Topic: Wii U has more power

I wouldn't trust any rumours on what these other next gen consoles will have until there is at least some concrete confirmation of when we can even expect them to launch. Currently there is no announcement on them so for all we know they could still be working out what their next systems will be.

The speculation on future consoles is about as reliable as the speculation on what the next iPhone will have. A year before it's out it has virtual reality keyboards and the best of every tech available..... and then they announce it and it's got a slightly taller screen. So grain of salt and all that.

The 'immersive display experience' will never see the light of day in a consumer market place. People don't live in square white rooms with no windows

The Wii U definitely has more power. Now you're playing with SUPER POWER!

I hope the power the Wii U has will allow it to be involved in the next console race from beginning to end. This time it has the right amount of buttons (unlike the GCN) and hopefully enough power (unlike Wii) to be able to compete. And since it can run in 1080p fairly well, I think devs should start making games to work on Wii U (with the pro controller) and send it to the others by upscaling, if needed, then come back and add in the Wii U GamePad features. That way, the GamePad gets the time it deserves and users of the Pro Controller for multiplatform games won't have a completely different control scheme from the other consoles.

this is so specific that it feels like it had to be a mistake. this guy is probably being tortured in a dark room by reggie fils-aime right now:

• "One of the weaknesses of the Wii U compared to PS3 and Xbox 360 is the CPU power is a little bit less," he said. "So for games in the Warriors series, including Dynasty Warriors and Warriors Orochi, when you have a lot of enemies coming at you at once, the performance tends to be affected because of the CPU.
  ...
  But from a visual standpoint, based on the performance of the Wii U, we knew the game had the capability of having much better graphics than games on PS3 and Xbox 360. Make no mistake, from a visual standpoint, it is able to produce better graphics. So our challenge was to make a higher quality graphics. We were able to meet that.
  ...
  While the visuals are great, as is being able to improve them, we had to deal with the lower CPU power and how we can get around that issue. ... I expect that GPU focused games will benefit from smoother frame-rates and lower levels of screen-tear, but cross-platform titles highly dependent on CPU power could end up noticeably worse off." -akihiro suzuki

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-09-21-a-chat-about-the...

that's the best picture of how well off the wii u is compared to current gen systems we've gotten yet. it will definitely look better on the surface, but the processor can't handle as much stuff underneath. kind of disappointing that after 7 years both the processor and gpu can't be superior to the current gen, but as long as it looks better overall i'm satisfied.

So it will look better, but not play better?

I here I thought nintendo cared more about gameplay than graphics! Guess they finally realized the truth.

Wii U has more power

no, according to the above, no it does not. it has more sparkle.

@romulux
A "little bit less" CPU power but "much better" graphics. You know how little that matters? If I had to pick a PC to play games on and my options were an Ivy Bridge i5 at 3.4Ghz with a GTX 560 or an Ivy Bridge i5 at 3.2Ghz with a GTX 660 I know where I'd go. There is no doubt in my mind that the latter is better for gaming by a huge margin. You could put a $2000 CPU with the 560 and the 660 would still beat it in gaming by a country mile.

skywake, i agree that at this point the gpu matters more than the cpu in console hardware. i just think it's a still little lame that the wii u technically can't do some things as well as a 7 year old console that's soon to be selling for the half the price of the basic wii u bundle. that's the price you pay for innovative gameplay, though.

still, the keyword here is sparkle. the wii u has more of it, possible even more zazz, but i don't want to get carried away here.

Developer: Wii U is the strongest console right now

• “Right now, the Wii U is the strongest console with a lot of potential for the future. You should not forget that the Wii U GPU is from a different generation than the ones from the current competitors. Because of that, there are many new ways of approaching things.” - Shin’en CEO Manfred Linzner
• Linzner added that it’s easier to implement graphics solutions for the Wii U than on current generation consoles because of the more modern hardware. “Coupled with the generous working storage” he said, “you have unbelievable possibilities”.

I don't know, but a console that can run a handful of games in native 1080p at 60fps, while streaming an equally high-definition image to the GamePad with what is said to be zero latency sounds pretty powerful to me.

Aside from that, I'm also interested in the fact that the Wii U makes use of a GPGPU, alongisde other processors. It's been rumoured that through this, the Wii U is capable of DirectX 11 equivalent graphics and shaders, based on the alleged wording of someone prominent in an interview with Unity Technologies; if this serves to be true, that'd put the console's graphics at least two generations ahead. I don't know where I stand on this rumour, but it's definitely not impossible. Anybody remember the early Zelda tech demo from E3 2011? I'm pretty sure the console was only halfway above being a prototype back then, especially seeing as Nintendo specifically said the "finished form" would be at E3 2012, even though no alleged changes on the exterior were in the least conspicuous.

But what do I know?

19 times more powerful than PS3!

• Nintendo representatives on the day informed me that it was “19 times more powerful than PS3.” Having spent a decent amount of time with the launch software I doubt these claims and would take it with a grain of salt, as the games on show at the expo appeared directly comparable to Xbox360 and PS3 titles and certainly no better.

How in the world did the person come up with that number?

@Ryno That person took a number out of a hat.

PCs probably won't be '19 times more powerful' than the PS3 for quite a few years.

I will agree with the "50% more powerful" claim, but 19 times is ridiculous. The next PlayStation and Xbox won't be that powerful. I don't even think PCs are that powerful...yet.

What's ridiculous is this claim. Obviously it depends on what your benchmark is but in general this is wrong. There will be some gaming style benchmarks where PS3 level hardware would choke and give you slideshow level fps but a high end PC will run along at 80fps+. It varies depending on what benchmark you use to measure it because of various bottlenecks but its ridiculious to claim that PCs aren't that much higher.

There's this thing called Moore's Law which says that the number of transistors you can fit on a piece of silicon doubles every 18months or so. That roughly translates into performance. Real world performance is a different thing but looking up some benchmarks for comparison a PC that cost as much as the PS3 did at launch would encode a 1080p video to H.264 19x slower than the best performing "consumer" PC CPU would today. Best in 2006 vs best in 2012 it's more like 5x. If all of Moore's Law was put into real world performance and there were no other bottlenecks that'd be 16x rather than 5x.

Is the Wii U 19x more powerful than the PS3? Not by a long shot. Are there PCs that are? A thousand times yes.

All this powerful talk doesn't matter- the games do. Look at the RPG DS lineup in the past 8 years; it's definitely my opinion, but I've enjoyed a lot of the RPGs more so than console RPGs.

Wii U will be a better overall system as compared to Wii, seeing as how the focus of motion controls have changed.

0:30 "More power!"