I don't think it's neccessarily on purpose. I had a look through some of the authors articles and they don't appear to be any tech articles. He may just be ignorant about CPU architectures. They probably should have had the Digital Foundry guys write this article. They could have at least couple it with their analyses of the E3 demos.

The DF guys proved to be rather unreliable when they ran their so-called "analysis" of the E3 demos.

We'll need to wait until closer to launch to see if that wasn't just a one-off flub by digital foundry, or if they're bias as well

This one?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-wiiu-e3-2012

What was unreliable about it?

That very little of their analysis came from on-screen sources, or from sources that were from the actual console. Much of it just sounded like speculation on their part, which they were then passing off as fact.

They clearly state their source material and the methodology they're using to come to their conclusions though. It's preliminary and at this stage, that's the best we can expect from anyone.

I said this earlier. They took only the lowest end rumors, not even the more detailed an reliable ones, and then regurgitated like coming from them suddenly makes it fact.

Seems like if you quote actual developers it has no creditably like Vigil Games saying can run a game at high end PC Version"

But quote an anonymous and some rumors you are totally legit.

This why nobody takes anyone on the internet serious.

"Vigil Games: "We had the game at the [same level as high end pc version] in a matter of days and a few lines of code got the game up and running on tablet in 5 mins.""

"Where did I claim OpenGL 3? Your the one that raised DirectX10 vs 11 in your article which claimed DirectX11 effects. I simply stated that the effects mentioned in the article were also possible with DirectX10 (not neccessarily easy to implement but possible), or in the case of Compute shaders, are actually possible with DX11 but on DX10 spec hardware. Technically, the PS3 and 360 are capable of some tesellation not to mention AMD chips have had non-standard tesellation units since the HD2000 series and DX11 spec ones since the HD5000 series.
As you mention, we shouldn't even be talking about DirectX as the hardware will be using OpenGL and I fully expect it to use OpenGL 4 (especially since the article states it uses a 7xxx series GPU)."

Tessellation Unit and Control isn't possible on OpenGl 3. Tell me how it would have it? It's already confirmed that it's OPENGL by the fact of it not being by Microsoft. So, either they don't know what there talking about or someone is lying. Because if your saying Direct 10 effects your trying to say Opengl 3 because Opengl 4 is everything Direct11x is with tessellation unit and control. I'm saying anything bad about you just that Eurogamer doesn't have clue of what there talking about.

If It's using Opengl 4 which like you said has been out before x7 series why would it only be able to use direct 10 effects if OPENGl 4 can do directx 11 effects easily?

The guy writing this probably has no clue about cards and Opengl because if he did then it would be obvious it could do direct 11 effects.

I believe the guy is doing damage control from two weeks so it looks like the article wasn't off much.

John Nash isn't saying anything about the ability of the system just that if it's not as powerful as ps4/nextbox doesn't mean it wouldn't be a good system. Which we can all agree.

By not as powerful we are not talking light years we are talking 2-4 generations ahead kinda like the gamecube and ps2.

Ps4 and Nextbox couldn't be powerful enough to not be able to scale down. The only thing holding wii back not able to do HD and only being 2 generations ahead of gamecube.

I agree that the author likely doesn't know much on the technical side. I had a look at his previous articles and this is the only vaguely tech based article he's written. So it wouldn't surprise me if he really has no clue about the GPU and has written misunderstood info from devs. Wouldn't surprise me if he mistook R700 for 7xxx series chip, as all rumours seemed to point to a chip originally based on R700 (which may also be where he got the DirectX10 idea from).

The only other possibility is that it uses OpenGL4 but has an older Tessellation unit in the chip.

As for developer comments, even the non-anonymous ones can be confusing (or media are misinterpreting/mistranslating). Take your Vigil games example:

Article 1:

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/03/vigil_games_wii_u_on_par_with_current_gen_consoles

"So far the hardware's been on par with what we have with the current generations. Based on what I understand, the resolution and textures and polycounts and all that stuff, we're not going to being doing anything to up-rez the game, but we'll take advantage of the controller for sure."

Article 2:

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/06/07/could-project-caf-233-be-the-best-platform-for-darksiders-ii.aspx

When we asked Bonstead if he thought it was possible that the Wii U version of Darksiders II would be the best version of the game, he said, "Yeah, just because the hardware is more powerful and it will have some extra features that I think will actually be useful to people playing the game. With it’s controller, [the Wii U version of Darksiders II] might be the best version of the game."

So, "on-par with current gen" or "hardware is more powerful"?  I know which one is more likely but comments can vary as much as the ones from anonymous sources... and this is from people working at the same company!

One of the main differences between an anonymous source and someone going on record is that you can judge whether the person on record could know what they're talking about ...

An anonymous source is far more likely to be someone who has never written a line of code than one of the senior developers, and their analysis of processing power is likely going to be based on something non-technical. Hypothetically speaking, a team may have realized that to take advantage of certain features of the graphics hardware they would have to rework a large portion of their rendering pipeline and it wasn't time and cost effective for a near launch game; as a result the graphical assets used on the Wii U version of a game might be identical to the PS3/XBox 360 version while the Wii U version renders at a full 720p (compared to 640p for the HD consoles), at a full 60fps (compared to an inconsistent 30fps for the HD consoles), and the QA intern leaks that the Wii U is essentially as powerful as the HD consoles to a gaming site.

Yep, completely true. Doesn't mean we should discount all anonymous sources, just to take them with a pinch of salt and compare them with comments from devs that have gone on record before drawing any hasty conclusions.