NX power

[fatslob-:O]

Pemalite said:

For all intents and purposes... Intel's latest CPU's is still based on a variation of the P6 architecture that debuted with the Pentium Pro decades ago.
Still night and day performance difference though.

Morphological AA also did gain *allot* of traction, in the console space.
Pretty much every Unreal Powered game used it to some degree... For good reason. It's cheap. Console's aren't PC's, they cannot afford to use the best of everything.
VLIW however is far better adept at handling such a task than the Geforce 7000 derviced GPU in the PS3 and the Radeon x19xx derived GPU in the Xbox 360... Which enabled an early concept of GPU compute.

And yes, Tessellation performance in Evergreen is pathetic, it's still vastly superior to the Xbox 360's Truform based Tessellation engine and the PS3's lack of one. That's a geometry advantage in the Wii U's favor.

The point is, the WiiU is more advanced than the XBox 360 and Playstation 3. It's not "Current gen" by any stretch, but still a decent jump.

Intel easily does way more to improve it's x86 architecture than IBM ever does for Nintendo's PowerPC 750 derivative and the modern core architecture is NOTHING like the P6 ... 

The Gecko and Broadway are literally identical, core for core aside from clocks and cache. If Marcan's words are to be believed, Espresso is just a higher clocked version of Broadway. That's a 10 year old CPU architecture without ANY sort of extensions ... 

The only post-process AA that I remember gaining a lot of traction was FXAA, the rest was meh for the devs from what I saw ... 

Xenos is also VLIW since it shared some features from the ATI R600 architecture and it's not like the PS3 couldn't do it's own type of "GPU compute" like using the cell processor to perform graphical tasks too ... 

The tessellation unit is meaningless in the WII U's case since it hardly has the shading power or rasterization performance to scale with it. The only good thing I can see the WII U getting out of it is lowering memory and bandwidth consumption since you can use a smaller vertex buffer to pass through the graphics pipeline in order to do some data expansion ro recreate the fragments but that has some drawbacks since Evergreen is known for serially consuming the new generated primitives which means poor parallelization. That would translate to lower utilization and potentially lower performance in the end ... 

The WII U is definitely more advanced from a functionality standpoint however the more important question is if it's an improvement from a performance standpoint ? That can not be answered so easily ...