Newsweek decided to find out, and the answer may surprise you.
Last week, Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division President Robbie Bach made some comments stating that the Wii wasn't really that much more powerful than the original Xbox. In fact, it was less powerful. Newsweek's tech expert and resident geek N'Gai Croal decided to investigate Bach's claim about the hardware differences.
The results may surprise some people. Talking to development sources on the condition of anonymity, Croal discovered that people from Nintendo's own development support group said the chipset powering the Wii is a "Gamecube 1.5 with some added memory." The developer who heard that said if Nintendo said it, "it must be true." The Wii lacks programmable shaders as did the original Xbox, and in fact another developer likened the Wii's graphic set to a seven-year old Nvida PC graphics card.
Such a comparison would seem to confirm the initial worry about the Wii being a vastly underpowered system. However, the two sources Croal tapped in his writeup indicate that the Wii is stronger than the Xbox in other areas, such as the faster clock speeds and extra memory over the GameCube. (Most people will agree that the GameCube and Xbox were neck-and-neck in terms of real-world performance.) One of the developers told Croal that the shader effects featured in the more powerful PS3 and Xbox 360 could be reproduced well enough on the Wii to get "very close results."
Croal concludes that Bach's initial claim about the Wii being underpowered compared to the Xbox wasn't unfounded, but not completely true. Still, for a "next gen" system to be so close in power to a console of the previous generation, one has to wonder how long Nintendo can keep up the "graphics don't mean anything" pitch without the gap starting to become too disadvantageous.