Back in the Dark Ages people roamed the land calling themselves 'soothsayers' - a famous example of such was Dr Johannes Faust - who went on to make a pact with the devil, and it all ended in tears. These days, soothsayers are frowned upon as New Age nonsense, circus acts or plain old charlatanry used to prey on the weak and the vulnerable.
Thank goodness we've moved on from the superstitious days of yore with its soothsaying and nonsense. Thank goodness we now have analysts who say things like:
This, of course comes from Wedbush Morgan analyst, Michael Pachter who - unlike soothsaysers of old - does not use crystals, virgin sacrifice or the guts of small Gaullish mutts called Dogmatix. Pachter uses analyst terms such as "my guess" and "may decline" and "could be introduced".
Science and analysis is brilliant.
We, of course, contacted Michael Spilligan (Senior Entertainment analyst at Nomoru Wahrheit Kennis) who told us, "I know Michael's work and I respect it. However, it doesn't take a person of average intelligence to suggest that component costs might or might not drop in near or not near future scenarios.
"From my crows' nest over the video game industry, I confidently predict that Nintendo will produce a high-definition Wii as soon as it manages to leverage its cost synergies correctly in relation to the consumer-base."
So, there we go.
Source: Next-gen
Source: GamePro
Thank goodness we've moved on from the superstitious days of yore with its soothsaying and nonsense. Thank goodness we now have analysts who say things like:
"Consumers may hope for improved graphics, and my guess is that Nintendo will comply.
"In two or three years, commodity prices for graphics processors and CPUs may decline to the point that a High Definition Wii could be introduced. If so, Nintendo will likely introduce one".
"In two or three years, commodity prices for graphics processors and CPUs may decline to the point that a High Definition Wii could be introduced. If so, Nintendo will likely introduce one".
This, of course comes from Wedbush Morgan analyst, Michael Pachter who - unlike soothsaysers of old - does not use crystals, virgin sacrifice or the guts of small Gaullish mutts called Dogmatix. Pachter uses analyst terms such as "my guess" and "may decline" and "could be introduced".
Science and analysis is brilliant.
We, of course, contacted Michael Spilligan (Senior Entertainment analyst at Nomoru Wahrheit Kennis) who told us, "I know Michael's work and I respect it. However, it doesn't take a person of average intelligence to suggest that component costs might or might not drop in near or not near future scenarios.
"From my crows' nest over the video game industry, I confidently predict that Nintendo will produce a high-definition Wii as soon as it manages to leverage its cost synergies correctly in relation to the consumer-base."
So, there we go.
Source: Next-gen
Source: GamePro
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Comments
Captain Chaos! 1 Aug 2007 13:14
1/12
these analysts really grind me down, how much does Michael Pachter get paid to spew out this noise.
what happened to all the 'analysts' predictions about the outcome of this generations console war? i seem to remember the ps3 streaking ahead again with wii coming a poor third.
what happened to all the 'analysts' predictions about the outcome of this generations console war? i seem to remember the ps3 streaking ahead again with wii coming a poor third.
schnide 1 Aug 2007 16:54
2/12
Captain Chaos! wrote:
i seem to remember the ps3 streaking ahead again with wii coming a poor third.
Come back in a few years..
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realvictory 1 Aug 2007 22:29
3/12
I don't think it's going to change much from where it already is, until something drastic happens, such as maybe a price cut - or maybe a high definition Wii...
The biggest question at the moment, rather than cost, I would say, is how do they introduce the new Wii against the current Wii? I suppose waiting is the answer, then.
No, actually - the biggest question is: what will the next innovation be!
The biggest question at the moment, rather than cost, I would say, is how do they introduce the new Wii against the current Wii? I suppose waiting is the answer, then.
No, actually - the biggest question is: what will the next innovation be!
OptimusP 2 Aug 2007 09:35
4/12
I'm geussing (hoping) the return of cartridges!
Have you seen the prices of SD-cards tumbling down these days, now imagine that 4 years down the road with 12-18-32(?) gig sd-cards.
It wont be innovative but it will refine the Wii-mote innovation (this one does lack a button or two) combined with X360-PS3- like power. MS and Sony will follow this path as well with consoles that will be like "two X360's ducktaped togehter". Nintendo has shown them that this very cost-effective manner works and pays of hugely...and do we need the high "5 times more powerfull zomg!" power really? Better Ai? yeah...i'll believe that when they start improving AI this generation by significant margins. I'm geussing...no one will, or better, no one will bother.
Have you seen the prices of SD-cards tumbling down these days, now imagine that 4 years down the road with 12-18-32(?) gig sd-cards.
It wont be innovative but it will refine the Wii-mote innovation (this one does lack a button or two) combined with X360-PS3- like power. MS and Sony will follow this path as well with consoles that will be like "two X360's ducktaped togehter". Nintendo has shown them that this very cost-effective manner works and pays of hugely...and do we need the high "5 times more powerfull zomg!" power really? Better Ai? yeah...i'll believe that when they start improving AI this generation by significant margins. I'm geussing...no one will, or better, no one will bother.
Captain Chaos! 2 Aug 2007 10:31
5/12
I cant see nintendo releasing a new upgraded hi def Wii any time soon. Why would they bother?
RayGamma 2 Aug 2007 12:22
6/12
Captain Chaos! wrote:
I cant see nintendo releasing a new upgraded hi def Wii any time soon. Why would they bother?
because composite didn't even cut it two gens ago and component is almost as horrible a clunky hasbeen tech
way 4 Aug 2007 14:52
7/12
What is going wrong with this site in the last month or two? I couldn't even get the login button to work last night or tonight. The page is causing such an slow down that it stalled mid click.
The Wii probably is perfectly capable of doing HD now, but not implemented in software. The Nintendo was something like 1024*768 capable but not used.
But look at Wii FarCry, please faster better hardware.
The Wii probably is perfectly capable of doing HD now, but not implemented in software. The Nintendo was something like 1024*768 capable but not used.
But look at Wii FarCry, please faster better hardware.
moosa 5 Aug 2007 01:25
8/12
When will the world learn; this is absolute stupidity! Everyone in the world who's ever talked about the Wii having HD, no matter how high-class and "intellectual" they present themselves, has no idea what they're talking about.
HD video doesn't come from a freaking cable. It's not a matter of paying $30 or $50 more for a machine that spits out HD. Rendering real-time gameplay at 720 or 1080 vertical lines of resolution in progressive scan, as opposed to the standard 480 lines vertical resolution with an interlaced picture of non-HD television sets, is a task that requires a very significant, and in no way inexpensive, upgrade in overall processing power and memory. That's the first step. Next you have to realize that you can't just plug in some extra juice into the game system; the box would literally not be the same system anymore, and would require both a different development process in making games, as well as some ridiculous and hardly economical way of emulating the original Wii hardware, even though it supposedly *is* a Wii , in order to play every game made for the Wii before the upgrade. Which brings up the next point: Nintendo would be making a terrible business choice in that it would be dividing it's own software library to such an extreme degree! I can't even imagine... half the Wii games on the shelf are HD, half aren't... that would be ridiculous. You have to understand as well that games don't just come out HD when the box tells them to, they need to be CREATED in HD... and thus any developer choosing to support your expensive choice in getting the HD Wii would not only need to design the game in HD, but also create the same game in the standard resolution format for the non-HD Wiis as well, and they're not going to like having to build you two copies of the same game... The next issue then is the costs in developing in HD. There's a HUGE jump in costs incurred by developers having to work in an HD format verses standard def. Those costs are very damaging to the industry overall, and furthermore, the publishers of HD games will of course pass the extra costs on to the consumers, the same way 360 and PS3 games now price at $10 more than the last-gen standard. And finally, to top it all off, HD videogames require much more memory to store all the graphics files, which would mean a tremendous difference given the limited disc space of the Wii's proprietary disc media. It's plenty big enough to store standard def-games comfortably, but the requirements of HD would cripple that.
Did I miss anything? Any questions?
EDIT: Oh yeah, and the Wii is capable of outputting an HD signal (with minor hardware modifications), but unless you want to see something that looks like Star Fox (SNES) in HD, I wouldn't be too excited about the possibility... >_>
HD video doesn't come from a freaking cable. It's not a matter of paying $30 or $50 more for a machine that spits out HD. Rendering real-time gameplay at 720 or 1080 vertical lines of resolution in progressive scan, as opposed to the standard 480 lines vertical resolution with an interlaced picture of non-HD television sets, is a task that requires a very significant, and in no way inexpensive, upgrade in overall processing power and memory. That's the first step. Next you have to realize that you can't just plug in some extra juice into the game system; the box would literally not be the same system anymore, and would require both a different development process in making games, as well as some ridiculous and hardly economical way of emulating the original Wii hardware, even though it supposedly *is* a Wii , in order to play every game made for the Wii before the upgrade. Which brings up the next point: Nintendo would be making a terrible business choice in that it would be dividing it's own software library to such an extreme degree! I can't even imagine... half the Wii games on the shelf are HD, half aren't... that would be ridiculous. You have to understand as well that games don't just come out HD when the box tells them to, they need to be CREATED in HD... and thus any developer choosing to support your expensive choice in getting the HD Wii would not only need to design the game in HD, but also create the same game in the standard resolution format for the non-HD Wiis as well, and they're not going to like having to build you two copies of the same game... The next issue then is the costs in developing in HD. There's a HUGE jump in costs incurred by developers having to work in an HD format verses standard def. Those costs are very damaging to the industry overall, and furthermore, the publishers of HD games will of course pass the extra costs on to the consumers, the same way 360 and PS3 games now price at $10 more than the last-gen standard. And finally, to top it all off, HD videogames require much more memory to store all the graphics files, which would mean a tremendous difference given the limited disc space of the Wii's proprietary disc media. It's plenty big enough to store standard def-games comfortably, but the requirements of HD would cripple that.
Did I miss anything? Any questions?
EDIT: Oh yeah, and the Wii is capable of outputting an HD signal (with minor hardware modifications), but unless you want to see something that looks like Star Fox (SNES) in HD, I wouldn't be too excited about the possibility... >_>
way 5 Aug 2007 14:17
9/12
moosa wrote:
When will the world learn; this is absolute stupidity! Everyone in the world who's ever talked about the Wii having HD, no matter how high-class and "intellectual" they present themselves, has no idea what they're talking about.
Are you having an go at me, or yourself. Apart from basically repeating the paragraph I decided not to put in, about the problems with going HD in Wii, you seem to be widely mistaken. Looks like I forgot to quote the 64 model as the one that HD 1024*768 support built in but not used.
HD video disks are not the only reason for HD, you can do HD games, the WII has way more power than is needed. What you mistake as HD, is the quality and quantity of the artwork. There is ways to program that automatically adjusts the artwork for different screen sizes, has been for years. This is not an too uncommon type of misconception, as even most programmers are too lame to think up these schemes, and have to rely on somebody else to supply them an interface and code. To make things extremely worse, cheap DVD players that support Mpeg4, Divx, or WMP in HD have an fraction of the performance of the Wii, for years.
One thing you do get right, is that we can't expect the same quality in HD as an more modern performance system can do. However, PC's have supported games with resolutions from below SD to HD like resolutions for years with performance not to much unlike the Wii, and the extra hardware is very cheap. Nintendo, apart from missing an mark, probably doesn't want to activate HD because the Wii looks much better in SD, even if it still does not look as refined, it is not their thing.
I am not an Wii fanboy, or intellectual wanna be, just objective and intelligent.
moosa 5 Aug 2007 18:01
10/12
Mr. Way, I apologize for the misunderstanding but that way in no way directed towards you. It was intended to be a direct response to what was written in the article, and more specifically, the analyst's statements which were referenced therein. I'm assuming that you are not this same analyst, but correct me if I'm wrong.
I hope you're not implying that I'm neither objective nor intelligent.
What you've stated is simply that the Wii hardware is theoretically capable of outputting an HD signal, just not in a fashion that would produce as-good-looking visuals. As you can see, that point was clearly made in my post.
Your points about HD video players and formats are pretty irrelevant. The closest you can come to relating an HD video format with rendering a real-time 3D video game in HD is through just the cables carrying the signal. A DVD player is no more a comparable device to a Nintendo Wii than a Super NES is to a slide-projector. A DVD player does nothing more than read, decode, and then transmit a digital signal. Real-time rendering capabilities of a DVD player extend about as far as the cursor you move in a movie's opening menu, which itself is hardly even responsive.
Comparing the Wii and PCs' hardware is no more valid. The systems are built very differently to handle different needs. This is very easy to back up with numbers:
The Nintendo Wii has a total of 91 megabytes of suitable RAM.
The desktop PC I am currently using, which cost around $600 as a total package about a year ago, has exactly 1 gigabyte, or 1024 megabytes, of RAM, not taking into account the usage possibilities of the HDD for virtual memory and such.
How can you expect the Wii to match my year-old, middle-quality, home desktop PC's real-time rendered HD resolution output when the Wii has less than 1/10th the RAM, among other things?
I have made no mistake about the quality of artwork and HD. That is of course a factor, as a low-res designed game rendered in a high-res format would not necessarily look very high-res at all. What you've stated about scaling the "art" quality is of course possible, but that would only be applicable in down-scaling, as obviously the Wii cannot be made to render at a higher quality than it's now capable of for HD textures and such unless a game was designed that would use the Wii's resources up on rendering HD instead of the quality of graphics that can be achieved in SD, which is essentially what has been said already too much.
I hope you're not implying that I'm neither objective nor intelligent.
What you've stated is simply that the Wii hardware is theoretically capable of outputting an HD signal, just not in a fashion that would produce as-good-looking visuals. As you can see, that point was clearly made in my post.
Your points about HD video players and formats are pretty irrelevant. The closest you can come to relating an HD video format with rendering a real-time 3D video game in HD is through just the cables carrying the signal. A DVD player is no more a comparable device to a Nintendo Wii than a Super NES is to a slide-projector. A DVD player does nothing more than read, decode, and then transmit a digital signal. Real-time rendering capabilities of a DVD player extend about as far as the cursor you move in a movie's opening menu, which itself is hardly even responsive.
Comparing the Wii and PCs' hardware is no more valid. The systems are built very differently to handle different needs. This is very easy to back up with numbers:
The Nintendo Wii has a total of 91 megabytes of suitable RAM.
The desktop PC I am currently using, which cost around $600 as a total package about a year ago, has exactly 1 gigabyte, or 1024 megabytes, of RAM, not taking into account the usage possibilities of the HDD for virtual memory and such.
How can you expect the Wii to match my year-old, middle-quality, home desktop PC's real-time rendered HD resolution output when the Wii has less than 1/10th the RAM, among other things?
I have made no mistake about the quality of artwork and HD. That is of course a factor, as a low-res designed game rendered in a high-res format would not necessarily look very high-res at all. What you've stated about scaling the "art" quality is of course possible, but that would only be applicable in down-scaling, as obviously the Wii cannot be made to render at a higher quality than it's now capable of for HD textures and such unless a game was designed that would use the Wii's resources up on rendering HD instead of the quality of graphics that can be achieved in SD, which is essentially what has been said already too much.
way 6 Aug 2007 13:38
11/12
My apologies, just defending myself, there are many people that jump in with unbelievably silly things around here sometimes, and I just get tied of it.
I had thought you had referenced HD video playback. I was just stating that the Wii had more than enough power for that, and higher resolution 3D (though it significantly less detailed than what we expect today, which I actually agreed with you on). DVD players and PC's are also comparable to the Wii for obvious reasons, all computing devices, and I am pretty sure we have had 3D HD like games that work on less than 91MB, 700Mhz PC's. So, I was never trying to compare it as equatable to what present day higher performance PC's can do, but older ones. You can design 3D graphics to be resolution independent (within certain limits of practicality etc). But of course I ws suggesting, if they upgraded the Wii's performance. You could design games to automatically be rendered in SD on the old Wii's, as they did with PC's too. However, with some limitations you can upscale Wii games to HD. Placement, and miniature feature side might be an problem, but apart from that 3D graphics lend themselves very well to upscaling.
But all in all, the Wii, is an three trick Pony, it has the ultra cool control technology and games, it has the Nintendo label, and it has cheap low powered hardware. But however, I would rather the control, and games, be on an PS3, or Xbox360. So, yes, for me, the Wii did need to be an bit more powerful and take an bit wider functionality. I awaited, and found they went with the lower spec, I was disappointed, and I rejected.
Once, again,sorry for the confusion,
and welcome to Spong.
Way.
I had thought you had referenced HD video playback. I was just stating that the Wii had more than enough power for that, and higher resolution 3D (though it significantly less detailed than what we expect today, which I actually agreed with you on). DVD players and PC's are also comparable to the Wii for obvious reasons, all computing devices, and I am pretty sure we have had 3D HD like games that work on less than 91MB, 700Mhz PC's. So, I was never trying to compare it as equatable to what present day higher performance PC's can do, but older ones. You can design 3D graphics to be resolution independent (within certain limits of practicality etc). But of course I ws suggesting, if they upgraded the Wii's performance. You could design games to automatically be rendered in SD on the old Wii's, as they did with PC's too. However, with some limitations you can upscale Wii games to HD. Placement, and miniature feature side might be an problem, but apart from that 3D graphics lend themselves very well to upscaling.
But all in all, the Wii, is an three trick Pony, it has the ultra cool control technology and games, it has the Nintendo label, and it has cheap low powered hardware. But however, I would rather the control, and games, be on an PS3, or Xbox360. So, yes, for me, the Wii did need to be an bit more powerful and take an bit wider functionality. I awaited, and found they went with the lower spec, I was disappointed, and I rejected.
Once, again,sorry for the confusion,
and welcome to Spong.
Way.
wiiboy101 UK GIZZA 17 Dec 2008 18:34
12/12
think ur on the money there about a hd wii and the older wii, a more powerful wii plus dedicated super resolution tech would allow full hd support full hd upscaling and super resolution hd upgrading, this would allow wii to be a true 480i to 1080p display console a native resolution of 800x600 with super resolution upscale would look near 1080p to a humans eyes and wii hd could be set resolution optimized and then use super resolution tech to match the highest hd displays 1080p and above,this way consumers get the best image they can be it 480i/576i to 1080p plus depending on the tv set a overclocked big edram big main ram version of wii with super resolution chip would be very cheep but also very powerful