- The Gamepad, loved it as a concept. But it's limited by range, if you could use it anywhere in your home for off-screen play, it's application would be far more appealing.
- RAM. - Only 2GB of the stuff. - It was also a pathetic 12.8GB/s. The system was bandwidth limited.
- EMMC NAND. - Yay. Solid State storage. But... It's only 8GB or 32GB of the rubbish. EMMC just lacks the throughput needed to really make the system feel snappy, Nintendo cheaped out.
- GPU. - The GPU was a low-end Radeon with probably around 160 VLIW shader cores. It can definitely make a bigger punch than the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 GPU due to efficiency, but it was a very small GPU and it was held back by the rest of the system.
- CPU. - This is where things get tricky. - The WiiU's CPU whilst based on an older CPU design, was more efficient... It used an Out-Of-Order design, so a developer doesn't need to get compiler heavy in order to make the best use of the CPU Cores like they would on the Xbox 360/Playstation 's3 in-order cores.
The SRAM cache definitely helped as well. - The main thing that held back the WiiU's CPU was actually just clockrates rather than architectural choices.
***********
The OS being clunky is most likely due to Nintendo's crap OS design, they had 1GB of Ram, they had Solid State Storage, they had an ARM9 CPU Core for background tasks/security, dedicated hardware audio engine... And it still ran like ass.
To be fair, the Switch's OS isn't exactly snappy either.. But it's infinitely more usable.
And even though the display is a paltry 480P, I think it was fine. Not great. Just fine, not like the specs could have pushed 1440P.
I think the WiiU was just advertised poorly. People got it confused with it being a peripheral, no one buys a Nintendo console for graphics or class-leading hardware.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
