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Soundwave on 26 March 2015
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Materia-Blade said:
Soundwave said:

Even if you look at the really "stunner" Wii U titles -- Mario Kart 8 and Xenoblade X it's not like they're miles beyond the best looking PS3/360 games ... Halo 4 and Last of Us are not that far behind if at all honestly. I think Xenoblade X is the one game that maybe punches a bit above those titles, Mario Kart probably gets away with probably more simplistic environments/character models due to its cartoony nature. 

Wii U games should look a little better even if we assume a 350 GFLOP processor, that's a decent bump from 250 GFLOPs on the 360, then factor in doubling the RAM to 1GB for games and triple the eDRAM from the 360 ... and sure some games should look better. 

I liken it more to the jump between the PS2 and the GameCube and especially XBox. Certainly the top tier GCN and XBox games like Rogue Squadron, RE4, DOOM III, and Riddick looked better than anything on the PS2, but they weren't like a huge step beyond the PS2 either. 

yes they are. the mix of better graphics, native 720p and 60fps early on already proves this.


There's nothing on the Wii U that's "miles" beyond Halo 4. 

There's two games in XCX and Mario Kart 8 that really look nice, but it's not that much different from Rogue Squadron II/III or Resident Evil 4 looking better than anything on the PS2. 

Games on Wii U should look better. It has a better GPU even at 350 GFLOPS, that's a full 40% improvement over the 360 with double the RAM and triple the eDRAM. Xenoblade X should look better than anything on the PS3/360. But it's not a generational leap either. 

Quite frankly the jump from N64 to Dreamcast is considerably bigger. If you read the Iwata Asks on the Wii U's development, Nintendo's main priority was limiting power consumption to about 33 watts -- that's what they spent most of their time on. They could've gotten a much more powerful GPU from AMD most likely had they been willing to compromise on the size/electricity restrictions they put on the device. 

Even AMD's cheapo $120 GPUs at the time like the 4850 punch well above 500 GFLOPS and run circles around the Wii U being able to run many games with 360/PS3 level fidelity at 1080P/60 fps. The 4850 sure as hell wasn't fitting into a 33 watt power envelope though ... that was the problem. I suspect Nintendo was also hamstrung by having to incorporate Wii backward's compatibility rather than being able to simply choose the best tech.