| etking said: It is not underpowered in every aspect. The CPU is slower than X360/PS3 but the GPU is faster. If they are made well and with a lot of effort, games and ports can look better than anything on PS3. Compared to PS4 and X1 however, the Wii-U is extremely underpowered. |
I'd have to disagree with this as someone who owns all three while I can accept there are graphics that would likely be better on wii u thanks to its later architecture. The powerpc dual thread main cpu and the 7 cell processors are close to 40,000 mips combined which is an easy 4x the power of wii u in cpu terms and the nvidia gpu of the ps3 I think from memory is rated at 240 gflops which is over the wii u's 176 gflops.
There is some clever stuff done in ps3 games with all the cell processors working to create lots of different graphic effects and its just not possible for the wii u to deliver that. It has some additional features in its gpu but its a marginal difference. The issue with the ps3 was it was notoriously hard to develop for and only really later games by some developers pushed the hardware.
Lets also not forget the ps3 delivered the best soundtracks of the three consoles with high quality 7.1 soundtracks, often amazing pre-rendered 1080p video thanks to its bluray disc capacity. The scope and immersion of many ps3 games is well beyond wii u.
Most games that are available on wii u, ps3 and 360 are inferior on wii u and many games simply weren't possible on wii u because of the low cpu resources.
People often point to the wii u's cartoon graphics as an example of its technical performance but the reality is realistic graphics are far harder to achieve and require a much higher performance level.
Essay Pro