Hacker News Reader

ATI developed the graphics chips for 360 and Wii. Feels a little too revisionist to say AMD produced the chips even if they did purchase ATI a number of months before Wii released..

View on HN

It’s a bit tricky even to say that ATI developed them - they were designed by ArtX (mostly ex SGI staffers who had also worked on the N64), who were bought by ATI.

Perhaps but ArtX was acquired by ATI long before. The ATI logo was already on the GameCube at launch.

Maybe Wii was ArtX but wasn't the 360 using a mainstreamish Radeon GPU?

It had some significant differences. Mainly the fixed SRAM render target. Fun fact is that a lot of tech from the 360 GPU made its way into Qualcomm Adreno GPUs. Reading about the tiled render pass OpenGL extensions in the Adreno was very reminiscent of working on the 360.

You’re right - I should have clarified that in my comment!

The Wii GPU is very much the GameCube one with some tweaks and faster clock speeds.

The 360 one is absolutely an ATI custom Radeon part.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com