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Is Wii less powerful than Xbox One? N'Gai investigates

Last week in an interview with eWeek, Microsoft's president of Entertainment and Devices division Robbie Bach made the claim that the Nintendo Wii "[doesn't] have the graphics horsepower that even Xbox 1 had."

Is the Nintendo Wii, with or without duct tape, less powerful than the original Xbox? Newsweek's N'Gai Croal decided to investigate by talking to "two of our most reliable technical experts at third party publishers" speaking under the condition anonymity (given Croal's credibility, we trust him).

The article therein is a very technical discussion on fixed function shaders, pixels and vertexes, and ultimately concludes that the GameCube 1.5 moniker isn't far off from the truth, though said one source, "keep in mind that the Wii's GPU is not as fast or feature rich as the Xbox 360 or PS3, but that doesn't mean you can't get very close results." And of course, given the hardware sales we've seen since the console's launch, how much does supreme technical prowess really matter to Nintendo?