One of the last appointments I booked was to chat with High Voltage Chief Creative Office Eric Nosfinger to chat about their upcoming Wii game The Conduit. What separates The Conduit from every other FPS on the platform(actually every game on the platform) is the level of graphic fidelity they`ve been able to deliver on the platform (see the exclusive screenshots below). Check out the interview below for more information about the game`s plot, Nintendo`s reaction to the game, and how they were able to pull off this level of graphics on the platform.


Click to play
play_blip_movie_1100824();

Looks like The Conduit is the Wii's graphical Crysis.

IM ALSO AWAITING FACTOR 5S WORK,, they also bigged up there wii engine, basically calling it ps3 like - HD witch i honestly beieve is possible, its all about balance and using the hardware correctly, native res for x360 is 720p its 480p for wii only 1 3rd but wiis gpu clockspeed is 50% lower than x360 so clock to resolution is in fact in wiis favor, also hollywood gpu has around 28gb bandwidth not counting compression in its catch/buffer having such power and efficient hardware capped at 480p has to = big performance, as pc gpu cards less powerful than wiis gpu have been doing 60 frames 720p plus now for years so hollywood gpu under such efficient conditions should BOAST HUGE BANDWIDTH AND FILL RATE..........WII = XBOX 1 WHAT UTTER GUTTER TALK

XBOX 1 133MHZ FSB= 1GB BANDWIDTH//////WII 243MHZ FSB PLUS PEAK 4TO1 COMPRESSION= 7.7GB BANDWIDTH JUST ONE OBVIOUS ADVANTAGE WII CLEARLY HAS

Well said Cyril.
There needs to be a balance between unrealistic fanboy fantasy and the current 3rd party consensus of "eh, it's the Wii, let's make our game look about as good as a crappy PS2 game." Hopefully High Voltage will set a standard...and also license their engine. From the interview with Chuck, it sounds like they really had to work at getting the hardware to perform--not every developer will have the time, money or motivation to do that kind of work. Maybe a reasonably priced middleware toolset will evolve the Wii's graphics beyond vomit-inducing textures and miniscule poly counts.

I wonder why Nintendo didn't give the Wii more ability with pixel shaders--after all, they were designed to make a game look good without pushing the poly count into unreasonable amounts. Doom 3 is a good exapmle (of graphics, not gameplay). The models are pretty low-poly, but the normal mapping makes them look good. There's a mod that lets you turn the shaders off, and Doom 3 ends up looking like Quake 3, pretty ugly.

It still amazes me though, that Factor 5 developed Rogue Leader, one of the Cube's prettiest games and a launch title, in 9 months, and nobody has done anything as pretty since, on the Cube or the Wii. With the possible exception of Rebel Strike, Rogue Leader's sequel, of course.

nintendoware middelware tools support improved shaders as does quantum 3 high voltage engine and factor 5s new wii tools

wii = huge bandwidth and fill rate @ 480p plus a 16 stage realtime shader blender engine TEV UNIT plus custom cpu shaders that interact with the TEV UNIT hollywood gpu onboard T&L AND TEV SHADER,,broadway cpu onboard custom graphics T&L geometry lighting engine......

16 stage shader 8 layered textures, bump and normal maps,custom maps, transparencies............

virtual texturing/tile rendering real time decompresion of compressed data textures

From talking to Eric what they are doing is a lot of low level calls/assembly level calls to get the processor to get increased performance out of the processor. While it works this is very coding intensive and not something a lot of companies are going to want to do to get games out on the Wii.