Wii U is 'definitely more powerful than 360 and PS3' - Scribblenauts dev

[zarx]

z101 said:

zarx said:

Unfortunately it seems that it doesn't have modern enough shaders (R700, DX10.1 spec shaders)  which seems to be left in the dust, with at least UE4 (we will see about other next gen engines) which requires DX11 spec shaders.

The Wii U GPU is only based on a R700 but is tweaked in many ways. With the Wii Us tesselation unit DX11/OpenGL3 should be no problem since tesselation is the new main feature of DX11.

The only official plattform for UE4-Engine is the PC. Epic had begged by Nintendo, MS and Sony for high-tech, so that UE4 makes sense on these console, but it seems that wether Wii U, or Xbox8 or PS4 has the power you need for full UE4. But UE4 is scaleable so in the end every gaming system gets its version, and there will be not much difference between Wii U and XBox8/PS4.

The tesselation unit in the R700 GPU is basically the same as the one in the X360's Xenos and is lacking several features that DX11 hardware tesselation uses, and tesselation is just one aspect the other is more advanced shaders that offer much more flexibility, and native BC6H and BC7 texture formats (compressed textures can be processed natively with no performance hit by the GPU hardware so they take up less RAM).

UE4 is scalable but seems to require a DX11 GPU and to port it to a system with an older GPU will require the renderer to basically be rewritten.

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/stunning-videos-show-unreal-engine-4s-next-gen-gtx-680-powered-real-time-graphics/

Tim Sweeney: "Unreal Engine 4’s next-generation renderer targets DirectX 11 GPU’s and really starts to become interesting on hardware with 1+ TFLOPS of graphics performance, where it delivers some truly unprecedented capabilities." 

hence I am guessing the reason why Epic have decided not to support Wii U (or any current platform that doesn't have a DX11 spec GPU) with UE4, and are instead pushing UE3 for the platform. With Nvidia Tegra 4 and PowerVR Series 6 GPU even smart phones and tablets will have DX11 feature set GPUs later this year, even if they wont have the raw power for all the bells and whistles.