If what you think you know may be true, then its false, the gba can handle texture-mapped polygons, and many games prove this.

Top Gear rally is one good example.

Tony hawks is not 3D on gba, it just uses an isometric view which gives the impression of 3D.

spyro however, the main roaming parts of the game look to be just isometric with no real 3D landscapes, but then i see a screen-shot of a 3D dragon.. and a lighthouse which seems to be faceted like a 3D model with a basic shader applied.

Actually, the graphics card will not increase your rendering speed in ANY way unless you use nvidia's own rendering solution which uses the GPU to render, or any other GPU-based solution, the faster GPU will increase the fps inside of the viewports though,.

However, the faster the CPU, and/or more cores there are, the faster you will find the application will render, if of course, you are using a renderer other than scanline which can use multiple cpu's/cpu-cores which would increase the bucket-count, therefore decreasing rendering time considerably.

For rendering, its all down to the CPU and RAM, GPU has nothing to do with it, as stated earlier.

Cheers.

Mario kart on gba wasn't 3d, neither was golden sun, mario kart just used a top-down drawing of each course which was then squashed and stretched in a perspective fashion untill it looked like you were driving along a road, whereas you were infact just driving face-first across a top-down map ^_^ just like Super mario kart eh. F-zero and Konimi crazy racing also used this technique.

and golden sun used the same kind of technique for the world map, but to a lesser degree, and battles just used a wide panoramic painting to make it seem like the camera was rotating around the characters, etc.

Correct me if im wrong, please.

Cheers.

SM64 was an awsome game, after never have owned or even played a snes (still havn't played one) but i did have a NES, and still do have one.

SM3 was the best game i had played on a ninty system prior to SM64 so i am hoping SMG will have the same effect on me as SM64 did! I was a bit of a sega fan back then too... but they ruined everything with the dreamcast >_>

I would definitely pay an extra £50 on the Wii if they used a higher clocked cpu, although the gamecube could almost match the original xbox, possibly even on par on a few games, so i believe the Wii can and will surpass the original xbox' graphics soon enough.