With the PS4 out and X1 nearly, can we say clearly Wii U's power failed to live up to next gen claims?

[curl-6]

Pemalite said:

curl-6 said:

Pemalite said:

The Wii and by extension the Gamecube had an alternative to programmable pixel shaders and it worked just as well and could pull off similar effects.
The Gamecube and Wii could easily punch above it's weight considering the hardware.
There just happened to be significantly less hardware than the HD twins to make up for that deficiency.

Wii/GC's TEV unit may have been an alternative to programmable shaders, but it worked very differently, making it difficult to translate effects over from programable to TEV. It was also less convenient and took a lot more work to get results out of; normal mapping, for instance, could be done on Wii, but you had to do it in a really roundabout way that bewildered devs used to programmable shaders, to the point where only about FOUR games in the Wii's entire library used normal mapping at all. (Conduit 1 & 2, Metroid Other M, Dewy's Adventure)

Wii U doesn't have this gap with PS4/Xbone; all three use programmable shaders. Wii U may not have all the same features, but it is confirmed to have DX10/11 equivalent functionality, so it won't be in a whole different ballpark like the Wii was.

That may be so, but it could still do most things Direct X 9 capable hardware could do, some things it can't, but that works both ways.

What could the TEV unit do that DX9 level programmable shaders could not?