Back in May, we used an assertion by Microsoft president of Entertainment and Devices Robbie Bach--that the Wii's graphical capabilities lagged behind even that of the original Xbox--as a jumping off point for an inquiry into what exactly we should expect to see on the Wii from a visual standpoint. That post generated a good deal of discussion and debate. It also prompted Farid Bouzid, a senior editor at the must-read graphics technology website Beyond3D, to send us an email explaining that while he liked the piece, we had nevertheless gotten a couple of things wrong. Unruffled by Bouzid's implicit challenge to our generally accepted infallibility, we asked he and his writers to pen a guest essay for Level Up based upon their own investigation into the Wii's technical specifications. We were also curious about why Beyond3D persisted in trying to uncover the Wii's specs when Nintendo was both a) thoroughly unforthcoming about such information; and b) insistent that specs were irrelevant when discussing the Wii. The resulting essay, which appears below, was co-authored by Tim Murray (who covers general purpose computing on GPUs for Beyond3D) and Stefan Salzl (who covers console hardware and trends), and edited by Bouzid. Read on.