Hoping to finally put the debate surrounding the technology powering the Wii to rest, graphics technology outlet Beyond3D and Newsweek's N'Gai Croal have done some extensive work at a physical hardware level to determine that, in no uncertain terms, the Wii is in actuality only about 50 percent more powerful than the original GameCube.

The long article breaks down the Wii into its component parts in simple terms and provides some comparative analysis of where the Wii sits in relation to the other competing consoles and its predecessor. Until this point, the article claims, the Wii has been "a total anomaly in the history of consoles," as no specific information was given aside from codenames.

Of note, "Broadway, the Wii's CPU, is a derivative of the PowerPC 750 CL clocked at 729Mhz," and that the "Hollywood" GPU has "no notable increases in programmability" over the Gamecube's "Flipper" GPU. The end result? "The Wii has the processing power of one-and-a-half GameCubes with no noteworthy increases in functionality."

While the analysis from Beyond3D hopes to spur conversation about just how pivotal the controller is to the gameplay experience in general, it's hard to look past the effort that went into confirming what many of us had already suspected and accepted. This, of course, doesn't change the fact that art direction will forever and always be just as if not more important as raw power.