Good analysis BlueFalcon.

I think Nintendo did the typical Nintendo thing and spent the money on designing something so custom that they could have paid if they were to pick a higher spec stock standard item such as the A10-5700.

Saying all this I really don't think Nintendo would have gotten the 3rd party support anyway no matter what the hardware. They need actually fix those relationships and not say they will.

I believe your analysis. I just did a very quick comparison to X1800XT 512MB. Quickly looking back at Xenos, it looks like HD2600 Pro x 2, with GPU clocks lowered from 600mhz to 500mhz ==> 8.7 VP x 2 * (500/600) = 14.5 VP. Although 2600Pro x 2 would have memory bandwidth of 32GB, nearly 50% more than Xenos.

That's a good point but perhaps having such slow hardware discouraged developers from porting games. For example, if you are a developer working on next generation BF4, Watch Dogs, Star Wars 1313, etc. if the Wii U is 4-6x slower than PS4/720, then it wouldn't be as easy as just dropping resolution from 1080P to 720P, or even lowering settings. It would require a complete redo of the port to even run on Wii U's hardware. That's a lot of additional $$$ to optimize the game for such slow hardware. The other point is if Wii U lacks 1st party games, why buy it now for $300-350? It's like paying $20K for a 4K TV without any 4K content. I don't understand their strategy. They are losing $ on the Wii U which means selling it isn't making them $. They could have waited 1 more year, bought much cheaper hardware and spent that 12 months getting Windwaker HD ready, Mario Kart, etc. Like what was the point launching the console while selling it at a loss and having no software for at least 6 months that actually makes up for the hardware losses?

Thanks!

I honestly think Nintendo didn't release much 1st party games because they thought the 3rd party ports would sell the system, and give the 3rd party devs a window where they would not be competing against Nintendo titles, meaning more 3rd party sales resulting in profits and future 3rd party support. However as we all know these games are just late ports so most of us gamers would already own them on the other systems so they did not sell well. The sales of these games (even though they are old) will not convince developers to invest in the WiiU.

As I have mentioned in the past, I really think Nintendo must fix 3rd party relationships with the big players or they need to start being more aggressive and establish their own new IPs and/or partnerships with smaller 3rd party studios to provide a variety of content for the WiiU. 

Yeah, pretty much how I came to that number - though, you're right, that math has flaw in memory bandwith...but I get similar result when I'm using 3650 as a base (which is pretty similar GPU to 2600), so I'm thinking it's somewhere in that area (maybe somewhat lower, perhaps 13).

I think you are over exaggerating the scaling of games.

A PC game always has settings to allow it to run on a generally very wide range of GPUs (and other components) so long as it has certain base features. The next-gen engines have this type of scaling built into them and to me its seems to reason that WiiU is close enough and with the same basic architecture to allow that scaling in what should be most of next-gen games.

I very well could be horribly wrong in this and only time will tell.

NOTE... I ALSO UPDATED THE OP BASED ON THE LAST TWO DAYS OF WIIU GPU DISCUSSION!!!!

nah, Nintendo simply wasn't ready.

They only recently got fully aquianted with their own dev kits and HD development. Knowing Nintendo quality standards, they simply didn't want to put out games that were intended to show off the hardware better when it clearly wasn't. A 2D mario game and Nintendoland clearly didn't need the full power to be delivered.

But they want Pikmin3, wonderful 101 (new ip), and of course other games to be upgraded and taking advantage of many new tech first.

The bandwidth for wiiu and ps4 iarewrong, its 12.8gb and 176gb for ps4.

Yeah bluefalcon just mentioned I may have the PS4 wrong... but where did you see WiiU? I thought I double checked it to ensure it was correct.

EDIT: ok found it... the gaf summaries must of changed from when I first added those values a few weeks back or I just goofed. meh. Fixed now.

It seems both the NextBox and the PS4 are both underpowered for what the designers of Unreal Engine wanted. I remember them wanting 2.5 Tflops and neither one has crossed even the 2 barrier at this point. What I am referring too was from the Samararian Demo in 2011.

So is this next gen going to be a disappointment or short one? Or does it add up if you included GPU and CPU?

Nah. A console is not a PC. Console are far more dedicated and you'll still see amazing differences in games. Hell WiiU will show differences as compared to current gen and its shaping up to be closer to current gen than its next-gen competitors.