"Wii U hardware is on par with current gen consoles"

[Navane]

Pemalite said:
The amount of "you know's" almost made my head explode.

But it's no contest that the Wii U is far more powerful than the Xbox and PS3 from a graphical perspective, the GPU alone is 4 generations ahead with allot more programability and effects at hand.
Why there is even a debate on this I'll never know, technology stands still for no one.

Some of the low down that the WiiU can do and the other consoles can't.
* Tessellation. (Xbox's Tessellator is far inferior. PS3 doesn't have one.)
* Improved Z/stencil compression. (Better and cheaper shadows etc'.)
* Improved Texture Filtering.
* Improved Anti-Aliasing.
* Better High-Dynamic-Range.
* More advanced Video decoding with better filters.
* Longer and more complex Pixel Shader instructions.
* Longer and more complex Vertex Shader Instructions.
* 4x larger texture size support.
* Geometry Shaders.
* Compute. (Aka. - Hardware accelerated Physics?)

Then you have stuff like better z-culling, schedulers, larger; lower latency and faster caches, more bandwidth and better compression of textures, normal maps and such to drive up efficiency.
Plus you have more Pixel shader pipelines, Rops, TMU's for extra sheer grunt.

Yes the Wii U's GPU is still 3 generations behind the PC and it will only be a mid-range part at best, but it will still be significantly more powerful than the PS3 or Xbox 360's archaic hardware.

This will all lead to a fairly noticeable increase in graphical fidelity over the current consoles when developers start using the full capability of the system, I don't recall any past system where the first release of games really pushed the hardware at hand, it won't change this time around either.
It will probably take developers awhile to get used to the VLIW5 shader architecture in the Wii U and start using Tessellation to it's fullest extent.

Hopefully this translates well into the PC space.

Something like that is what I was hoping and expecting the Wii U would be able to do. It'd be a few steps up and offer a somewhat noticable increase between PS360 games and Wii U games.

But what you said is only based on the rumored graphics card, and according to this developer, it's only gonna be on par with current-gen tech.