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Originally posted by: KDR_11k
well Wii may not have the custom shaders(really a dissapointment), but there used to be a time when devlopers werent lazy and didnt have to rely on built in hardware tricks to make better games, they programmed it themselves.
Shaders ARE what you program yourself (they're tiny processors that handle certain effects), trying to do their effects in software is like drawing 3d graphics without a GPU: Technically possible but so slow that it's rarely worth it and will never stack up to the output of something that includes the dedicated hardware. This is not about "not being lazy", this is about performance and being able to implement stuff without missing even more deadlines.
They all have finally figured out, five years into the hardware's life cycle, how to do at least basic shaders and a rim light, but that's what everybody does.
That is pretty much a desaster, it sounds a lot like it's hard to make the Wii do any of those effects and things that are hard often result in hacks. Hacks result in badly maintainable code (didn't Factor 5 toss their entire engine between RS2 and 3?) and lots of bugs (something both RS games were notorious for IIRC). While it will look nice in screenshots it will hurt the overall quality of the game.
the balance here is that the Wii has a faster gpu and cpu then gamecube, so running software shaders in the background wouldnt be too slow, its not like you would be able to achieve xbox 360 graphics, but you would get graphics that are better than gamecube, and also better than xbox.
if we go back to gamecube verses xbox, the gamecube's proccessor was a monster of efficiency compared to the xbox cpu, the xbox gpu was better than gamecubes gpu with all of its extra features. Now though we have aqn overclocked cpu, and an overclocked gpu. I don't know what the specs of this overclockedness is, but one could say that the best looking xbox games(ie doom3,chronicles of riddick(the games that don't really look any different then this gen) should be possible on wii, and with some gruntwork look better than their original xbox counterparts.
i think it was ubisoft that said and im paraphrasing "the graphics on wii are not as powerful as the other systems, but gamecube had some really good graphics, and the graphics are better than that, so we have nothing to worry about."
i think devlopers are just being lazy with the wii
http://media.wii.ign.com/media/842/842201/img_4355989.htmlgames shouldnt look that bad on wii. especially when games look like this on gamecube
http://media.cube.ign.com/media/015/015821/img_2429086.html