Although now that I think of it, the 360 / ps3 were a little more evenly matched with the Wii pretty far behind.

If the Wii U --- nextbox --- ps4 are a little more staggered power wise, it could be interesting for the Wii U if the Xbox becomes the "starting point" for multiplats. Less of a gap in HW performance would be a good thing for nintendo.

i don't think ps4 will be the lead platform, but even if it is i won't be a problem to port to wii u.

One thing that's going to really help the Wii U is Nintendo's surprisingly forward thinking with their choice of architecture. It's going to be easier to port between the Wii U/PS4/720 than it currently is to port between the Wii U/PS3/360. The architecture of both the PS3 and the 360 is a bit odd with floating point work being done by the CPU rather than the GPU, and this generation we're going back to normal with the floating point work being done by the GPU.

Developers are also going to be greatly helped by both the Wii U and 720's memory setups being virtually identical. I really can't understand why Sony didn't go the same route tbh. They would have ended up with 8GB of RAM with much lower latency and using less chips making the motherboard a hell of a lot cheaper to produce as well as the RAM chips themselves being cheaper.

Another thing going in the Wii U's favour as far as development is concerned is that any interaction between the CPU and GPU is going to be lightning fast.

What you are describing sure sounds like another Wii/PS3/360 situation to me. Why would any core gamer want to play their favorite franchises in a: lower res, with less AA, less impressive lighting, less impressive particle effects, more pop-in and longer loading time? That sounds horrible lol.

You also keep forgetting how the Wii did get some of the big core franchise. They just didn't really sell and eventually developers stopped trying on the Wii, even if the 70m installbase was hard to ignore. Nobody bought a Wii U because they want to play next gen FPS games, they bought it for Mario, Just Dance and Wii Sports. That is why core game developers will use the next gen consoles as the main platform and not the lowest common denominator. 

There wasn't a single port of a major core franchise. All that it had was gimped versions developed separately. No Elder Scrolls, no Fallout, no Dead Space, no Bioshock etc etc.

The Guitar Hero and Call of Duty franchises were the only major core franchises that Wii owners saw, and with the exception of the last CoD they all did well. But those games were a completely separate SKU developed independent from the others.

And as I've already stated when I started posting in this thread your Mr Average Joe won't be able to tell the difference between the Wii U, PS4 and 720 versions of games unless viewed side by side. Your average gamer is pretty dim tbh lol.

Off course next gen games will make 360 games look like crap in comparison dude. Why would they even build a new console if it wouldn't?

Not many pictures of true next gen games out there, but if it's real then a comparable game on ps4 defintely makes a 360 game look like a pile of poo.

Ok, they were gimped version, but what do you call a game with: " lower res, with less AA, less impressive lighting, less impressive particle effects, more pop-in and longer loading time?"

The drop from 1080p to 720p alone is enough for core gamers to ignore the wii version and even my half blind grandmother can see the difference between 720p and 1080p. For a while the 360 was winning this console generation because people were buying it's "superior versions" of multiplatform games on their platform. This wasn't due to a big difference in resolution, it was because of differences that most people can't even see with the naked eye.

Like I said, even if the Wii U gets the next-gen multiplatform games, people still wouldn't care and it won't help the Wii U sell more then the 30k a week that it's currently selling. All it will do is show the whole world that it can't handle next gen titles, unless off course they get gimped to some weak sauce version that will make my granny's eyes hurt. 

I meant gimped in terms of content, not due to a lack of power but due to a whole new game in its entirety being built from the ground up for the Wii.

As for the difference between 720p and 1080p native, perhaps you personally may be able to tell the difference but the majority of people won't due to the majority of people not having the correct viewing distance between their seats and the screen even before you take into account that the Wii U's GPU will upscale the images anyway.

The difference in IQ between Wii U multiplatform titles and PS4/720 multiplatform titles should be equivalent to the difference in quality between PC Medium settings and PC High and Very High settings. They're not going to look like GameCube/Wii games compared to PS3 and 360 games, nowhere near.

We're going to get a taster of what sort of IQ that Latte is capable of when we see the likes of 3D Mario, Mario Kart 8, more of X and Retro's new game, and these will still be first generation titles. We still don't know what around a third of the GPU does and what we do 'know' is pure guesswork from the GPU die shot very kindly released by Chipworks.

I'm of the opinion that Nintendo have evolved the fixed functions that Flipper and Hollywood had so that they can be used whilst keeping the pipeline standard so that these fixed functions can be implemented into engines such as Unreal, CryEngine etc.

You've also got to remember that the pipelines for both the CPU and GPU are quite short so any instructions can be carried out quicker than those of the other consoles. Those of you that are technically minded really should check out the Latte thread on Gaf, you'll find it very interesting.

PS4 will be around twice as powerful as the XBox 720. PS4 will be 3 or 4 times more powerful than the Wii U. 8th generation repeating the 7th generation in terms of specifications but PS4 should be able to blow the XBox 720 and Wii U out of the water in regards to consoles sales.