There are only three options, when disregarding degrees here. Either the Wii U is more powerful than these consoles, it is on-par with them,or it is less powerful. Naturally, one compares something new to the best thing there is on the market, currently. There were some people who argued the Wii U was in fact on par, or even less poweful than the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. This confirmation cements that as false, and allows us to proceed for other arguments of degrees. For the pricepoint it's aiming toward, and the investments in other aspects of the system (the controller) , the Wii U seems to have the hardware that makes it suitably more powerful than the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, while still within the range of what the predictions of PS4 and Xbox next-gen are, for recognition in multiplaform releases. Therefore, no it's not lame in terms of logic, especially for Nintendo's core audience, who prefer a conservative price-point. 

I find it so ironic how console gamers want the top of the line graphics, yet don't realize how much it hurts the industry: both the console manufacturers and the software developers. Ultimately, whether one sees gaming as a form of art or as a recreational time-spender, variety triumphs over inefficient advancements. Companies closing or losing money because they invest too much in these infficient advancements are highly detrimental to the gaming industry, and therefore gamers. For this reason, don't expect such huge advancements in graphical fidelity, well until the advent of a technology that allows it at a feasible investment. 

Have to wonder if that drop will be irregardless, or if both of them are showing high detailed graphics on screen instead of acting as input devices that allow play selection, etc... for like Madden football.

A PC with that configuration wouldn´t run Battlefild 3 or Crysis (1, 2 and probaly 3) at standard resolution. Even if you have a very similar archtecture to the 360 the developers will need a LOT of work for optimization

Luckily consoles aren't PCs. Look at what the PS3 and 360 can do, and look at what a comparable PC would have been able to do, for a more observational example. For  more concrete reasoning, consoles are standardized; therefore, games can be optimized for their hardware. Consoles also don't waste resources, and utilize them efficiently.

I was really eager today to talk to the Ubisoft guys, who are putting a lot of support behind Wii U, and when I got a chance to talk to them, this was the gist of their information:

- Assassin's Creed 3 looks basically identical on Wii U. There are slight areas of improvement and slight areas of not as powerful (?????) but they assured me that all of the features would be in the Wii U version. -


Great... I was hoping it'd have MORE content, if anything. They were very much down-talking the Wii U to the point where I lost much of the hype I've been building up.

Thanks, Ubisoft reps.

I reckon it will end up with more Ram. We've got another 6 months to go.

- Assassin's Creed 3 looks basically identical on Wii U. There are slight areas of improvement and slight areas of not as powerful (?????) but they assured me that all of the features would be in the Wii U version.

But that's because they're very very lazy, not because its not capable.

except ur playing the same game differently and interacting with the environment.. therefore it's being rendered twice, it's like split screen co-op, except it's on a tablet controller and on tv, in split screen co-op the game is basically being rendered twice..

No it is rendered once. One monitor is camera 1 and the other camera two. The scene isn't rendered twice; this is a trick that old 3D games use to optimise proformance. The only way the video card will have to reder two differenct things is if the controller and the TV are displaying two very different scenes.

The interactions with the eviroment are not something the video card has to deal with, that is a problem with updating, hence it is a CPU problem. The GPU takes the updated information from the CPU and renders the screen as discribed in the paragraph above.

The reason why there is a profromance drop when you add another Upad is when the screen is rendered to optimise proformance unneed pologons/textures are culled from the scene. The more detail you can take out the more efficantly the system will run. But when you are dealing with 3 cameras fewer details get taken out of the scene causing the proformance drop. In addition more specialized occultion(spelling) technicas need to be used which each more time with each render.

I'm with spurge on this one! Except that I actually do understand Icelandic to a degree, so it's more like Chinese to me...

impossible to know without clock speeds