Polygon performance and fillrate varies a lot on the Wii, depending on which features are being used. Enabling the fixed function lights drop vertex throughput per additional light and using multiple texture layers (lightmaps, gloss maps, reflection maps, etc) also has adverse effects on fillrate.
On the 3DS things are further complicated because it has a programmable vertex pipeline, so the vertex throughput depends on the complexity of the vertex program.
I also don't know if the MAESTRO extensions actually do the additional per-vertex processing required by some effects automatically when enabled or if devs need to feed that data manually in the vertex program.
It's also unknown how exactly the per-pixel lights are implemented in the 3DS: they can either be rendered in one pass or in multiple passes (which would consume fillrate for multiple lights). It's also unknown if they are done in tangent-space (requires more per-vertex processing) or world-space (looks better, but requires more per-pixel processing).
dark10x said:
People HAVE played most of them, however, and I doubt we'll see a dramatic change in visual quality.
They look good and, on the small 3DS screen, they should match up reasonably well. It's clear, however, that they are not throwing around the same amount of geometry we've seen in the Gamecube and Wii iterations of those series.
Due to S3D, the 3DS would need
twice the Wii's vertex throughput to render exactly the same amount of geometry. Firelink's calculations seem very reasonable, and I believe the 3DS' GPU is clocked at something between 100MHz and 133MHz, which would put it at 40~50M polygons. Cut that by half for 3D and you have a difference that roughly mirrors what we've seen so far.
It's also worth mentioning that the Pokedex models are
far more detailed than the ones in Wii's Pokemon Stadium. If you use AR markers, it's possible to show around 10 pokemons at once, all casting shadows on each other. So a 3DS stadium game could look much better than the Wii version, with self-shadowing and per-pixel lighting even.