| prayformojo said: What you're asking me to do is suspend more than 30 years of gaming hardware trends and redefine what it means to be "next" gen. See, I've been gaming since the 2600 and every generation meant better hardware. Even Nintendo did this from the NES>SNES>N64 and then Gamecube. Every console doubled itself in power. They were into making core gaming machines until the Wii. So now that they decided to change and do a 180, I'm suppose to redefine what I believe next gen means simply because they said so? Next gen has always meant getting more powerful hardware capable of rendering physics/graphics/AI unachieveable in the prior gen. |
1. It may be the definition that *you* used, but if you look back carefully, you'll see that each generation, except when it comes to the PS3/360, introduced new things that weren't just power increases. The least innovative of the generations was the Gamecube/Xbox/PS2 generation, but even it introduced a few tasty morsels of innovation and increased capability (rather than increased just power). So no, Next gen has not always meant anything - your definition was nothing more than your personal opinion, based on an incomplete (and rather wrong) view of history.
2. Technically, the Wii U is surpassing the Wii by more than enough to qualify for your description of "doubled itself in power" (ignoring that it's more accurate to say something along the lines of 4-16x the power). Even the Wii was a significant boost relative to the Gamecube - many antifanboys liked to say "two gamecubes duct-taped together", but the results put the lie to that claim - the system was noticeably more powerful, a good estimate would be roughly 3-4x the power of the GC. What it wasn't was a massive overstep in power - the PS3 and 360 increased relative to the PS2 and Xbox by factors of the order of 10-20x, and that's just insane... and it's why they were so expensive earlier on, and why the Wii shot out of the gate when the other two systems struggled.
3. Next gen has always meant exactly what it means now - the NEXT GENERATION. By the very definition of that term, the Wii U is next gen. If they released a new system that was as powerful as the GameCube, but with a massive array of control schemes and added capability that had nothing to do with brute power, then it would still be "next generation".
4. Brute power doesn't necessarily give you better graphics/physics/AI. Indeed, the thing most holding back graphics, AI and physics on the 360 and PS3 were bottlenecks caused by, among other things, insufficient RAM. A console is only as powerful as its worst bottleneck.
5. The Wii U has a significantly boosted GPU. Most rumours suggest that the Wii U's GPU is well beyond those of the PS3 and 360, capable of functionality that those GPUs didn't have (a good example is tessellation), and trailers for games made specifically for the Wii U (such as ZombiU and Project P-100) support those rumours very strongly. And by having the GPU capable of all of these extra things, load is taken off the CPU, thereby reducing a major bottleneck. And then having far more RAM (rumours seem to put the CPU's RAM somewhere around 4x the total RAM of the 360 and 8x the total RAM of the PS3 - that's before factoring in any extra RAM attached to the GPU) reduces another major bottleneck.
