A portion of a Gaming Blend interview with David Helgason, the CEO of Unity...

Gaming Blend: While the Wii U doesn't specifically use DirectX functionality, will the Unity Engine for the Wii U allow for DirectX 11 equivalent functionality in regards to shaders, soft and self shadowing as well as potential scalability for shader 5.0 (or higher)?

Helgason: Yeah. We'll do a – we'll make it potentially possible to do. 

What's interesting is that our philosophy is always this: We have a match work flow and I'm sure we can make a decent game and prototype, and they're fun. And then we have a shared system that basically allows you to access the full capabilities of the hardware you run. That's going to be good whether you're running [software] on an iPhone, the Wii U, a gaming PC or whatever. 

So what Unity is all about is the evolution from PC and you get really good cross-platform economics porting from one device to the other. But also, it's become layered between you and the hardware and layered between you and the controls. And you look back at some of the stuff we showed at the Unite Conference that we did about a month ago, and we showed some videos […] we were showing off our lighting technology and there's a demo of that, we call it a CG movie. It basically looks like a movie but it's actually in real-time. 

There's a session where we walk in and pry open that movie and start moving things around – and of course all of that technology we're making available. 

http://gonintendo.com/?mode=viewstory&id=186139

The source for the final WiiU specs released on VGLeaks posted on the GAF thread and said although the leak said DX 10.1/OPenGL 3.3, the WiiU API goes beyond that.

Search is your friend. This was posted yesterday. Twice if I remember correctly.

Gr8 avatar, is that the official Bayonetta 2 box cover?

It may have that power spec-wise; but the fact that the device needs to render 2 screens, invalidates the possibility to have those graphics at all.

Why don't you just stay out of non-Sony threads?

why? I am not trolling, just giving an opinion; based on the current info available.

I'd file this under "wait and see". If it's possible (the operative phrase), then it may be unlikely for the controller screen to be heavily utilized. And forget about multiplayer with two GamePads. Getting a higher-end Unreal Engine 3 game to run well on WiiU would be impressive enough (not to mention "next-gen"), though I have a feeling that a downgraded version of Unreal Engine 4 will be standard in a few years, once newer platforms have hit the market.

Of course, it depends on how far a developer will choose to push the Wii U. Nobody even tried to push the Wii further than GameCube, it seems, but perhaps history won't repeat itself.

It is possible to write shader code that does the same calculations as the equivalent DX11 API call but it will be much slower than if the function was implemented in hardware.

DX11 is about features not "power" of hardware.

Correct me If I am wrong, but I thought directX was just a windows things?

Arn't console engines "equivalent" code for the functions of directX anyway.