Nintendo's white-hot commercial success console, the Wii, has been called a lot of things. The most prominent description  is "underpowered." Microsoft Xbox division Robbie Bach took a swipe at the innovative game system recently, saying that even the original Xbox can pull off better visuals.

That may be a foregone conclusion as Nintendo itself was recently quoted admitting that the processor for the GameCube and the Wii are very similar except for a few minor details. Anonymous third-party developers say that the layout of the system is not very flexible and may pose gridlocks to developers.

The sources said that the processing power of the Wii when it comes to shadow and lighting generation is very close to last-gen Nvidia GeForce 2 3D accelerators. "The Wii's GPU has fixed functions for vertex, lighting, and pixel operations... The Wii is an older fixed function design where you have lots of operations but the pipelines are not programmable in the sense of downloading shader code to run," says a developer.

What distinguishes the Wii from its earlier-generation brother in terms of graphics is the fact that it has significantly more memory that allows better pixel generation and other important feats. The memory was raised from 162MB to 243MB, freeing up operations to allow better lighting and rendering effects as well.

Nintendo, however, doesn't seem to mind the criticism, and rightfully so. The strategy has never been to compete with sheer muscle. Rather, it chose to expand the market and outfox the competition with innovation and friendliness. The results are outstanding. With its relatively low price and massive appeal, it has been dominating from Japan to the USA.

If you want to know the whole technical comparison of the Wii to the GameCube, you can follow the read URL. See if you think Robbie was able to "Bach up" his assertions.