CPU architectures have moved on a long way since then and X86 CPUs are at least equal to PowerPC in efficiency.

As you mentioned already, clock speed counts very little compared to the overall achitecture

That, especially the LAST LINE, is all any tech-geeks around here ever need to read when pondering the "how weak is Wii U" argument ad nauseum.

Everyone knows that Wii U is going to be the weakest console again this gen, but "weakest" is a relative term this time around, whereas the Wii was only roughly 1.5-2 times the overall power of the GC. It was more powerful than the original Xbox, and you could absolutely state with accuracy that it was the most powerful SD console to exist, as it outpaced the original Xbox. But there was still a huge gap between it and the PS3. That didn't excuse the laziness of many developers in their shitty ports, or lack of ports, but it was still something that was just there, out in plain view.

The Wii U, on the other hand, is just the third notch down an HD scale, going Wii U>One>PS4. That's how it pans out this gen, from "weakest" to "strongest". They're all HD, they all have good hardware, they all can handle a lot of the same things. Engines and graphics will simply have to be scaled down for Wii U. BUT, unlike the Wii last gen, companies will not have to entirely make a game from the ground up for Wii U, because it's an HD console. They just have to scale it down, which costs less time and resources. Once sales pick back up for the console itself, there will be little legitimate reason for most third parties to support the system with multiplat (or even exclusive) games.

Except that this time around they literally aren't. If you want to talk pure graphics, the Wii U will be able to pull off pretty much every single graphical trick and effect that the other two systems can. The only area where Wii U could wind up lacking in certain cases, are things that involve tons of shit happening in a given game world at once, or advanced physics effects that might have to be scaled down a bit. It was a joke when it was originally stated, but the meme is now going to ring true, that in the next gen "graphics whores will become physics whores instead". As someone else in here mentioned, it is going to become all about the nuances.

Every single thing you've seen from Wii U thus far, even Mario Kart 8, is just "first generation" Wii U software. No console puts forth it's best looking games in the first gen. Give it a couple years, and you will see games on Wii U that will make you say "wow", no matter how jaded you are. And by the end of the gen, there will (gauranteed) be Wii U titles that will be counted among the best looking graphically of the entire console generation. Wii accomplished that being a much weaker SD console with several titles. Wii U will surely accomplish the same with much more modern hardware.

Yeah.

Things are definitely going to start taking off, graphicswise, for Wii U with X and Mk8.

Exactly.

Compare first gen 360/PS3 graphics:

To what they achieved later in life:

We haven't seen anywhere close to what Wii U can really do yet.

I doubt physics will improve that much this gen. Graphics still have a LONG way to go. This time around the Wii U(verse the Wii) will be closer in architecture to the other systems but it's still limited by much weaker hardware. Lots of effects that could technically run on that architecture will just be to power demanding to be used in games. Look at some of the killzone shadow fall technical slides about lighting and reflections. Let's hypothetically imagine it being ported to Wii U. If the wii u game decided to keep the same lighting engine and effects as the PS4 version, everything else in the game would have to be scaled down to the point of looking like puke. It just wouldn't be worth it. Instead pre-baking the light would be a much smarter idea and allow the Wii U port to at least look ok, if not good compared to the PS4 game. If it was being ported to Wii U, that's what they'd do to make the WIi U version the best it can be.

The problem is, Killzone is made from the ground up for real-time lighting. In the 7th gen mega games that pushed console graphics had every single model re-textured based off the surroundings. This was done by hand to make a trashcan in a blue room look correct compared to the same trashcan in a red room. It was stupid, expensive, and a big reason for the HD hurdle. The PS4 has passed this hurdle by just doing real time lighting. A trashcan is a trashcan. Xbone will be about the same. Making this hypothetical Wii U port however means an extra year of work since it's still stuck at the HD hurdle, just to make it look ok compared to other next gen versions. At launch Wii U should be getting ports since nothing but exclusives will be doing advanced lighting like this, but in a few years Wii U porting could cost more than WIi porting.

That of course doesn't mean Wii U games won't look amazing. Like you've said everything we've seen has only been year one stuff. Having the best graphics of the gen though? No no no(unless we include art style ). Wii games from the end of its life look so much better than what it did at the start of the gen but nothing comes close to the best of PS360(unless we include art style ). Wii U will be the same way. Its end of life gens will look miles ahead of what we're seeing today, even on 4BONE, but 4BONE games will also continue to look better and better. End of gen PS4 games will look incomprehensibly good.

.176 TF. People who are under NDA can't leak numbers, but this info is already public domain.

I really don't see why people still think this is worth discussing.

Over generation 7 (and to a lesser extent 6) art style replaced raw graphical detail as what I find most graphically appealing in a game. A sea of gun-metal gray shooters running Unreal 3 will do that to a guy. For me, the real question is if the weakest system (the Wii U, obviously) can run an open world environment with late-life PS360 graphics (because after that, we're talking art style, not graphical fidelity.) The answer is a rather obvious yes, therefore I really don't care how many teraflops I'm "missing out on." I don't think it'll actually add that much to my experience.

Hm, lot of wrong assumptions around here...again. Even if WiiU is 320SP VLIW5 part (352GFLOPS), or 256SP VLIW4 part (282GFLOPS), this would still make it at best 1/6x PS4, and some 2x PS360...so sorry, no, not even close to PS2 to Xbox1 comparison...actually, it's more that PS360 to WiiU is like PS2 to Xbox1 in that scenario.

But for some reason I doubt it'll be getting much better than X.

Is really funny the ignorance of people about the PS4 RAM, and how important is the amount and finally the bandwidth access , the only thing I will say is that GDDR5 on the PS4 RAM will make other console tremble and high end PCs gamer go OMG in terms of visuals on the PS4.

Just ask your self why some GTX same models but different amount of ram can sky rocket in price from each other ;).