GameInformer

@S.T.A.R.S. Officer

Resident Evil 4 was a great game and one of my favorites, but I doubt the Wii can produce a decent RE5. They have pretty much the same gameplay and that's about all the Wii will be able to produce. Not saying the Wii can't play Resident Evil 5 at all, just won't be at the same stage as the 360/PS3 ports. Dead Rising on the Wii is a perfect example but was used with the RE4 engine so here's hoping they at least use Havok as they did with Darkside Chronicles. cavia has done quite good so far but there's always room for improvement.

Well, if its "quite possible" to produce an Resident Evil 5 for the Nintendo Wii. Then maybe the Capcom should start developing an exclusive Resident Evil 5 version for the Wii (with all new content).

I can assure that RES5 visuals and even more is possible on Wii.

Besides, I have a better example that RES DarkSide Chronicles. How about Silent Hill Shatered Memories for Wii, which the one who made the preview was so amazed by the visual quality that had mistaken the game as a 360 title before he used the Wii controls?

http://play.tm/preview/25134/silent-hill-shattered-memories/

The game also makes use of HDR+AA

 If we want games at the level of Resident Evil 5 in Wii, the only possible way is by making use of the appropiate tools, engines that not make use of stream processing like OpenCL, or Floodagte, CUDA, etc, will not take real adventage of what wii can offer.

There are also tools like Havok for Physics, which was selected for Wii due to it´s new tool called Havok FX; this tool can take adventage of GPUs that are native GPGPUs to do the physics. Do not confuse this tool with Havok Hydracore, this last one is for doing the physics in multicore cpus. The Havok Hydracore was available since version 3.0, and the Havok FX was available in the Havok 4.0 release.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=9308

Product: Havok Supports Wii, Next-Gen At E3
by Jason Dobson
"

During last week's E3 event in Los Angeles, cross-platform middleware physics solution provider Havok announced support for the Wii, Nintendo's upcoming next-generation video game console platform.

The GameCube's current library of software titles feature more than fifteen games that utilize Havok middleware, and this announcement confirms the continued support of Nintendo by Havok.

"Havok has become synonymous with state-of-the-art physics in games in recent years," said Ramin Ravanpey, Director of Software Development Support, Nintendo of America. "With this announcement from Havok, we feel Wii developers have another critical tool in their hands that helps unleash the real magic of the Wii platform."

In addition, Havok's software solutions were featured in 35 titles from 25 different developers at E3 across multiple platforms, including Alan Wake, Alone in the Dark, Assassin, Auto Assault, BioShock, Brothers in Arms Hell's Highway, Cars, Company of Heroes, Crackdown, Dawn of Mana, Dead Rising, Destroy All Humans! 2, F.E.A.R., Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Happy Feet, Heavenly Sword, Hellgate: London, Just Cause, Killzone, Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, Metal of Honor Allied Assault, Motor Storm, NBA Live 07, Over the Hedge, Saint's Row, Shadowrun, Sonic The Hedgehog, Splinter Cell 4, Spore, Stranglehold, Superman Returns: The Videogame, Test Drive Unlimited, The Ant Bully, The Godfather, and Urban Chaos: Riot Response.

"We wanted the action in our game to focus on interactive elements in a highly intuitive manner," says David Nadal, Game Director at Eden Games. "We knew Havok Physics could help us do that for game-play elements, but we wanted to push the envelope even further to add persistent effects that could interact with game-play elements. Havok's GPU-accelerated physics effects middleware helped us achieve that in surprisingly little time."

Through the use of Havok FX and GPU technology, game developers are able to implement a range of physical effects like debris, smoke, and fluids that add detail and believability to Havok’s physics system. Havok FX is cross-platform, takes advantage of current and next-generation GPU technology, and utilizes the native power of Shader Model 3 class graphics cards to deliver effect physics that integrate seamlessly with Havok’s physics technology found in Havok Complete.

“With Havok FX we can explore new types of visual effects that add realism into Hellgate: London,” commented Tyler Thompson, Technical Director, Flagship Studios. “Given the widespread installed base of GPUs and the incredible performance of the new Nvidia GeForce 7900 boards, Havok FX was a natural choice."

"

The only stream processing engine that i know that has been licenced for Wii is the Floodgate, which comes in the Gamebryo LighSpeed.

http://www.emergent.net/Products/Gamebryo/Technical-Details/Floodgate/

"

Gamebryo Floodgate®: Cross-Platform Game Development, Streamlined

"

They say that Floodgate runs in a different way on wii since it´s cpu is not multicore, by that they are saying that Floodgate runs on the wii Hollywood since Floodgate is an engine that can run on cpu´s multicore and also native GPGPUs like the ATI x1000 and the Nvidia 8800.

Just look what stream processing is and you will understand

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_processing

"

Stream processing is a computer programming paradigm, related to SIMD, that allows some applications to more easily exploit a limited form of parallel processing. Such applications can use multiple computational units, such as the floating point units on a GPU, without explicitly managing allocation, synchronization, or communication among those units.

The stream processing paradigm simplifies parallel software and hardware by restricting the parallel computation that can be performed. Given a set of data (a stream), a series of operations (kernel functions) are applied to each element in the stream. Uniform streaming, where one kernel function is applied to all elements in the stream, is typical. Kernel functions are usually pipelined, and local on-chip memory is reused to minimize external memory bandwidth. Since the kernel and stream abstractions expose data dependencies, compiler tools can fully automate and optimize on-chip management tasks. Stream processing hardware can use scoreboarding, for example, to launch DMAs at runtime, when dependencies become known. The elimination of manual DMA management reduces software complexity, and the elimination of hardware caches reduces the amount of die area not dedicated to computational units such as ALUs.

..ect

Most programming languages for stream processors start with C or C++ and add extensions which provide specific instructions to allow application developers to tag kernels and/or streams. This also applies to most shading languages, which can be considered some kind of stream programming languages to a certain degree.

Non-commercial examples of stream programming languages include:

• ACOTES Programming Model: language from Polytechnic University of Catalonia based on OpenMP
• Brook language from Stanford
• DUP language from Technical University of Munich and University of Denver
• OpenCL, an open standard
• Sh library from the University of Waterloo
• Shallows, an open source project
• StreamIt from MIT

Commercial implementations are either general purpose or tied to specific hardware by a vendor. Examples of general purpose languages include:

• AccelerEyes' Jacket, a commercialization of a GPU engine for MATLAB
• Floodgate, a stream processor provided with the Gamebryo game engine for PlayStation3, Xbox360, Wii, and PC
• HMPP, a "directive" vision of Many-Core programming
• PeakStream,^[1] a spinout of the Brook project (acquired by Google in June 2007)
• RapidMind, a commercialization of Sh
• TStreams,^[2][3] Hewlett-Packard Cambridge Research Lab

Vendor-specific languages include:

• Brook+ (AMD hardware optimized implementation of Brook) from AMD/ATI
• CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) from Nvidia
• Intel Ct - C for Throughput Computing
• StreamC from Stream Processors, Inc, a commercialization of the Imagine work at Stanford

"

Even if you think that Wii has shown all what has to offer, I got you good news, the GPGPU software is evolving and will take even more adventage of the GPUs for general purpose(not all GPUs, since in the case of  ATI have to be models like ATI x1000 or superior and in Nvidia have to be 8800 or superior) in the future.

@ S.T.A.R.S officer and Tapionvslink,

    You fanboy's are impossible.  The HD option is not even an option, it's a last minute cop-out, and put screen shots of Uncharted 2 and Gears of War next too the ones above and let reality sink in.  Also, SD cards mean jack, it's not just the storage, it's all the extra stuff developers can use it for that makes it a must have.  How many extra devices,SD cards, and peripherials do we have to keep buying to make this console not suck.

If Capcom ports it to the Wii, they should be worrying about squeezing the content in. A gameplay-perfect port (which, sadly, ain't the Wii Call of Duty games) would be better than a pretty port.

Wait? What? The Wii producing the same high-end graphics that the PS3 and the 360 have? The Wii's graphics are barely improved over last generation.

If graphics on Wii showed in the begginig that were of past generation is due to the tools used in the development of the games.

As I have said, if you want good wii titles , the developers and studios most be interested in achieving impressive graphics on Wii, and make use of tools like Floodgate from Gamebryo LighSpeed.

Floodgate has been available for Wii since Gamebryo 2.3 and according to Dan Emerson, it really takes adventage of Wii capabilities.

On purpose, Floodgate is a stream processing engine  similar to CUDA and can do stream processing on cpu´s multicore and GPUs that support GPGPU.

Since Wii has a weak cpu comparable to a G3 and is only one core, it must be running on the Hollywood. Besides, Dan Emerson said that even though Wii has a cpu of one cre, wii will have the same core features as 360 and ps3 and that even porting form ps3 or 360 to wii will represent no problem and that developers wouldnt have to worry if the game in 360 or ps3 to port to wii made use of multiple threads.

The first GPU capable of GPGPU were the ATI x1000 family cards, and were available to market since october 2005. Wii Hollywood was finished after June 2006. So there was plenty of time to implement the technology.

Not to mention that GPGPU technology gaved nintendo the opportunity to create a small and cheap console. The only problem would be the software to talke adventage of it.

That is why until recently we see titles that really take some adventage of the Wii. And this is just the begginig since GPGPU software is growing and being more popular, in fact, has killed future proyects of IBM with the Cell architecture.

If you make proper use of GPGPU sofware, you can achieved between 100 and 250 times more performance than a single but powerful cpu of one core.

Of course that for that time and money is required.

Even seeing your "proof," this is like saying that the N64 is capable of producing early PS2 games. While it looks very close, it is simply not the same.

Your sources are somewhat questionable, misleading, and irrelevant, so I would just accept the fact that developers themselves know what the Wii is capable of right now.

The Wii has very visually stunning games, like Super Mario Galaxy, Zelda TP, and the screenshots of the games you showed. However, it has been proven with official numbers that the Wii's GPU is less than half as powerful than the PS3 and 360's GPU.  The Wii's CPU is about 1/3 as powerful as the other systems.

Here are the numbers, and I won't go into the processor's names...:

GPU-

360---------500MHz

PS3--------550MHz

Wii----------243MHz

CPU-

360--------3.2GHz

PS3-------8 Cells @ 3.2Ghz

Wii---------729MHz

So, no matter what engine you use to make the game and how much you take full advantage of the Wii's technology, these numbers are not going to change. If the game was reproduced for the Wii at full 360/PS3 graphics, the console would either crash or run at an incredibly slow framerate. There is a reason why the Wii is $100 cheaper than the other consoles, and it isn't just because of the hard drive.

For example, on my computer, my specs are good, but I have a crappy integrated graphics card. I could download the PhysX engine and such, but that does not change the fact that my computer is not capable of HD video games.

Before purchasing another console, I was defending the Wii like you, saying that developers are just not taking full advantage of the Wii.

My advice: If you are concerned on the graphical capabilities of your console, waiting for developers to "take advantage" of the console isn't a good idea. Just purchase another console and get to know what you're missing out on. I know myself it's not all about the graphics, but the Wii is sure missing out on a lot of original titles, like the 360's upcoming Alan Wake, or the PS3's upcoming Heavy Rain.... 

@Sintendo

Not really sure what you're trying to say. It's obvious to me, and more than likely everyone  else who owns a Wii that the Wii will never achieve Uncharted 2 (which in my opinion doesn't look all that great. I don't like the style) and Gears of War 2 visuals. Duh.

The SD cards comment, I don't get what you're trying to say. We have the option to use SD cards AS storage. Isn't that the point? On top of that, you can put any SD card that has the adapter or is the size of that specific card into the Wii and play music, videos and do stuff with pictures. I can't see what other purpose a SD card would have.

What else are developers gonna do to make buying an SD card worth while? What the hell do you think? Add more games on the Shopping Channel! My 1 GB is really filling up, with great classic games and WiiWare titles, and now we have the option to download demos. What more could you want? I can think of DLC, but thats about it.

I think it's kinda dumb that there are so many different peripherals for the Wii remote, and the Classic Controller is a bit over priced. At least each attachment has a significant use for something and adds different ways to play some of the games.

It's not about how many SD cards or peripherals make the Wii a better system, its about what you see in the system that makes it great. Obviously you have nothing positive to say about the Wii, and thats fine. Everyone gets an opinion. I'm not a big fan of the 360 because 3/4 of the games that come out every month have to do with killing people in the most gory possible fashion. I like some variety.

Maybe in due time Capcom will announce a new Wii version of Resident Evil 5 (one that fully support the Wii capabilities).

RES5 in Wii is possible with all it´s beauty in graphics, but that will only happen if CAPCOM makes use of stream processing engines like Gamebryo LighSpeed´s Floodgate. The Wii Hollywood is a very powerful chip, but has to be used not just for rendering, but also for tasks that would normally be done in the CPU(GPGPU) like physics and floating point calculations necessary for some rendering thechniques like the displacement mapping.

GPGPUs can achieve performance gain as high as between 100-250x vs a single but  powerful single core cpu. As for the speed clock of the Hollywood is not a burden unless the Hollywood is used for both rendering and floating point calculations, off-loading work from the CPU and saving bandwith 

http://nintendo-revolution.blogspot.com/2005/12/is-displacement-mapping-last-secret.html

"

While the poly count is significantly lower, there is some strain on the CPU. Johannes Hirche writes:

Rendering displacement mapped surfaces is a process that involves a significant number of geometric and arithmetic operations. When applied to a triangle mesh, it involves prior retessellation of the base domain surface and transformation of the vertices and normals. Even on fast CPUs, it is a time consuming operation, wasting bandwidth and processing power.

This is why displacement mapping has not been widely used in real-time graphics. However, new and refined techniques allow for displacement mapping to be implemented in real-time. Again, Johannes Hirche writes:

The main focus was to explore new techniques suitable for hardware implementation in order to reduce the bandwidth strain on the system bus by moving the tessellation process onto the graphics subsystem. (...) A possibility to overcome these problems is to tessellate the individual triangles sequentially and to adaptively add triangles where necessary, until a desired level of accuracy is
reached. (...) With only minor user interaction or conservatively predefined input parameters the sampling schemes produce adaptive tessellations with very low error measures.

"

Who knows, maybe CAPCOM is not planning RES5 on Wii, but maybe another RES with the graphical qualities of RES5 by making use of displacement mapping, but that will only happen if they use the appropiate tools like Floodgate or OpenCL.

@ S.T.A.R.S

  /sigh, you really are clueless and obviously blind.  Developers have used the hard drive for everything from eliminating load times ( Uncharted 2 has none) to helping with textures and ...never mind, you cant understand, /facepalm.   And if you Havent seen any of the PS3 and 360 games in HD than yes, ,they only look a little better because there all in 480.......but there is a huge difference between 480 and 1080.  What is so hard to understand about that.

  And I do not hate Nintendo, I have owned every system since the NES,  but I am frustrated with them, and just wish that for once they would not be behind the curve and stop relying on gimmick's to sell systems.   Yes this is my opinion, but I do own all 3 systems, I play them in HD, and I can assure you that the difference in gaming experience between the Wii and the other 2 is huge.  I want to play the Wii....I just do not have reason to untill the next Zelda comes out.

I get what you're saying, by all means, I do. I've never really noticed a problem with load times on many Wii games though, I think RedSteel had the slowest load times out of any Wii game I've played so far.

I'm aware of the difference between 480p and 1080i, its huge. 1080i is more sharp, vibrant, clear, etc. 480p is, obviously standard. My friend's got a .... 62, 72 (I never remember, i just know its huge) 1080i TV that we play 360 on. The games look great, compared to Wii games, but I don't see what's so special about it. Why does it matter if a game has HD graphics or not? Sure HD looks a lot better, but there not anything to get overly hyped about.

Why don't you have a reason to play the Wii until the next Zelda? Whats wrong with the other 1st party games and some of the 3rd party games? There's a bunch of great ones.

Wii and 360 are different.. The first is all about efficiency and xbox 360 is power.

Let me give you an example

Maxocnole states that Wii Hollywood has 3.9GBytes/s of memory bandwidth right?

http://www.maxconsole.net/?newsid=8802

We know that games like Cursed Mountain for Wii can do HDR, antialaising, motion blur, dynamic shadows, etc.

Cursed Mountain and the Athena Engine
http://www.neoseeker.com/Games/Products/Wii/cursed_mountain/userreviews.html?reviewid=33871

"
Cursed Mountain doesn’t falter on the technical side of things either, the ‘Athena’ engine the game runs on enables for a variety of impressive effects as quoted from Gerhard Seiler, Technical Director of Sproing;

“It is really important to us that the player experiences nature's powers as realistically as possible, and that the game's viewing distance allows the player to see the monumental landscapes at all times. We are also going to great lengths to make the dead souls look as convincing as possible in order to deliver the level of immersion necessary for really effective and believable survival horror.

“In order to achieve this, our ‘Athena Engine’ is designed to enable HDR-Rendering, shader simulations developed especially for the Nintendo Wii in order to display ice, heat and water (realistic reflections and refractions), an ultra-fast particle system for amazing snow storms, soft particles for realistic fog and smoke, depth of field, motion blur, dynamic soft shadows, spherical harmonics lighting, as well as a high performance level-of-detail and streaming system in order to provide long viewing distance of the entire surrounding.
“Our engine technology really takes the Wii hardware to its limits and Wii gamers can really look forward to a heart-stopping and breath-taking world that comes alive with this title”

From a graphical standpoint Cursed Mountain is easily one of the best ‘realistic’ looking games on the Wii, the technical effects the Athena engine produces are practically unmatched on the console and the art direction truly is perfect. Some of my personal highlights would be the amazing particle effects that come into play during battles against the ghosts, or when I first arrived at the monastery, the visuals are simply breathtaking, even when compared to games on more powerful gaming platforms.

"

But do you know how much bandwidth the Xenos of the 360 needs for HDR+antialaising+lighting effects ?

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p3.html

"

Bandwidth
The PS3 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and 25.6 GB/s of RDRAM bandwidth for a total system bandwidth of 48 GB/s.

The Xbox 360 has 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth and a 256 GB/s of EDRAM bandwidth for a total of 278.4 GB/s total system bandwidth.

HDR, alpha-blending, and anti-aliasing require even more memory bandwidth. This is why Xbox 360 has 256 GB/s bandwidth reserved just for the frame buffer. This allows the Xbox 360 GPU to do Z testing, HDR, and alpha blended color rendering with 4X MSAA at full rate and still have the entire main bus bandwidth of 22.4 GB/s left over for textures and vertices.

"

So how is it that Wii Hollywood can do HDR+AA and other lighting effects?

Is all thanks to the use of the new architectures present in the ATI x1000(R520 or R580) since these were the first cards that supported HDR+AA and without several impact in performance.

So, how can the Wii Hollywood do HDR, antialaising,alpha blending, etc?
Youn can find your answer here.-
http://transporter-game.googlecode.com/files/RealtimeHDRImageBasedLighting.pdf

"
Abstract
This report presents the work done on the final project
for the course of Image Based Rendering. A real-time
application has been implemented with the purpose
of demonstrating the capabilities of nowadays GPU’s
power within the scope of Image Based Rendering
and Lighting. The built application has a full High
Dynamic Range (HDR) pipeline and it deals with
issues like tone mapping, automatic scene exposure,
vignette e ect and blooming (to increase the high
dynamic e ect). Furthermore, some materials were
used to demonstrate the potentiality of Image Based
Lighting.

Keywords: Image Based Lighting, HDR, Tone
Mapping, Real-Time.

1 Introduction
HDR images, in comparison to normal digital imaging
techniques, contain a high dynamic range of intensities.
Given these high range intensities, HDR images are able
to convey a more realistic idea of the scene (through
tone mapping techniques, given the screen restrictions).
HDR images can be used as light sources for rendering -
a technique referred to as Image Based Lighting (IBL).
The goal of this project is to performed HDR IBL at
real-time using hardware accelerated graphics.
To gain an understanding on how to construct an
HDR pipeline, some ideas were taken from real-time
HDR IBL implementations that currently exist. Example
implementations are Masaki Kawase’s rthdribl
and ATI’s real-time version of Debevec’s Rendering with
Natural Light.

2 HDR Pipeline
2.1 HDR Texturing
HDR Texturing seems to be a hot issue nowadays, specially
in real-time applications. With the GPU boom
and the possibility of programming real-time shaders,
this subject became suddenly possible on commodity
computers. However, there are still certain limitations
regarding texture handling that one must take into account.
The usage of high precision textures like 32
bit FP for all the pipeline is definitely not the way to
go given the bandwidth overhead caused. 16 bit FP,
though, seems to be a good tradeo between accuracy
and memory space - still depending on the purpose of
the application [1].

The code was developed on two ATI cards - X700
and X1600 Mobility Radeon -, and neither of them supports
bilinear filtering of 16 bit or higher floating point
textures. Therefore, the decision of using an encoded
format - RGBE - was made. RGBE is a format that
can store quite a high-range of intensities thanks to its
exponent - E, and, once stored on RGBA16 doesn’t suffer
from great loss of precision [1]. The way to store
an RGBE tuple is to use the alpha channel as the container
for the exponent E - which has the drawback of
loosing blending capabilities. In Figure 1 it’s shown the
di erence between using 8, 12 and 16 bit fixed-point
textures. The di erence between 12 bits and 16 bits is
unnoticeable for this scene but it might be useful for
higher dynamic range scenes.

2.2 Cube Mapping
Cube mapping has been used extensively on this
project. In order to render the background scene, a
vertical cross HDR texture in .hdr format was split
into 6 separate .hdr textures (one for each face of the
cube). The background scene was then rendered using
OpenGL’s extension for cube maps. Cube maps were

GPGPU Computations
Computing luminance statistics for a certain scene
might become a heavy operation for real-time applications.
Therefore, a General Purpose GPU parallel
reduction technique has been used to compute in parallel
the minimum, maximum and log average luminance."

This technique becomes extremely ecient for scenes
bigger or equal to 5122 pixels where the parallel power
of the GPU comes in. In our particular case the number
of pixel pipelines were at least 4 allowing for 4 computations
at the same time

"

Yeah and Modern Warfare in the Wii looks just as good as the 360 version! Oh wait...

Why do some developers talk out their asses?