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Samus Aran on 15 April 2015
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bonzobanana said:
curl-6 said:

Those multiplatform games were pretty much all designed from the ground up around PS3/360's architecture and then haphazardly ported to Wii U with the bare minimum of investment.

And I don't recall a PS3/360 game that does subsurface scattering and physically based shading at 60fps, like Art of Balance does on Wii U.

Wii U's more modern GPU and larger RAM could have made it easier to port Project Cars compared to last gen systems.


Yes the wii u gpu definitely has the superior feature set but ultimately getting a game to run even with reduced graphic quality is about memory and cpu performance. If the wii u had a  hard drive then fair enough you could give wii u the advantage but lack of hard drive means no fast streaming of data from hdd which on 360 and PS3 massively helps stream in textures and new graphic data which the wii u lacks. Lets not also forget while the wii u has that 32MB of very fast memory it is also hindered by main memory which is slower than that of 360 and PS3 and the 360 has 10MB of very fast memory itself. The ps3 splits its memory into 2 camps with one fast to the cell processor and one fast to the gpu. There is more cpu performance in its dual thread main powerpc cpu than the wii u and the ps3 still has 6 more cell processors on top.  

Your comment 'haphazardly ported to wii u' is a biased comment. A large number of developers have made games for the wii u now, it has a well established and dated cpu architecture and probably a mobile radeon gpu in addition to an older integrated wii gpu chip.  There is no reason to think all these developers have got lazy and have all failed to achieve good results on wii u. By far the most logical conclusion is the wii u spec is weak with poor performance. Lets also not forget the wii u is based on a dated 45/40nm fabrication process like 360 and PS3 yet uses far less power even allowing for the lack of hard drive. You simply can't expect such a console to have good performance. It is what it is a console that performs roughly in line with the last generation, weaker in some areas, stronger in others. The design is basically achieve last gen performance but with significant cost savings using low cost low bandwidth memory chips for example and no hard drive. If the wii u had sold well it would have been  hugely profitable for Nintendo on the hardware alone.

I'm a wii u owner myself as well as 360 and PS3 and its pretty clear the console is struggling to even match those consoles much of the time.

Nintendo must be working magic then as Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8, Yoshi's Woolly World, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, Super Smash Bros. Wii U look far better than similar PS3 games.

Even gamecube remasters (Wind Waker HD) look better than similar games like Sly Cooper HD collection and Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time (a game built from the ground up for the PS3). 

LittleBigPlanet 1-3 run at terrible framerates for a 2.5D platformer. Constant 60 fps should be a must for such games. 

Playstation All Stars Battle Royale runs at 720p and can't even hold a firm 60 fps while Super Smash Bros. Wii U runs at 1080p and 60 fps even when 8 characters are on screen at the same time. 

Modnation Racers looks a lot worse than Mario Kart 8 and runs at a meagre 30fps while Mario Kart 8 runs at a solid 60fps.

Ratchet and Clank into the Nexus is a 4 hour game that can't even hold 30fps most of the time... Super Mario 3D World looks a lot better with a perfect 60fps. 

Xenoblade Chronicles X has a much bigger overworld than any PS3 open world game and it looks much better than let's say Skyrim. Of course the PS3 has games with better graphics than XBX, but those aren't huge open world games.