You absolutely can*. HD only refers to resolution. It says nothing at all about any of the other graphical qualities. And it is far from infrequent that a 3d game will look much, much better in higher resolutions even with no other changes. And with most TVs being LCDs now and therefor having a static resolution this is especially true since upscaling the already rendered image just creates a blurry mess. It’s one of the two main reasons I almost never play my Wii and the reason I always play my PS1 and PS2 games on an emulator where I can have it render to HD for the 3d games and use straight pixel doubling for 2d games to not get any blurry scaling.
*Assuming by “uprez” you mean render at a higher resolution than the Wii currently uses(640x480?). I’m not sure what you mean by unrendering or uprendering. 3d data doesn’t exist in any set resolution. It is simply a collection of points that define surfaces and it is absolutely trivial to render those surfaces at any resolution at all. While it’s true that rendering at a higher resolution will make lower quality textures, bumpmaps, lighting/shadow techniques, and etc, more noticeable it will still basically always look better than lower resolutions regardless of the assets.
That’s a completely different thing though. Movies aren’t being rendered in real time. Games are. Outside of some cut scenes anyway.
This seems to directly contradict your previous statement?
Sure, but the actual 3d data is only a small part of what makes even 3d games look the way they look. If you just render the 3d part, you get something that looks like Asteroids.
This seems like a baseless claim to me. You’re just making the surfaces and objects larger. About the only positive effect this has is making lines less pixelated, which is pretty low on my list of reasons games can look bad. And as a result, you get gruesome textures, etc.
Out of curiosity, what would the size and heat output be of these HD-outputting components back when the Wii was still in its design phase? Having to make it bigger or increase the cooling somehow would probably make it an automatic no-go, even if there was a great upswell of demand to make Link’s shoulders slightly less jagged.
This screenshot was taken today. Why are so many people playing old-ass Counterstrike? You can’t even smell the terrorists’ feet. GOD. You must have to be a real idiot to play such a horrible, primitive game. It can’t possibly be fun.
It’s nearly impossible to say, since the details of the Wii’s GPU aren’t known. It’s entirely possible that they’d need to make no changes. They’d probably need to increase the VRAM at least, since that’s a huge weakpoint for the Wii, but that wouldn’t really change the size or heat dimensions much. It wouldn’t take more than a high-end laptop GPU from 2006, which would add an inch or two to the width (the size increase coming from a heatsink large enough to dissipate the extra heat from the tripled power consumption.) They don’t really publish prices for such things, but it’s probably somewhere north of $150 per chip. Things have advanced enough since 2006 that they could manage to make a “Wii HD” or whatever that’s the same size but draws more power that just renders games in HD resolution, which is what I think they should do.
The sass coming from people who don’t even vaguely understand the issues in this thread is embarrassing.
Two images from a SD console game. 1 rendered to it’s standard resolution then upscaled to fit an HD tv. One rendered directly to 1080. Basically nothing else is different.
Can you honestly say the higher resolution one doesn’t look much much better? And the upscaling on the SD image here is probably slightly better than most TVs would have.
Only if you don’t know what the difference between upscaling an already rendered image to HD(such as what usually happens when you run a Wii or the older consoles on an HD LCD screen) and rendering the image directly to HD. This was, of course, almost a non issue on CRTs as they could change resolution to give a crisp image even with lower resolution inputs. Higher resolutions were still better but at least you didn’t have blurry upscaling.
Not exactly. There’s meshes, textures, and various texture like maps such as bump maps and specular maps. The rest of it, shadows, lighting, shaders, etc are likely already being computed and should simply be crisper if rendered to a higher resolution.
It makes everything crisper and clearer. Yes low resolution textures would be more noticeable but most textures are higher resolution than they need to be for most situations in a game in order to look good when you are zoomed in more. Rendering at a higher resolution will take advantage of those textures at a further distance.
This is very much not true, in my experience. I recently replced both my 360 and my Wii. With my 360 I could transfer all of my old systems downloads to the new 360 and those DLs that I had bopught that I could not move I could redownload from Live.
With the Wii all transfers are specifically blocked by the system and I would have to rebuy all of the downloads since “it was being installed on a new system” (Nintendo’s words). Even the remaining points that I had would not transfer since they are specifically assigned to that one console, instead of being kept in a central account.
The download process my be similar for both, but beyond that Xbox Live and PSN are both far and away superior systems for customer experience. It is not like saying “10 is bigger than 9.999999” is is like saying 10 is better than 1. Just because they both have a 1 does not mean they are close.
The issue is that Nintendo has pissed off ‘hardcore’ gamers by not making the Wii HD and not scaling the maturity factor of its games with the aging of ‘hardcore’ gamers. By that, I mean the people who were 10 years old in 1990 are now 30 years old with kids and Nintendo is making games for their kids, not for them.
Boo hoo, I’m sorry the magic of Mario didn’t hang around for you because Galaxy wasn’t in stunning 1080p and with a plot out of ‘There Will be Brawl’.
I’m off to my corner to throw Star Bits at Lumas while giggling happily.
We’ve all said it a hundred times, in a hundred different ways in this and other threads. We’ve tried to use logic, humor, common sense, statistics (sales figures), etc etc. We’ve certainly tried both dumbing it down and elaborating on it ad nauseam. Some of these people are just never going to let it get through their skulls. It really makes posts like this hilarious to me:
Literally nobody in this thread is saying SD games can’t be fun. The argument is that if you put Twilight Princess for the Wii beside Twilight Princess for some hypothetical HD system, why wouldn’t you prefer the version with better graphics? It’s not like fun and good graphics are an either/or thing. There are plenty of games for the 360 that combine fun and good graphics and if Microsoft can do it, Nintendo can too.
Because that game doesn’t exist. And likely couldn’t exist if Nintendo went balls-out with an HD system when the Wii was released.
The low production costs have resulted in Nintendo producing dozens of games this generation, more than they have in years. And nearly all of them are classics. I’ll take the Wii SD thank you very much.
And the point from the beginning is that Nintendo’s refusal do a Wii hardware refresh so that HD Twilight Princess is possible is dumb, because an HD Twilight Princess would be awesome (as the screenshot demonstrates.) It literally has zero impact on software production costs, which has been said over and over by different people.
Twilight Princess was a terrible game, imo. Making it HD would make it no less insufferable.
Because resolution is not a barrier to having fun. I bought NBA Jam on the Wii because I found it more enjoyable than its HD brethren.
And I hope that every one of you making this argument purchases only the PC version of multi-platform games. After all, they’re almost all inarguably graphically superior to the PS3 and 360, and thus must be “better.”
I dunno, I suspect that putting out a “Wii HD” that would require anyone who owns a Wii (which at this point is most of the world and their grandmothers) to re-buy the base hardware would not go all that well.
The differences are, quite frankly, very marginal when compared to the full-bore HD cutscenes that make up 99% of the advertising copy for games on the PS3 and such.
So I don’t think you’re going to get a whole lot of new people that avoided the Wii because of graphics issues to buy, and I really don’t think you’re going to get a lot of people who have a Wii to re-buy just for that.
Then you’re going to get some amount of people who will be pissed at Nintendo for what they perceive (rightly or wrongly) to be a money grab to try and get people to re-buy what they already have.
So you’re proposing to redesign and re-tool production capacity on a console that is probably somewhere in the last half of its life cycle for something that won’t get them to sell very many more units.
I don’t really see how it’s much difference than any of the DS hardware refreshes, conceptually. Nobody objected to the DS Lite, but a smaller form factor and longer battery life didn’t make the game any more fun. It just made playing them more enjoyable, much like HD. In fact, I’d say HD would have an even bigger impact on the enjoyment than the switch from the DS to the DS Lite. The same goes for the DSi refresh, or the upcoming 3DS. That’s three refreshes in six years and for a platform with double the units sold. I don’t think one refresh after 4 years is too demanding or unreasonable, especially since both Microsoft and Sony have done hardware refreshes of their own consoles and show no real signs of launching new hardware in the near future.
@Red Barchetta I would be very interested in your thoughts as to why the Wii version of NBA Jam is better than the identical-but-HD-and-online version released for the Xbox 360.
I foresee after Wii HD, people would complain it didn’t have a hard drive. So we’d get Wii HD[sup]2[/sup]. And then people would complain that now that the format war is over, it should get a Blu-Ray drive. Then we’d get Wii BD. And then we’d have SegTendo and it’ll all be over.
(please note the above post is meant to be tongue-in-cheek)
