All of you guys claiming 1.5 GB of RAM is low or that the Next X will have 6+ GB of RAM need to stop. You are embarrassing yourselves.

Getting this worked up over early 3rd party ports on the Wii U is pointless because none of them are actual indicators as to what the Wii U is truly capable of.

Viper
"All of you guys claiming 1.5 GB of RAM is low or that the Next X will have 6+ GB of RAM need to stop. You are embarrassing yourselves."

quoted for the truth

Since before the XBox 360 and PS3 were released we were beginning to approach a point where hardware processing power was no longer going to limit the amount of detail in a game; and processing power would only limit the kinds of graphical effects that were present. Now, I don't know if the Wii U has hit that point but I would say the primary limiting factor to how detailed games are is the level of detail that developers are willing to produce.

What I'm referring to is advanced level of detail technologies ...

Essentially, GPUs have gotten powerful enough to render more polygons to the screen than there are pixels in the image they're producing; and rendering more and more polygons does not lead to more detail in the image. We haven't seen this materialize yet because the amount of memory required to hold the highest detailed version of models in memory has been prohibitive. Basically, when part of a model takes up most of the screen you may need hundreds of thousands of polygons on that model to hide polygonalization artifacts and a massive texture to hide pixelation, and most systems released so far could only hold a handful of these models and textures in memory at a given time.

Enter tessellation

Tesselation empowers the GPU to subdivide the model eliminating polygonalization artifacts, similar texture subdivision can be done to eliminate pixelation, and then vertex shaders can be run to "add" detail to the new surface. The net effect can look like this:

For those who will ask "Can that run on the Wii U", if the rumoured specs are correct than the answer is yes (probably above 30fps at 720p with 4xAA):

Misread chart (googled for 4850 and read 4870 when realy was 7870), but concept is still valid

Edit: Ran on my Radeon 5770 (not much better than rumoured Wii U GPU) with moderate levels of tesselation, directX 11 at 720p it ran at between 25 and 30fps for most of the demo; with a few places running far better and a few places running far worse. When looking at the wireframes, and toggling tessellation on and off, they're doing some pretty extreme subdivision even at the lowest settings. While the Wii U couldn't produce a replica of the video and maintain a decent framerate, the effect is certaily viable on similar hardware to increase detail above and beyond what the current HD consoles are doing

You should have used the Frobllins demo. It was actually made for the 4850.

Of course the GPU and CPU in thd WIi U are custom built. The GPU will have a DX11 level tesselator which the 4850 didn't.

I think people are getting frustrated because here is a game that should have at the very least be performing just like the others but isnt. I can understand the frustration

Oni
dont be silly
you know hes right, that comment was unnecessary

Who says anyone's proud of it?

And how do you know that the next gen console's specs will be so great compared to Wii U? We know nothing about them yet, let alone whether they will be powerful enough to render the Wii U "obsolete." I'm not sure MS, and especially Sony, can afford to take massive losses on their consoles again next gen, so I wouldn't necessarily expect anything revolutionary in terms of graphics/specs, unless we're in for another $599USD. From what I've seen from the Wii U games, they look good enough anyway, and probably will at least hold their own with Sony and MS's stuff. I can't see the graphics of their consoles being that noticably better than what we have now, at least not to the point in warranting $500 on a new console. So what exactly will make the Wii U obsolete? A few more polygons and slightly more detailed textures? Give me a break.

Wii U games already look on par, or I dare say even a little better than current HD console games, and this is pre launch.. In 4-5 years, I'd imagine the visuals will look significantly better, similar to the 360 launch games comapred to current games.

I mean honestly, is this really not good enough for some of you?

Not sure what the hell people are expecting to see out of Sony and MS's new console visuals, but I have a feeling many will be disapointed. There is only so much room for improvement left before we reach the point of photorealism, and we're getting close already..

Iwata said that the gap between Wii-U and the other systems won't be as wide as it was this gen. Nintendo isn't going to make a beast of a console and destroy the other two, but they know they screwed up last time and I don't think they'd do it again. I think at worst, we're looking at a Dreamcast to Xbox difference and that's fine imo. I loved the Dreamcast, and even though it was clearly behind the Xbox, it was much more fun to play (I had all four consoles that gen). I don't remember EVER thinking "man, the Dreamcast looks like crap". As a matter of fact, I didn't even WANT another console. The only reason I bought a PS2 was because the Dreamcast died at it's hand and I HAD to move on.

The Wii-U will be fine.

I still don't get this. How did they screw up? They won this gen. If the Wii completely stopped selling right this instant, the PS3 and 360 would still never catch it in sells. As Reggie said, they had the best specs the two gens before this one and those have been their worst two gens.

The only people I can think of who didn't like the Wii were the kind who only play miliant shooters and medieval/ancient sword fighting games like Uncharted, God of War and Dark Souls. Oh, and the ever classic graphics fanatics, because if it doesn't look photorealistic(which has only been achieved with ames that used actual photos like Mortal Kombat 1-3) then its no good to them.

People who preferred playing anything aside from those categories generally liked the Wii and DS.

I wonder, with all of the people who say the Wii U has bad graphics, do the PS3 and 360 also now have bad graphics since theirs are not as good as the Wii U?