Originally posted by: acejj26
It is technically impossible for the GameCube to have graphics on par with the XBox. It had 48 MB of memory compared to 64MB on the XBox. And of that 48 MB of memory, 40 MB was 18ms DRAM. DRAM. Do you know how slow DRAM is? It so slow that Nintendo told developers not to use that memory for anything that was needed immediately i.e. textures. That memory was used to store things like UI, stats, and level layout.
So on texture quality alone, the GameCube could not compete with the XBox. Eight MB of 1T-SDRAM is no match for 64 MB of DDR memory.
Most uninformed quote ever...you're probably the guy that buys a GeForce 6200 because some manufacturer put 512 MB of memory on it instead of something with a better processor (i.e. 7800) with "only" 256 MB of memory.
BTW, if rendering a 640x480 screen with 24 bit color and 8 bits of alpha blending, you only need about 1.2 MB of memory. Granted, there will be some overlap, but if you optimise your code enough, you might be able to squeeze all the textures you need into that 8 MB of really fast 1T SRAM.
The processing ability of the Gamecube WAS roughly on par with that of the original Xbox and it was more advanced than that of the PS2.
Also, did anyone else notice or find it weird that the clocks on the Wii processor and GPU were exactly 50% faster than their predecessors on the GameCube? So, if the architecture is the same, you would expect 1.5x the performance of the GameCube. If they were able to perform some tweaks to enhance IPC, maybe its twice as fast. So, I don't believe that the graphics of the Wii are horrible...they're probably about twice as good as the GameCube.