The 3DS one actually looks better in action; the PSP screens have motion blur while the 3DS ones are straight screenshots. Motion blur can obscure a lot of imperfections.

Alright last post because this is getting out of hand. I'm still kind of new in some of the technical areas, just trying to learn more. Someone posted pixel rates so I searched for Vita's and found a huge breakdown page for psp and psv. So much info I couldn't read it all. For pixel rate he said it was 8x the IPhone 4, so around 50mil, though he wasnt sure, mentioned OpenGL and possible even higher rates. Take that however you will but I think having a number close to that, along with 512MB RAM dedicated to running games, it's quite the contender.

Given those pixel numbers posted earlier, it looks like 3DS games can show the Wii a thing or two.

Vita has far less ram dedicated to gaming.  It's got a 128 meg framebuffer (half of what the PS3 has) and 512 system.  Considering that system is shared with the OS and other apps you're looking at maybe 256 total for games.  Still a lot, still too little.   Though the 3DS is considerably weaker than the Wii, it's far more flexible, but it'll be a while for anyone to take advantage of the hardware.  Capcom was more or less lucky that they managed to get their framework ported over, cause Resident Evil Revelations wouldn't have looked any better than Resident Evil 4, maybe worse.  (That luck involved being that most of Capcom's shader effects are supported in hardware.)

The 3DS runs with 128MB RAM and the Wii 88 (24MB internal, 64MB external). The Vita doesn't need as much VRAM as the PS3, and that 128MB gaurentees the 60fps it puts out.  512MB is quite a bit, figuring that the ps3 was only using 256MB.  Sure its sharred with OS and apps, but there are restrictions in place when running gaming software (ones I can run around thanks to LiveTweet, hehe, which doesn't crash the system, probably just eats up more battery).  The system is capable of a lot even with an open OS access (does the 3DS have game to OS back and forth or is it a more seperate function, as in on Vita you can pause and return to OS?) Cutting the 528MB in half isn't an exact science, gaming could well use more.  Also since you bring this up, why did I read stuff saying that it was 512MB dedicated to gaming and 128MB for OS? I just looked it up and I'm not getting that info anymore, thanks for the knowledge batman...I mean darknightkryta

No. But MK7 and SM3DL are pretty regardless even if they don't look as good as their Wii counterparts.

3DS appears to push less polygons but more shading effects

The tie breaker is that Wii outputs at a higher resolution and has more anti-aliasing (from most of the games I've seen on either console)

dolphin shots don't count lol!!!

Those GCN numbers turned out to be unrealistically conservative; Factor 5 managed to get 20 million polygons/sec out of it with Rogue Squadron 3, while also running a host of fancy effects. From this we can conclude that the Wii should be able to do 30 million with bumpmapping and such.

I actually disagree. Nintendo are generally not that great at pushing their own hardware. Most of the best looking games on their consoles are made by other developers.

3DS has 128 RAM total with 32 MB dedicated to the OS.   And yes, you can pause the game and return to the OS (even open up the web browser).

The PS3 has 512 MB of RAM but it's plit into 2 pools.   256 MB on the GPU and 256 dedicated to the CPU.  I forget which but one side can access the other sides RAM pool but not hte other way araound.    The PS3 OS takes up approximately 48 MB of the CPU's 256.

RAM doessn't guarantee a frame rate.  You could have 8 GB's of RAM on any console and still have frame rate troubles.