OP: Launch games never look very good, 3rd parties especially, they have a lot less time and experience with the dev kits. Some of the ports the Wii U has gotten actually look slightly better and the Wii U's GPU is easily more capable than the PS3 and the 360's.

Remember PS3 and 360 launch titles? Compare them to what we see now, 2nd and 3rd generation engines and optimization on the kits make a world of difference. Call of Duty 3 on PS3 and Perfect Dark: Zero on 360 both looked like shit back when they released, I remember seeing them and thinking; "Man, is this the next generation of games?!!"

I guess what I'm saying is; its all good, reports on the Wii U's "terrible" hardware performance are likely heavily exaggerated and judging by 1st generation launch titles and aging ports is a bad measure at any rate.

You'd be too busy dying to notice them.

While I agree that we shouldn't be judging based on ports, I do think it's rather unfair that so many people are blaming the problems on "lazy devs." A lot of these ports are being handled by people who are trying to figure out the best way to work with a new architecture while still having to meet deadlines. It's not like they instantly and intuitively understand how best to program for the Wii U. Even developers who have praised the system have admitted to struggling with the CPU. It's going to take time. The people who bash developers for not turning out a perfect Wii U game/port are as bad as those who bash the Wii U for having what are rather typical problems for a new console.

My only real concern for the future is that, with three versions to produce for multi-platform titles, publishers won't allow more time for optimization, which could result in more ports like CoD for the PS3, where it's clear that the standards were lowered. If it takes a significant amount of effort to re-code for the Wii U, we could possibly see more frame rate issues in the future simply because of inflexible publisher deadlines. I hope that isn't the case, as I'm more than a little sick of people bragging about their console being better because of relatively minor differences in a third-party title.

From what I seen, especially with say textures not loading at all, i.e. batman in ONE scene out of the whole video comparisson is that these games have porting bugs.

Hopefully they can be fixed via an update here or there. but i don't know how they ported the games so these little annoyances will drive you nuts.

Which leads me to my biggest issue with current gen and all gens to follow. BLoody updates. because we have allowed them developers are more rushed than ever by publishers to get a game out because they knwo they can probably fix it with a patch.

As for CPU, the tekken developers said it was slower (clock speed) and they said you cannot rely on pure speed to get things done, like the 360/PS3 did. He did however say the GPU offered ways to resolve the issues they had in tekken 2 and that these things were not able to be done by 360/ps3 gpu. The developers who have complains about the CPU are mainly PC developers.

Now lets look at PC developers in general (not just gaming).

Software for example. Why do newer version suddenly take up much more ram and space than they did in the past if they don't really offer aything substantially new? Web browsers, office, cd burning software, adobe etcc.. programs that are barely upgraded with features and yet they seem to always waste more space. It is because it is less optimised than in the past. Why? because the space is available. I don't know if you have ever done any programming classes, but there are many ways to acheive the same output. One example I can give of this is a program we all had to write, my mate who has been programming since he had a commadore 64 lol, can optimise his programs very well. So well infact that his program was smaller and better optimised than the teachers suggested solution. Now my other mate who thinks is an excellent programmer (compared to regular people sure), achieves the same outcome in about 4x as much code. Sadly this is the level that most programmers are at. Me personally I hate programming and suck at it so I won't judge to harshly.

This is why when you look at say pure console developers, They can achieve some amazing stuff on 360/PS3 because they know how to optimise the hardware to get the best out of it. Where as the PC develoeprs rely on the raw hrose pwoer to get their games running.

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You can offload certain things to GPU (like physics), but you still need CPU to do bulk of other stuff - that sad, WiiU's GPU is, from what rumours and physical size implies, slightly better at pixel/texture fill rates than PS360, but has decent amount of shaders more than them, so yes, certain things can be offloaded to it (as well as to audio DSP, I think I read that in typical console game these days audio can eat up to 1/6 of CPU). It's just 3rd parties are not used to do that, cause on PS360 they didn't have to do it - and I suspect, they were expecting (or hoping) they won't have to.

As for "PC developers"  - PC developers must make their games/engines work for wide area of different specs and can't allow themselves to go too narrow - I'm sure that you can have game developed just for PC with i7 3770 with 7970 card and SSD that is coded to the metal and as optimized as much as 1st party console exclusives, but market for that wouldn't be too big. So it is given that, in most cases, developer who only develops for PS3 for example will know ins and outs of both archaic (by todays standards) RSX architecture and quirks of Cell better than "generic" PC developer, and will be able to squeeze more out of them.

If you look at 3rd parties, they are in similar, though, somewhat easier position - they have to make game for 2 (now 3, PC not included) quite different architectures - having those architectures similar in both design philosophy and power is a big plus for them, ensuring similar results without too much additional costs. This is the main reason why I see some of developers complaining about WiiU's CPU, cause porting obviously in some cases is not as straight forward as they might've expected, but I'm certain that in time, if WiiU's user base turns out to be valuable market for 3rd parties, they will all learn how to work around those limitations.

second that, because they are bashing the game everywhere

this.

+1 Mummelmann

Is it doing anything extra or is it the same as the tv upscaling the image? Why would it look like a stretched out piece of ass, Wii is already in the correct aspect ratio? (I actually set my 360 to 720p output since my tv does a cleaner job of upscaling to 1080p then my old 360)
The Wii has big pixels after the tv upscaling algorithm, nothing mysterious going on there horizontol res x 2 / vertical res x 2.
Does the WiiU add a softening filter after quadrupling the pixels?

It would be nice if it does this, it should have more than enough power for that, but somehow I doubt it:

<object width="640" height="360"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/oQU0oFVh0DU?version=3&amp;hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/oQU0oFVh0DU?version=3&amp;hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="360" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>

Games look good to me, some people were complaining about ZombiU, and while it won't be competing for graphics king, I think it looks good, more importantly it's a solid survival horror and I really like how the gametablet is integrated. NSMBU looks awesome and is just a great experience. Miiverse is a real surprise, for me at least, the community is having a lot of fun and there is just this incredibly positive vibe happening. The wii U has already established itself as completely unique, in my mind, I'm kinda blown away by how much I'm enjoying it.