Quote:
Originally Posted by [TTG] Yare
And I stand by them. The Wii and DS are extremely underpowered and their popularity doesn't remove the hardware limitations. 
The extra RAM is really what makes the difference. Of the Wii's 88 MB of RAM, a not insignificant chunk of that is always being used by the OS and is unavailable to developers. The Wii's RAM is also split into two separate banks, each of which has different read/write metrics and you can't really spill from one to another if you need to.
As I said before, everything in computer science is about striking a balance between a small memory footprint, or having blistering fast algorithms. When you are limited in file size and memory footprint, you spend a lot of processing time decompressing things, deciding what needs to be loaded in memory at the moment, streaming things on/off the disk, and so on. If you have more memory, you can use cheaper (or no) compression, spend less time worrying about how much stuff can be loaded, hit the disk less frequently, memoize calculations, and other awesome stuff.
A little bit of RAM goes a huge way in letting you use faster algorithms. It's more important than a faster processor, IMO.
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Having limited hardware capability doesn't preclude the DS from having an excellent library of games. I could give a crap about the iPhone and its games since it's not
primarily a gaming device and doesn't have anywhere near as expansive a library of games of different genres. Graphics and power aren't everything in gaming, it's how the specs they have are utilized to make the best games possible (gameplay). Other developers seemed to have no trouble making great-looking and fun DS games despite the "lame architecture."
Loving the zomg!specs a
little too much...and maybe sipping some haterade on the side?
