What should Nintendo have done instead of Wii U?

[curl-6]

Pemalite said:

curl-6 said:

What was it exactly (aside from the output) that limited the Wii to 480p, was it the 3MB of eDRAM that made a bigger framebuffer unfeasible? 

Well, you aren't obligated to use the 3MB of eDRAM, so you can skip that entirely.

You can also take a tiled rendering approach to use that 3MB for higher resolutions anyway... And of course you can use it as a general cache as well.

I would assume it's just a firmware restriction rather than a technical one... As Component can output 720P just fine which the Wii supports, obviously the higher resolution would result in less/lower quality effects of course.

Interesting, so they basically capped it at 480p internally cos that was what they envisioned as its target when designing the hardware?