No, the Wii U isn't really next gen.

At least, not yet. This industry, this hobby, is about games. And, right now, all the games are current gen. Perhaps Nintendo will release some titles that can't be duplicated on the PS3 or 360. If not, then we'll have to wait until Sony or Microsoft launch their next console and third-party studios release games that are exclusive to the next gen.

In my opinion, people get too wrapped up in hardware. It's the software that really matters.

When you compare games that run on videogame console hardware to games that run on similar PC hardware the console games (generally) are far more advanced. The bulk of this is that, while these features are (often) available on the PC hardware, developers only make use of the special features of console hardware (or optimize around the bottlenecks) of console hardware because there are too many hardware configurations in the PC market to make it cost effective to optimize for any particular hardware.

Of course, a large portion of the work needed to be done has to be done in the nether regions of the game engine which means that (outside of big budget projects) you usually won't see much of an improvement until game engine developers update their engines.

Who?

What games has he developed for the PS3 and Wii U?

all i know is when the xbox 360 first launched and i started seeing demo units be put up in my local stores, I was absolutely blown away.

Watching and playing those 360 games shocked me. I couldnt believe graphics could look so good. It was a giant leap over the ps2/xbox.

when i first played Cod 2, my jaw dropped. These launch games blew me away, at how huge of a leap it was over the previous gen.
The Wii U has unequivocally failed to do this.

I'm not going to draw attention to him and he posts anonymously.

The verdict is that the Wii U has 12.8GB/S bandwidth now courtesy of Anand La Shimpi. So very plausible in light of evidence.

Annonymous Developer = Lying fanboy (about 99.9% of the time)

Edit: Of the remaining 0.1% of anonymous developers, 90% are making their claim based on opinion, rumours or speculation (very little is fact based).

We already have plenty of facts to work with. The die shots have been released, we know what process nodes they were made with and we know the memory bandwidth.

I trust him and that is all I will say.

lololololol

I have the Wii U and I can easily say that there are PLENTY of things the Wii U can do that the PS3/360 cannot do/handle. A lot of OS-related stuff, to say the least. Don't say I'm wrong because I know I'm right.
Squilliam, you and your friend don't know shit about the Wii U. 90% of PS3? Saying that the PS3 is actually BETTER than the Wii U? I'd like to point out how many developers actually debunked that, but you would just say "I don't trust them" or something because for someone to still believe that the Wii U is weaker or only as good as on par with PS3/360 are ignorant.

We also know that the Wii U is getting (at least) similar performance on ports of games while rendering to a second screen ...

For the Wii U to be only 90% as powerful as the PS3 you're basically saying that developers have already gotten better performance out of the Wii U on early low budget ports by external developers than they have gotten out of the PS3 after 6 years of focused development by the best studios in the world.

Your friend is obviously speaking from a position of ignorance or bias.

I'm not saying the Wii U is a generational leap over the PS3, but I doubt the PS3 could match the performance the Wii U has already demonstrated; and I think it would be foolish to argue that the Wii U is less powerful than the PS3.

With that said, it is entirely possible that the Wii's CPU doesn't perform as well as the Cell processor on synthetic benchmarks but that doesn't mean that the Wii U is less powerful in general.