Why does it matter if Wii U games dont look as good as others?

[JoeTheBro]

Conina said:

JoeTheBro said:

Compared to the PS4, the Wii U is not that great  It's a much stronger system than people give it credit for, but so are the other two next gen systems. In time if the PS4 dominates, there is going to be a huge golf between the systems' graphics.

Luckily for Nintendo in this day and age graphics scale really well. Having worse resolution, worse models, worse animations, worse textures, worse framerate, etc. are much better than missing entire aspects of the game. That's assuming the Wii U gets a port of course.

Yeah, most modern graphic engines scale very good... just compare the performance of some PC games with "normal" settings and with "extreme" settings. But even the best scaling has it's limit. The level design of many future titles will find its common ground in 4 - 5 GB free RAM for the PS4, XBO and PC versions. With reducing texture details, effects and other stuff, the game would probably work with 3GB or even 2 GB free RAM. With only 1 GB RAM available to games (or maybe 1.2 - 1.5 GB RAM after reducing the OS footprint by a major firmware update) and a different architecture than the other 3 systems, downscaling will be not enough in most cases... whole levels and perhaps even some gameplay features will have to be redesigned to fit in the WiiU memory and the porting costs explode.

I don't see that happening till late in the gen when devs are complaining about the lack of RAM in 4BONE. For the next year or two it really shouldn't be too big of a problem, especially as devs keep porting for the 450MB of the HD twins.