Everyone keeps saying how under-powered the Wii is, with its less than 100 MB RAM and inferior graphics architecture. But now I've found quite beautiful gem (at least in terms of graphical prowess) in one of the places I'd least expect to see the Wii being a graphical powerhouse... in a budget-title Cars-themed Mario Kart clone.
Take a look at this [Click for Image]:
This is a screenshot of Cars Race-O-Rama for the Nintendo Wii, as emulated on Dolphin. Take a look at the left side, where I've enabled some debug statistics. There's one listing in particular that's called "Primatives (DL)". Take a good long look at its value.
For those of you who don't know what that entry means, the "Primatives" are polygons/triangles rendered and "(DL)" stands for display list, which can be synonymous with the 3D models used in Wii games.
That means that in this game the Wii can render at least up to 620,000 polygons at once on-screen, and during the part of the game this was taken from (the very first level) it stayed between roughly 550,000 - 625,000. Now that's wicked.
This game is actually quite odd. It was originally designed for the Xbox and PS3, then ported to the Wii later on, but that's not what sets it apart. I've looked at footage from those first versions and compared it to the Wii's in-game visuals, and found that the only tangible differences between them were the lack of certain lighting effects and some downgraded texture quality in spots, but everything else seems crazily identical, down to the 3D models of the cars themselves (which average out to about 60,000 triangles per car, with eight cars per race and from what I can tell no lower level-of-detail versions used in-game). Combine that with up to 100K polygons of the track being visible at any given time, and the numbers get absolutely insane for a Wii game. I'd even go on record (even if I'm probably wrong) stating that this is the highest-poly Wii game we know of to date.
Oh, and it stays at a solid 60 FPS.
This surprised me at first, but what do you guys think?
P.S.: First post on GBATemp. Nice to meet ya!
Take a look at this [Click for Image]:
This is a screenshot of Cars Race-O-Rama for the Nintendo Wii, as emulated on Dolphin. Take a look at the left side, where I've enabled some debug statistics. There's one listing in particular that's called "Primatives (DL)". Take a good long look at its value.
For those of you who don't know what that entry means, the "Primatives" are polygons/triangles rendered and "(DL)" stands for display list, which can be synonymous with the 3D models used in Wii games.
That means that in this game the Wii can render at least up to 620,000 polygons at once on-screen, and during the part of the game this was taken from (the very first level) it stayed between roughly 550,000 - 625,000. Now that's wicked.
This game is actually quite odd. It was originally designed for the Xbox and PS3, then ported to the Wii later on, but that's not what sets it apart. I've looked at footage from those first versions and compared it to the Wii's in-game visuals, and found that the only tangible differences between them were the lack of certain lighting effects and some downgraded texture quality in spots, but everything else seems crazily identical, down to the 3D models of the cars themselves (which average out to about 60,000 triangles per car, with eight cars per race and from what I can tell no lower level-of-detail versions used in-game). Combine that with up to 100K polygons of the track being visible at any given time, and the numbers get absolutely insane for a Wii game. I'd even go on record (even if I'm probably wrong) stating that this is the highest-poly Wii game we know of to date.
Oh, and it stays at a solid 60 FPS.
This surprised me at first, but what do you guys think?
P.S.: First post on GBATemp. Nice to meet ya!
