 1983 | 1990 |
| CPU | Ricoh custom 6502 8 bit CPU at 1.79 MHz (NTSC) and 1.66 MHz (PAL) | Ricoh custom 65C816 16 bit at 3.58, 2.68 or 1.79 MHz (switchable) |
| RAM | 2 KiB (Cartridges could host RAM expansions) | 128 KiB |
| GPU | A dedicated Ricoh 8 bit chip dubbed Picture Processing Unit or PPU (take that Ageia, Nintendo did it first) Clocked at 5.37 MHz (NTSC) or 5.32 MHz (PAL) 2 KiB of VRAM 64 Sprites (8x8 or 8x16 pixels) per screen - 8 per scanlines 25 different colours per scanlines - out of a palette of 53 Resolution mode: 256x240 |
Two custom Ricoh PPU 16 bit chips 64 KiB of VRAM 128 Sprites (up to 64x64 pixels) per screen - 32 per scanlines 256 to 4096 colours per screen - out of a 15bit palette Resolution modes: From 256x224 to 512x448 Hardwired effects: Mozaic, color shifting, scaling (Mode 7) On cart DSP addons (Super FX) allowed for basic flat shaded 3D |
| Note about the graphics performances | Top of its game for 1983, its market and price point. | Impressive for 1990 , and for its $199 US price point. Only the Neo Geo outclasses it that year, but at $649 ($1 K factoring inflation) per console with carts going for as high as $300, it was in a class of its own. |
Enters the 3D as the main attraction
| Nintendo 64 | |
| Year | 1996 |
| CPU | NEC custom MIPS R4300i 64 bit - 24KB L1 - 93.75 MHz |
| RAM | 4 MiB of RDRAM at 500 MHz, the Expansion Pak adds another 4 MiB |
| GPU | SGI custom chip dubbed 'Reality Co-Processor' (RCP) at 62.5 MHz (Fog exists in reality thanks to this chip... Not really) RCP is comprised of two parts: - Reality Signal Processor (RSP) - Which handles transform, lighting, matrix ops and the audio (Yes) - Reality Display/Drawing Processor (RDP) - Rasterizer, ROP The RDP is infamously forced to store its textures in a 4KiB texture cache (A single texture couldn't be bigger than 64x32x2-bit or 32x32x4-bit) RCP was much more advanced than its competition (PS1/SAT) counterparts. Supported texture perspective correction, linear filtering, floating point precision for transform and matrix ops, Z-buffering, Edge AA, etc. 32 bit RGBA colour frame buffer Resolution: 256 x224, 640x480 |
| Note about the graphics performances | Top of the line feature-wise for 1996. |
TnL and fixed function era
| Gamecube | |
| Year | 2001 |
| CPU | 'Gekko' IBM custom PowerPC 750 - 64 KiB L1/256 KiB L2 - at 485 MHz - Die size: 43 mm2 |
| RAM | 24 MiB MoSys 1T-SRAM (2.7 GiB/s throughput) 16 MiB ARAM (80 MiB/s) |
| GPU | 'Flipper' ArtX designed, clocked at 162 MHz - Die size: 120 mm2 DirectX 7-era feature set - Fixed function pipelines 3 MiB of eDRAM (1 MiB for texture cache and 2 MiB for the frame buffer). Supports transform and lighting (TnL) 4 pixel pipelines (a texture unit each) TEV unit - A register/color combiner capable of various Environment Mapper Bump Mapping (EMBM) effects. Supports bilinear, trilinear, anisotropic filtering. Multi-texturing, texture compression (S3TC) and anti-aliasing. 32 bit RGBA colour frame buffer, a 18 bit (6r, 6g, 6b, 6a) mode is also available. Resolution: up to 480p (640x480) Integrates a sound DSP. |
| Note about the graphics performances | Feature wise it was much more advanced than Playstation 2's Graphic Synthesizer. It was a generation behind, though, when compared to the DirectX 8-era NV2A found in the Xbox, but it could definitely produce graphics that weren't out of place next to NV2A's own output. |
| Wii | |
| Year | 2006 |
| CPU | 'Broadway' IBM custom PowerPC 750 - 64 KiB L1/256 KiB L2 - at 729 MHz - Die size: 19 mm2 |
| RAM | 24 MiB MoSys 1T-SRAM (2.7 GiB/s throughput) 64 MiB GDDR3 (4 GiB/s throughput) |
| GPU | 'Hollywood' ArtX designed, clocked at 243 MHz - Die size: 72 mm2 DirectX 7-era feature set - Fixed function pipelines 3 MiB of eDRAM (1 MiB for texture cache and 2 MiB for the frame buffer). Supports transform and lighting (TnL) 4 pixel pipelines (a texture unit each) TEV unit - A register/color combiner capable of various Environment Mapper Bump Mapping (EMBM) effects. Supports bilinear, trilinear, anisotropic filtering. Multi-texturing, texture compression (S3TC) and anti-aliasing. 32 bit RGBA colour frame buffer, a 18 bit (6r, 6g, 6b, 6a) mode is also available. Resolution: up to 480p (640x480) Integrates a sound DSP. Integrates an ARM9 core dubbed 'Starlet' that handles I/O and security tasks. |
| Note about the graphics performances | It's has the exact same feature-set the Gamecube had in 2001. |
From a pure hardware standpoint, the Wii suffered from missing the DX9.0c era of GPU capabilities and extended programmability. The world of GPUs has definitely witnessed a paradigm shift in terms of how developers work with these now fully programmable fragment and vertex shader cores. Making it hard to conceive of an engine that would be truly compatible between the DX9.0c GPUs found in PS3 and Xbox 360 and the DX7 GPU powering the Wii. But that was then, and now is the time for Wii U to catch up.
