Displaying in HD does affect frame rate. It affects it because of this:

Lets say you have 480i/p resolution, that is 720x480=345600 pixels that must be output from the GPU. I won't go into details but there are a ton of calculations and math that can turn a 3D environment to a 2D screen. Look here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_pipeline) for more info on the rendering pipeline. Now if you have an HD resolution of 720p, that is 1080x720=921600 pixels which is ~2.6 times more pixels to output. That is a lot more translations that must occur to go from 3D to 2D. There are other factors, but this is definitely a huge factor. If you want to know more about graphics, I can make some recommendations. It is all really interesting stuff.

Sure it affects frame rate. Just take a look at how the addition of HD aspects in the Half-Life series over the years have required more powerful hardware with each new iteration.

Imagine Crysis running on a Wii. I'd be willing to bet that even the best 1st generation DX10 cards won't allow you to run Crysis with every, single last detail turned on. We're going to have to wait for possibly the 10xxx series of NVIDIA cards and R8xx ATI cards before maximum detail levels can be achieved.

Look at Counter-Strike 1.6. The game is around 9 years old now and even with a 7900GTX SLI setup, you'll still see framerate dips when approaching a layer of 2 or 3 smoke grenades.

If it were just HD movies, then the Wii could probably handle it. With HD games, don't forget, the CPU has to process all the HD info as well as actually processing the game. Both of these elements at the same time will make for low framerates.

Rich, technically, a lot of the processing nowadays is off loaded to the GPU for processing, but it's still a ton of processing to do regardless of where it is happening.

Ok I don't understand the first point. It's too expensive but that could be fixed with the first Wii refresh? What does that even mean?

If a "Wii refresh" = new version of the Wii (ala DS Lite), well why not just pump up the hardware capabilities of the new version, but for old games without HD support, cap the capabilities to the original Wii's? (Note: I anticipate this in a couple years if/when HD saturates the market)

I feel that this whole article is gibberish.

Also, the way the author thinks that Wii rhymes with High, there's your indication of a high-quality article.

All - clearly, I stand corrected about frame rates. Thanks for the info!

Case - I hadn't noticed that he thought Wii rhymed with high until you pointed it out - that's hilarious.