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

[JEMC]

Pemalite said:

Even on paper today's graphics cards wipe the floor the the PS3 and XBox's Graphics chip.

For the sake of it... I'll omit the memory bandwidth numbers because in a console they can pair it up with whatever expensive yet stupidly fast memory they want anyway.

PS3:
24 Pixel Shaders, 8 Vertex Shaders, 24 Texture mapping units, 8 Render output pipelines, 550mhz core clock.

Xbox 360: 48 Unified shaders. (Both Pixel and Vertex use the same pipelines.), 16 Texture mapping units, 8 Render output pipelines, 500mhz core clock.

$100 PC graphics card (Radeon 6750):
720 Stream processors. (VLIW5, comparitively would be 144 SP's.), 36 Texture mapping units, 16 rops, 700mhz core clock.

If you go with the Wii U's rumoured 46xx class graphics chip:
320 Stream processors, (64 SP's.), 32 Texture mapping units, 8 Render output Pipelines, Core clock of 500mhz - 1ghz.

VLIW5 architectures that the WiiU uses is generally rather efficient and allows for more throughput per shader cluster than what the PS3 and Xbox is capable of, so even if it *did* have the same amount of shaders it would be far more efficient at pixel and vertex shading with the additional benefit of being able to do geometry shading amongst other things.
Graphics architectures like Fermi and Southern Islands is more geared towards compute, VLIW4 and to a lesser extent VLIW5 is incredibly efficient at graphics  tasks.

If the Wii U is going to be "minimum" in next gen consoles, that should mean some pretty impressive graphics.

Hold a sec there. I know rumors talked about a rv700 chip, not the one on the 46xx family but the one found in the HD4770. When did that change?