Same was PS2 games were ported to the original X-Box. The original X-Box was about 4x as powerful as the PS2 (21 GFLOPS compared to 6.2), but GTA still got ported to the X-Box.

Still power isn't everything, Gamecube X-Box and PS2 all had their own games, and it will be much the same this gen. I bet the Japanese gamers will jump onto the easier to develop, Wii U, and sell to their niche market, with most JRPG's getting localized. PS4 and NextBox will mainly be fighting for America's/Europe "core" audience, while the Wii U will cater to the less addicted gamer, and a smaller group of core gamers.

I bet a very similar situation to the 7th gen will occur, except Nintendo will be better comparitivly then Sony in Japan, MS will probably do better comparitivly in Americas, and PS4 will do better compared to the competition in Europe.

You probable meant devs, and no they won't jump ship to WiiU, PS4 is also easy to develop for, I reckon it will get all of the nice games, even more so than the PS3, which was hard to develop for.

This is a terrible attempt at rationalizing the equality between 8GB of RAM (in truth 7 after OS) and 2GB of RAM  (In truth 1GB after OS and other functions). They will not run the same and you definitely must not have seen or probably might not even be able to understand why a lot of third parties are stepping back from Nintendo because the Wii U is underpowered. People can only keep an open mind so long for Nintendo and Nintendo does not have a next gen capable system. Don't get me wrong, its next gen for Nintendo, but it is not next gen the way power is going to be pushed to create new worlds, emotions, battles and more. They will be behind, but they will do their own thing. Holding back games for the Wii U will only hurt the art direction of games. Most people just don't get that because they want to believe the Wii U can handle them. It's not true at all.

Nintendo failed to give their hardcore gamers the console that will get them multiplats yet again. Nintendo only has themselves to blame for it. 

Watch the PS4 unveiling again and this time listen to what the possibilities next gen tech will make possible which PC/720 and the PS4 will enjoy. 

I agree that the Wii U will have a tough time catching up, but games like the Witcher 2 and skyrim were running around 3-4GB of RAM on PC if you wanted to run them properly. Third party devs demanded 8GB from Sony and got it so you can bet your bottom dollar that they will squeeze every last drop out of this gens tech.

I almost, almost wrote out a long post explaining why the Wii U could still run a PS4 game but have come to realize the post will be...

1) ignored.
2) misunderstood.
3) have irrelevant portion quoted.

So I'll just say that the Wii U to PS4 circumstance is not the same as the Wii to PS3 circumstance. Performance, architecture, game engines, texture streaming, etc...all infer that the Wii U could run PS4 games despite the RAM difference. This is far closer to to various PC configurations and how games run on them than it was with Wii to HD consoles.

No 3rd party in the world would want to port a PS4 game to Wii U. Not because of RAM, but because of the PPC Architecture. x86 on the PS4 brings a lot of advantages for developers (for example free choice between DirectX, OpenGL or Low Level Mode. Especially Indies can port their PC games with little to no effort.). PPC on the Wii U only brings problems. Sure, Wii software is running and everyone who developes for the Wii will instantly feel at home. But who the hell developed for the Wii, seriously?

That said, you can in fact bring anything on a platform with less RAM. You just have to scale it down a little and live with longer loading times. Think about it this way: The same game can run on Wii U with constantly streaming data from the disc (unfortunately, it isn't possible to make a swap drive on an internal hard drive as Nintendo didn't include a hard drive in the Wii U. Much bigger issue than RAM if you ask me.) while the PS4 can fit the entire game into the RAM. That would mean no loading times at all.

The differences will be very noticeable, but who thought otherwise? It will however be possible to port almost every game to Wii U with less graphics or a lot of loading screens when it comes to Open World. (Lego City comes to mind. Those Loading times are INSANE!). But I doubt that many developers will want to port games to Wii U as virtually every 3rd party game tanked even considering the install base. (Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed bot sold nearly twice as much on Vita). It just isn't worth all the time and money.

As already explained, that 256MB of video data cannot hold a "game world", it's only for rendering the scene.

I think we've reached full circle here :p

The GPU renders the scene, VRAM stores textures and such, which are part of the game world too. Switch of the PS3's VRAM and your game just got a hell of lot less... well, video. ;)

I haven't got the motivation to continue this. It's up to you what you want to believe but it doesn't make it true.

I'll leave it at this...

The memory setup in the PS3 has been a problem for developers with certain types of games (open world specifically). There is a consensus that this is because the 512MB total RAM available is divided between 256MB for system and 256MB for video as opposed to a shared pool for the Xbox 360.

By your logic, that would mean that this divide isn't a problem at all.

Just to be clear to anyone else who isn't reading the context here of previous posts (so I don't get flamed for making the comparison). This is not about saying the Xbox 360 is better, this is about compring the 88MB of available system RAM in the Wii to the 200MB available on the PS3.

If you want to say otherwise, curl-6 then it's up to show that video RAM can be used as system RAM on the PS3.

I know an answer, and have a hunch, but posted to see if anyone can show me otherwise.  And people have tried in this thread actually.