Compared to the PS4, the Wii U is not that great  It's a much stronger system than people give it credit for, but so are the other two next gen systems. In time if the PS4 dominates, there is going to be a huge golf between the systems' graphics.

Luckily for Nintendo in this day and age graphics scale really well. Having worse resolution, worse models, worse animations, worse textures, worse framerate, etc. are much better than missing entire aspects of the game. That's assuming the Wii U gets a port of course. One thing that is really going to be a problem with the Wii U is dynamic lighting. With 7th gen games lots of lighting was done in production. This saved a lot of system resources but took a lot of time to make. Every item needed to be remade depending on its lighting situation for example. With PS4 and XBONE, many devs are switching to a real time solution. This means they only have to make one neutral colored item and the game engine does the rest. It looks better but more importantly is much cheaper.

Sadly the Wii U just doesn't have the power to do this and have great graphics. A port of a PS4 game will either need to be rebuilt costing millions of dollars, or else it will have to be scaled back beyond acceptable values. 1080p on PS4 verse 480p on Wii U with a worse framerate. Maybe I'm taking that analogy a bit far, but you get the point. I'm a dev so even though I post crazy things, I'm still less crazy than a random gamer.

On the thread subject, graphically there isn't much that in an ideal situation the wii u couldn't do. However games are more than graphics. AI, gameplay based distruction, and online elements are just not going to compare to the competition.

When the clock struck 2014 everyones eyes immediately became super sensitive and any resolutions lower than 1080p have been reported for hospitalizing gamers from torn retinas with their Jagged edges.

Seriously tho, some of those effects in Super Mario 3d World are amazing looking, After being a 360 nut all through the last gen and Ps3 fan right at the end I'm actually gonna be keeping an eye out for a cheap wii-u over the Jan sales to start this generation of gaming for myself.

It matters when you're trying to play with 10-15 fps in Lego Marvel super heroes. In the WiiU's defence it's rendering two separate views, one on gamepad, one on tv while we're in different parts of the city.
Too bad it can't do local co-op with the ps4. Buy one version, download on any console, online co-op between the consoles. Now that would be next-gen.

7 years after the launch of the PS3, why is it taboo to expect great looking realistic or semi-realistic games like Uncharted 3 or 2 on Nintendo hardware? Seriously? A game with good graphics cant have good gameplay? I hate how that's usually implied by certain people.

Just last week when I called Crysis 1 a great game someone dismissed me as a graphics whore. I then promptly reminded him of a 91 on metacritic. Cause games with good graphics are inherently "bad" or something these days.

Yes art style is nice, and also masks technical limitations of the hardware. Art style can look good on freaking anything. And art is also subjective. Art doesn't automatically make a game better or worse. On the PS4 for example cell shaded Guilty Gear looks like a god damn anime, even more than the Naruto games. Cell shaded Okami looks great on the DS, yay! Again after 7 years why is this "bad".

I'm personally looking forward to Project CARS to see what the Wii U can do in that respect, as it will push the system to its limits if the PC version is anything to go by. But I'll probably be a bad lazily programmed game right?

the Wiiu version also wont even play as good, trust me almost all if not all mutiplat games will be vastly worse on wiiu

The Wii U is perfectly capable of producing beautiful games, as Super Mario 3D World and Trine 2: Director's Cut prove.

Plus, it's the only place I'll be able to play Nintendo's latest masterpieces, so it's an easy choice for me.

It matters.

To a relatively small crowd.

To me it matters that the Wii U is the only system well suited for just about any genre of games invented so far.

People pay a lot of money over time for both the console and the games. Quality for the money is important.

These days most people have 1080p TVs and expect that too.

Finally you are comparing WiiU (current gen) titles to PS3 titles like uncharted 2 when PS3 is now last gen!

You can pick up a PS3 for around £120 now and have fabulous first part titles of top quality and hugely varied content and  great enjoyment.

For the WIIU it is a lot more expensive and the content is much more constrained and in a lot of cases worse in quality.

These are the reasons it matters.

Finally, people are seeing much better value from Sonys proposition than WiiU and hence PS4 is already outselling WiiU lifetime in some territories.

Nintendo dropped the ball completely with WiiU and they need to bring out something new, The 3DS single handledly is keeping them in the gaming business.

Wii U games look and play fine, that is all that matters. If a game has clean visuals and decent controls that will do me fine, hence the reason i still play Gamecube. I like to see fancy graphics and it does add to the overall experience, but it is not a deal breaker for me, i like the basics to be done correctly. 

I bought a wii u for nintendo games because I love them. It's not a competitive console in performance. Most of the eurogamer face offs show the xbox 360 and ps3 versions of games are superior to wii u.

Nintendo go cheap on hardware and price highly. That's just the way it is.

The wii u won't be capable of the same game experiences that push the hardware of the ps4 or xbox one but then Nintendo never attempted that. The wii u is based on a low cost 45/40nm fabrication process, slow DDR memory and a cpu design that dates back to the last century. Nintendo have cleverly designed the wii u for maximum performance using very low cost components that puts it approximately at the same power level as 360/PS3. In some ways a bit higher and in other ways a bit lower.

Cartoon graphics do not need high resources. The textures aren't realistic and are often repeated and you don't need complex physics engines or AI. Mario Galaxy still looks amazing and thats on inferior hardware to the original xbox. Nintendo are capable of crafting beautiful, extremely playable games on more humble hardware.

The wii u does not make a good all round console capable of playing a wide range of games. It's simply not competitive in performance with regard such games and there are very few available anyway.

Still a brilliant console though but like many I'm very disappointed how low Nintendo set the performance level. I was hoping it would be somewhere in the middle between ps3/360 and xbox one/ps4 but instead its right down with xbox 360/ps3 and inferior to them in some regards.

However the key thing is the performance jump from wii to wii u is huge. It's a massive generational leap.

I don't think its unreasonable for consumers to want a higher performance console than wii u so graphics and frame rates are better. Yes you can make do with wii u level graphics but why should you. I love Skyrim and have put in many 100s of hours into that game. The wii u probably isn't capable of that game because the game engine needs high cpu resources. If it was available on wii u it would probably run much worse than we see current wii u games run at in comparison to ps3/360 and perhaps end up with missing parts in the game. The small things that add a touch of reality to the game like the ants that run across tree trunks or the clouds that drift at the top of mountains may be gone. However that said the additional memory of the wii u may have benefits in some areas and the wii u could do 1080p upscaling that the ps3 can't do. Generally though it would be weaker.

If Skyrim is converted to ps4 or xbox one we could see huge improvements over the 360/PS3 versions. Higher resolution, much more detail, lighting effects, more birds, on screen characters etc. When you are outside in Skyrim you only encounter a small selection of people at a time, maybe 10 at the most but on ps4 that could be 50 people. All this will add to the experience of feeling like you are immersed in a real world that makes games more satisfying. The wii u would do the opposite to that.

I'm just making the point that improved gpu and cpu power plus a lot more memory can make far superior games. It's like giving an artist a large canvas and a wide selection of oil paints to paint with or giving him the back of an envelope and a box of crayons. Yes he can something good with the envelope and crayons but ultimately he is limited by them.