Telltale employee says iPhone “much more powerful” than Wii
A Telltale games employee who goes by the username Yare has claimed on the official Telltale forums that the Apple iPhone packs more power than Nintendo‘s Wii home console. Not just more powerful, but “much more powerful.”
A Telltale games employee who goes by the username Yare has claimed on the official Telltale forums that the Apple iPhone packs more power than Nintendo‘s Wii home console. Not just more powerful, but “much more powerful.”
We’ve heard a lot of comparisons between the iPhone and other current market handhelds since the former’s release so coming across another one isn’t really that surprising anymore. Comparisons to current-gen home consoles, on the other hand, aren’t as prevalent, I think.
The statement was made in a thread for complaints about the bad quality of Telltale’s WiiWare version of Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal. Yare backed up his claims with the following explanation:
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, memorize 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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