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VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi has placed his hands on Wii U during E3, and found the console has capability issues due to its single processor having to drive multiple displays.

Speaking with alist, Takahashi said this single chip has to process games onto the television screen, the main game screen, and provide imagery for the tablet controller. That’s a lot of work for a system which “itself isn’t that powerful.”

“Nintendo only showed games with one game pad controller and the TV [at E3],” he said. “Most games out there, if you’re in a social setting, you want two controllers. Nintendo didn’t show any games that do that. They admitted in a Q&A that the games are going to run slower if you have two game pads and playing on a main display. That’s a fairly big issue for them.

“They made a good case that you can play with one controller and multiple Wii controllers, what they call asymmetric gaming where one person is looking at the small tablet screen and trying to deploy zombies while the people playing with the controllers were all on the main screen. You come up with very creative, different kinds of games where it’s one against four, or one person going online. They tried to justify and turn into an advantage this major weakness of the Wii U, but I think a lot of people saw this as a weakness.’

Takahashi said the strongest point for the console were the creative games, which explore the capabilities of the tablet and the touch screen, but still, he found there wasn’t an “obvious blockbuster,” out of all that was shown.

“They may have had a good one in ZombieU, but in the demos it didn’t necessarily play that well,” he said. “Nintendo came up as a pretty big disappointment at E3.”

You can read the entire interview through the link.

Just to clarify, what does he mean with "single processor"? Is he talking about the CPU, the GPU or another thing?

Well, I'll wait until I get hands-on, because I've heard plenty of people who'd disagree.

But yeah, a second, albeit small, processor in the tablet would make things much easier, and would only cost; what, a few £ more?

VentureBeat has long had an anti-Nintendo slant. Here we find an article based on little more than this "journalist's" speculation.

Wii U will be underpowered that's a given. It will be ok for core games where there's minimal use for the tablet controller but games that really take advantage of the tablet will look noticeably inferior to games that don't.

I don't think he understands technology at all.

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Rendering to two screens is as hard as rendering to one screen with twice the resolution or framerate, and the tablet screen is optional much like the second screen on the DS was. Number of cores/GPUs doesn't come into it; game devs can just have the tablet screen blank if they want to make the TV screen look better.

The console is probably already being manufactured to have enough stock for the launch/Christmas. Everything they had to do was already done before E3.

Do you remember that either you (or someone else) posted on the Official WiiU or your Nintendo news thread, that developers had recevied the final dev kit about a month before E3? Any new change would imply an update on the dev kits.

Thanks for the answer.

I asked that because the console only has 1 CPU, but it has 3 cores so he couldn't be talking about it, and given that most WiiU games will be 720p on the TV and the screen of the gamepad probably isn't HD, the GPU shouldn't have a problem dealing with them, at least for now.

you expect me to believe a rumor from an anonymous developer?? I call BS on this.

And who is this "Takahashi" from "VentureBeat"? He's a writer for a technology blog. Newsflash: technology blogs tend to focus on the latest technology, and gaming consoles are never the latest technology. This guy's criticism can essentially be boiled down to "it's not as powerful as a PC". And thank goodness it isn't. Every generation so far has been won by the least powerful system. This is true in consoles and in handhelds.

Meanwhile, his complaint about the Upad lacking its own processor is just absurd - in order for the system to stream so quickly, it needs to be able to do it with minimal fuss - having to go through a processor along the way will just delay the reactions. What's more, it's streaming graphics, meaning that it would need to house a graphics card, which would then need access to the graphics data (textures, etc), which would mean the need to copy all of that extra data across, which would then vastly slow down the operation of the system... To make matters worse, that means it would need a significant amount of extra ram, which would jack up the price of the controller even further.

The displays slow down for the same reason as why playing at 1080p generally has a lower framerate than playing at 720p - it takes more time to generate more pixels of image. It has been noted that the system runs slower with multiple Upads... which would be able to be compensated for by having a lower resolution on the TV output. Alternatively, the complexities of the displayed scenes could just be scaled back a little - essentially, exactly the same thing that is done for splitscreen multiplayer. And the slowdown would really only happen if the system was trying to generate full 3D on all screens, anyway - a much more likely multi-Upad usage would provide functionality on the internal screens, and display things on the TV.

In short, don't pay any attention. This guy is even lower on the hierarchy of relevant opinions than analysts... and that's saying something.