Topic: is the wii u powerful enough?

Its powerful enough for me since its probably will end up being my Nintendo console with a few indies or if a multiplayer community of a game Is big.

@SCAR398 Yes, I left it out beause saying PS4 got the point across just fine and was shorter to write. It was some simp shorthand, I didn't mean anything by it. Your reading into what said too much.

You say that as if the Wii U already hit its limit. You couldn't be farther from the truth.

the difference between the 2 mario platformers on the console is pretty noticeable as far as I see. Granted, that might be because the New Super Mario Bros series are mostly lazy-like games for boring hate new things-like people.

I love the NSMB series but its assets are recycled heavily and can come across lazy in places still a great series though.

I think Nintendo will be able to make fantastic looking first party games like SM3DW and MK8, but third parties won't put much effort if sales remain the way they have been in general this year.

I'd be fine with lazy-ish technical graphics as long as the games are good. Especially if the art style is good.

@Jaz007
The whole reason why I had to go into more detail, is because people tend to generalize PS and Xbox as the "powerful" systems.

Go back to 6th gen...
GCN and Xbox were the "powerhouses"
7th gen...
Xbox 360 and PS3 were the "powerhouses"
...and now 8th gen
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Wii U and Xbox One are on similar terms, with PS4 being the sole "powerhouse" of this gen.

Notice how Microsoft's system is the only system that stayed powerful on a consistent basis since the 6th gen, yet Sony flew from being the weakest system(PS2) to currently the strongest system. This backs my point that people are assuming that Nintendo is always the company that manufactures the "weakest" system. More ridiculously, is that the Wii was the only "weak" system they EVER made, and it's catch was the Wii remote.

It is definitely not warranted to say I'm reading too much into things, or that I'm defending Nintendo when I factually know the crappy attitude people have about this stuff.

EDIT: Also, Sony is the ONLY company that tries to get the most out of their hardware. Unless you count Sony exclusives as 3rd party games, then you are completely wrong. I wouldn't doubt that most of the 3rd party games will be built around the Xbox One like the 360 in 7th gen, and you will never get any games that take advantage of the extra specs unless it's from Sony studios.

@SCAR392 the Wii and the Wii U are the only Nintendo systems that have been deliberately underpowered (outside of handhelds but there it can be more justified because of battery life) but the N64 and NGC were underpowered because of their media formats, the larger capacity of CDs and DVDs compared to Cartridges and GCN propietary Mini DVs help the other systems outperform Nintendo's even if Nintendo's system had technically more power

Powerful enough for Nintendo's flagship games? Yes
Powerful enough to run some ports now? Yes
Powerful enough to run ports of games when developers start using the power of the PS4/Xone? No.

Since now graphic engines are scalable (thank you, mobile gaming) and all 3 consoles are 1080p capable, then I would say it's powerful enough for the next 3-5 years. After that, they might compromise graphic fidelity, but the gap will be smaller than the PS360-Wii generation.

@fethepoet
That may be somwhat true, but that's only because it's easier to sell a cheaper system with some sort of "catch" like the Wii remote or GamePad to more easily differentiate it between it's competitors.

The power is in the Wii remote and GamePad, and I have no doubt in my mind that anyone thinking the Wii U is "weak" will be surprised with what developers will be able to do with it during the course of this generation.

I think it isn't so much power as it is architecture. The Wii U has a very different architecture from the PS and Xbox consoles.

Exactly. From what I can tell, Wii U and Xbox One are actually probably closer in capability than Xbox One and PS4.

PS4 technically has the same architecture as both of them, because that whole memory bandwidth spiel that everyone gave the Wii U criticism for is technically present in the PS4 as well. They just categorized it as ×86 because that's what the memory bandwidth is working off of as apposed to a PowerPC like the Wii U.

Thanks for explaining, I think the wii u can handle all of the third party multiplats if they keep resolution at 720p and reduce some other stuff to keep the framerste, but it depends on the dev if they are lazy or not

The Wii U is powerful. It's better than the ps3 and Xbox 360 that's for sure. It isn't as powerful as the Xbox one or ps4 at all, but that's doesn't mean games can't be ported over to the Wii U by dropping a few textures, physics or resolution.

The Wii U has 2gb DDR3 RAM with 1 GB dedicated to games. This is a lot of RAM dedicated to gaming. The speed of DDR3 RAM is fast too so its nearly impossible to bottleneck a game via the speed. The Xbox one uses the same type (8gb worth) and the ps4 uses gddr5 RAM. Don't let people tell you GDDR5 makes the difference in game performance, it doesn't.

The GPU on the consoles are a different generation. The Wii U uses an older chip than the new consoles. The power of the GPU is worlds apart but don't worry. The Wii U is still capable of HD resolutions with great graphics.

The main area the Wii u lacks is the CPU. If any area of the consoles gain distance this will be the cause. The Wii u tri-core CPU won't match the jaguar 8 core ps4/Xbox chip.

BUT! The Wii U is here to stay with its excellent Nintendo games. They will look great, they will be fun to play and game developers will learn the Wii u architecture better and produce better games over time. Don't get hung up on technical specs because were at a stage of deminishing returns anyway.

@Solado

One of the reasons why people think the Wii U couldn't handle PS4/XB1 ports is because they are comparing it to current PS3/360 ports. The problem with thinking that way is that the PS4/XB1 aren't designed in the same way the PS3/360 are. Last gen, it was powerful CPU over GPU. Now, it's powerful GPU over CPU because of the increased offload capabilities via GPGPU. Wii U is closer in configuration to PS4/XB1 than it is to PS3/360. You take a look at multiplat games that are only on PS3/360/Wii U, you'll see that Wii U games, most of the time, perform worse. But, when you see multiplat games that also include PS4/XB1, the Wii U version performs better than PS3/360. That is mainly because development is focused on next-gen rather than last-gen.

The Wii U CPU may be low by some standards, but the PS4/XB1 CPU is also low. Most games cannot take full advantage of 3 cores, let alone 7-8, and diminishing returns come into play in those cases. The amount of RAM really only translates to the detail of the game, but the game can still be the same, whether it's running on 1GB or 5-6GB. Bandwidth is only an issue if you are having to work with a lot of data. PS4/XB1 have 8GB. Wii U has 2GB. There's no way they are going to fit 8GB of data into 2GB of data without reducing the detail of the data (like textures and models). The reduction size of the data not only makes it fit into the less amount of RAM, but the amount of data the transmit over is also less, leading to DDR3 to really be not so bad in the end. It might be a problem for XB1 though in the graphical department, having 8GB running off of DDR3, but I can see it running CPU-specific tasks far better than PS4 because DDR3 has much lower latency than GDDR5. This is not including the embedded RAM, like ESRAM for XB1 and EDRAM for Wii U, with Wii U excelling in that regard, even to the PS4.

All in all, because of the scalability of the game engines nowadays (thank you mobile devices), there's no reason why Wii U can't get PS4/XB1 ports if they are scaled down. People still think PS3/360 games look good enough, and Wii U games can only look better than them. We've already seen multiple games take little time to be ported over to the Wii U. If they could just put Wii U into their general development cycles rather than after, maybe they'll appreciate what Wii U can offer.

It's powerful enough for what Nintendo wants to do with it.