The Wii GPU has a nice blending/shading engine

A Wii patent says the following:

Title:

Recirculating shade tree blender for a graphics system

Abstract:

A hardware-accelerated recirculating programmable texture blender/shader arrangement circulates computed color and alpha data over multiple texture blending/shading cycles (stages) to provide multi-texturing and other effects. Up to sixteen independently programmable consecutive stages, forming a chain of blending operations, are supported for applying multiple textures to a single object in a single rendering pass...

...The number of recirculations may be limited in a particular implementation in view of real-time rendering timing constraints, but a reasonable number of recirculation stages (e.g., fifteen) can provide great flexibility in implementing a variety of complex shading models.

It is known that polygon counts are not the most inovative part of a GPU these days. That was true for Xbox, PS2 and Gamecube. The most advanced GPUs support something called "shading" or "blending" that are effects applied to textures and generated frames before displayed. This process helps to generate a more realistic image because it produces efects like bump mapping, displacement mapping, reflection mapping, etc. So the polygons can have shadows, reflections, seem more polished and more realistic through a process like this one.

Wii´s GPU shading/blending cycles (similar to pipelines) are designed with a general purpose. Wii reasonably handles up to 15 cycles (pipelines) in a single render pass for real time aplications ("real time aplications" is a close term to in-game, right?). In comparison Gamespot mentions that the Xbox 360 has a unified shading arquitecture (similar than Wii´s) and supports up to 48 pipelines (they don´t mention if they are raw numbers or in-game numbers). They also mention that PS3 handles 33 dedicated pipelines. This are more efficient than the general purpose ones (raw? in-game?). The original Xbox supports 4 simultaneous textures (raw). This 4 simultaneous textures can be thought as a type of pipelines.

Concluding, the Wii will have a really nice shading/blending engine. We don´t know exactly how is this engine compared to Xbox360 or PS3 ones, cause we don´t know if they are raw or realistic numbers. But we can say something, The Wii´s shading/blending engine is well positioned between the actual generation (Xbox) and the next one (Xbox 360 and PS3). So Wii could show really nice effects on polygons that can set it appart from current generation consoles (Xbox), just look at Mario Galaxy videos and screenshots and you can notice an important difference. Compared to the new generation consoles? I think Wii could give a good battle. This is good news because some people on the Internet assumed that Wii couldn´t make shading/blending just because it hasn´t dedicated pipelines.

Source:

http://patft.uspto.gov/...

http://www.gamespot.com/...

http://gear.ign.com/...