'Level Up' blog solidifies rumors surrounding Wii GPU

Thursday 10th May 2007, 04:04:00 AM, written by Carl Bender

N'Gai Croal in his "Level Up" gaming blog has recently added substance to longstanding Wii GPU architectural rumors. Performing some detective work after claims made by Microsoft's Robbie Bach that the Wii is the graphical equivalent of the original XBox, two Wii developers were quoted by Croal as confirming that the ATI/AMD-provided Wii GPU contains simple fixed-function - rather than programmable - shading units.

Speculation on this matter has raged for months, with a B3D thread on said topic actually linked to from within Croal's own article. In a system that is an exemplar of cheap and efficient, GPU complexity is thus kept to a minimum, keeping the die size smaller than would be the case with more robust shading capabilities; this in turn has positive spillover effects on expense, power consumption, and in-system heat generation. The negative side of this, however, is that the Wii is constricted in both the breadth and scope of shading effects it is able to generate.

In this environment, certain Nintendo developers have created tools to maximize the performance of the fixed-function units when porting code over from the PC/360/PS3. Through these 'conversion' tools, modern shader code is re-compiled into a set of fixed function instructions best suited towards replicating the desired effect on the Wii. To expand its potential relative to the original chip inside GameCube, Nintendo has supposedly increased the number of fixed-function "texture environment stages" on the chip from 8 to 16; the result being that developers are able to pursue more complex pixel operations should they so choose, at the expense of speed.

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