Graphical progress on Wii U so far

[bonzobanana]

JRPGfan said:

maxleresistant said:

People don't understand that while the WiiU is not as porwerful as the PS4/Xbox One. It doesn't mean that it is 10 year old technology.

The WiiU architecture and components are as recent as the PS4/One, but with power more aligned with the PS3 and 360.  In the end, she can do a lot of next gen effects really well, and this is why when developpers take the time to do their game properly, the result can be as beautiful as any PS4/X1 games. 

Now Nintendo made good progress in HD development, Starfox, Zelda, and the ther games that will be released next are going to prove furthermore that Nintendo is still the graphics geniuses they always were. 

Splatoon is one good looking game too.

".....designed by AMD, is based on the Radeon R600/R700 architecture"  - wii u wiki.

Radeon HD 4650 launched in 2008.

 

"....a customized version of AMD's 7870 GPU, with 2 CUs disabled" - Ps4 wiki

Radeon HD 7870 launched in 2012.

There is still no confirmation on what the wii u gpu is as Nintendo have never released such information and as far as I can tell no hacker has managed to divulge its secrets. It's pretty obvious it's heavily customised and many of the so called specs of it fail to even mention the wii gpu embedded in the hardware which is necessary for wii mode as well as the texture cache, frame buffer memory etc. It is expected to be based on a mobility radeon not desktop and these normally have a few compromises to reduce power consumption. We know the wii u is on a inferior/cheaper fabrication process which is more power hungry yet still consumes far less power than ps3/360 even allowing for the lack of hard drive.

It wouldn't surprise me if in fact the wii u gpu architecture is pretty much upto date with ps4 in functionality, feature set etc but its actual performance is less than many people realise.  The 32MB of the wii u is blisteringly fast and the stated 352gflops just don't seem to be realised at all in performance. Lets not forget in one generation of Radeon chips efficiency went up 30% and since many improvements have happened. The 240 gflops of 360 do not equal the 240 gflops of a modern budget gpu today as older gpu's required far more resources including additional support from the cpu. It's highly likely the wii u gpu is well below 352gflops but still massively outperforms the 360 and PS3. Many people have stated the wii u gpu is 178gflops and this certainly fits the power profile of the console but this will still be massively superior to ps3 and 360. If the wii u gpu is 352 gflops why isn't it drawing power that you would expect from such a gpu with a 40 or 45nm process? If you look at neogaf and other places there are good debates on 178 or 352 gflops and the case against 352 gflops based on power consumption is very strong.