j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
And yet both consoles are themselves significantly weaker than current PCs. Does that mean after a couple of years, we can expect developers to stop porting games from PC to PS4 or Xbone, as they won't be able to handle the requirements?
Not going to happen since the hardware is still quite a bit more powerful than the Wii U and hardware specific optimizations will keep them going for a while. Besides, when someone like John Carmack is saying the tech in those consoles is actually pretty impressive, I'm more inclined to listen to him than someone such as yourself with an obvious Nintendo bias. But more over, consoles aren't going away any time soon, and most AAA studios are going to focus their efforts on the PS4 and XBone because they're the most powerful consoles on the block and they can maximize their player base by releasing games for both.
The Wii sold 860 million units of software, more than either the 360 or PS3. I believe that's a library winning a console race right there.
The Wii had the worst attach rate of the three and barely outsold the PS3 and 360 on the software end. The only reason they managed it was because they sold 22 million more consoles than the other two. If it was a case of library being the driving force in console sales, they should have had the best attach rate by far. They didn't, so library wasn't the deciding factor. No big surprise when most third parties avoided it like the plague.
And yet the innards of the Wii U are still a mystery. We know it has 2GB of RAM. We know it has some kind of AMD Radeon GPU. But as far as I was aware, no-one has yet been able to work out what kind of GPU it's actually got sat there on its motherboard. I'm glad you seem to have cracked this. So come on then. How powerful is the Wii U GPU? How many shaders does it have? How many FLOPS? If you're so sure it's no better than current gen, you must have something to back that up, right?
They're not that big a mystery. We know more than enough to say the Wii U is almost certainly significantly underpowered compared to the PS4 and XBone, but a simple look at it's Wikipedia article would tell you that quickly enough. Sure, it has 2GB of RAM, but only 1GB is available for use by games and is shared by the CPU and GPU. Compare that to the 5GB in the XBone, and 5GB of significantly faster RAM in the PS4. The amount of memory Bandwidth available in the Wii U is abysmally low compared to the other two consoles. We also know the GPU is comparable to a Radeon HD 4670/4650. A 5 year old GPU, except the Wii U's GPU actually has fewer texture mapping units, and the 4670/4650 have raw performance measured around 8GLOPS, compared to the more than 1.8TFLOPS the PS4 runs at. You'd honestly have to have your head buried in the sand to not know it's significantly weaker than the PS4 and XBone based on the specs we do know.
Oh, but hang on. Didn't both
Criterion Software and
Shin'en Software come out recently and say in the open that the Wii U hardware is several generations more advanced than current gen? I believe they did.
The articles you linked to don't support your statement at all here. The Criterion article specifically says that it's quite powerful for the amount of watts it uses to power itself. This tells us absolutely nothing about how well it compares to other systems. The Shin'en article specifically mentions that the GPU is several generations ahead of the 360 and PS3 GPU's but says nothing about the rest of the hardware at all. And since the PS3 and 360 GPU's are built on architecture that's 2-3 years older than the HD 4670/4650 it's true that it's more advanced than the GPU's in those two consoles. But it's also still more than 5 years old already.
But go ahead and continue to misquote articles if you want. Maybe you'll fool someone who doesn't actually read them.
In fact, I believe Shi'nen said they plan to use things like tesselation extensively in their next game. That would rather suggest that the Wii U is rather more powerful than the PS3 or 360.
I never said the Wii U isn't more powerful than the 360 and PS3. But it's closer to them in power than it is to the PS4 and XBone.
And the PS3 was nearly sunk at launch, or had you forgotten?
You seem to forget that it's problems were the result of it's high price, not it's game library. But I think it's become quite clear you can't make a point without misrepresenting facts.
Actually, Nintendo has got a large amount of third-party support for the Wii U. It just happens to be indie developers, rather than the likes of EA. At last count, the Wii U has around 50 indie games scheduled to launch in the near future on eShop. Though last I heard, Activision, Ubisoft and Warner Bros were all bringing their big guns to Wii U this year, so I've no idea where this claim the Wii U has no third party games comes from.
Everyone's reaching out to indie's this gen. But Nintendo has also been historically difficult for indie's to work with and many were put off after trying to release on the Wii and some even got screwed over by them. The Wii U isn't doing anything more to court indie's than Sony or Microsoft though.
As for other publishers bringing their big guns to the Wii U, that won't last once their big guns are being released on consoles that are far more powerful than the Wii U. Same way that ports for the Wii weren't exactly common place.
