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archbrix on 23 May 2012
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KungKras said:
archbrix said:

Yeah, I can't understand why people associate Nintendo home consoles to "old gen" when the Wii was the first to follow this philosophy.  All of their previous consoles have been very capable machines for their respective generations.

Furthermore, it's been all but officially confirmed that the GPU in the WiiU is from the Radeon R700 series.  Granted, that's from 2008, but more than capable of outperforming the current consoles... particularly since it has been highly customized for WiiU.

Add to that the extra RAM and the fact that the CPU has been confirmed by IBM themselves to be a POWER7, and WiiU is hardly "old gen".  While I do expect Microsoft's NeXtBox to be stronger (not so sure about Sony yet), I don't think we have to wait until its release for the 8th gen to begin.

Computers had all moved to 16-bit when the NES was released. The SNES used an old weak CPU from the C64, and the gameboy probably used outdated tech as well.

Bottom line, he has a point :P. The only consoles where Nintendo didn't follow the philosophy of "creative thinking with withered technology" was with N64 and Gamecube.

I disagree.  First, I'm not talking about handhelds, and second, the fact that every Nintendo home console has compared favorably to its competition remains.  No, the SNES CPU was not as fast as the Genesis CPU, however the SNES was a far more capable machine on a technical/graphical level.  My point being that Nintendo has never had the weakest performance with their console hardware in a generation until the Wii, which was far behind despite being released a year after the 360.  And while I would bet that WiiU will be the weakest of the 8th gen in the end, I don't believe the gap will be perceived anywhere near what it was this gen... unless the competition releases much later or much more expensive than we think.