The forums have proven time and time again that there aren't enough objective people on both sides of the fence to make a rational conclusion. Digital foundry all the way.

I still stand with great ART as the reason this game looks amazing. Forza 4 is 720p60 with 4x MSAA and more or less all the effects I've seen so far in MK8 on the 360 so Im not buying the technical achievement hype just yet.

I consider Little Big Planet 2 and Journey to look better than Killzone 3 on the PS3 due to ART. Even though Killzone 3 is obviously demanding more resources than either of the others

It looks real nice. I can't wait to play this game. And I can say the music is pretty great too... Makes up for the lackluster soundtrack of the previous iteration.

I'm not adding any fuel. My opinion is that computation power does not equal most visualy appealing graphics. As many people have said on this thread, design and art are a big part of making a game look good. The fact is, Nintendo does that in a masterful way. I am not gonna pretend that isnt true just cause i have a PS4 and also enjoy different kinds of games.

Now, i see posters that want to disdain that pretty clear conclusion just because the game is on a Nintendo system and they already decided that it cant qualitfy as "next-gen" because it doesnt have X RAM or Y TERAFLOPS. I merely dont let that bias blind me towards what is a very appealing game on every level. If that isnt what next-gen is supposed to be, then what is?

Still blaming me after I was straightforward and provided a link showing the OS was 50MB?

That's a hell of an attidude.

I was just trying to be helpful, since it sounded like ICStats knew what he was talking about but he was having trouble getting his point across. This thread is somewhat lacking in technical analysis of the games being discussed. I don't know anything about such technical things, so I can't be much help, but I'm curious about the wizardry on display here.

Its not a competition to see who was wrong the most in %. I have no problems in admiting i was wrong. But you did quote someone and made a reply in response to what he said. It wasnt correct aswell.

This conversation is a bit petty though. Who was wrong the most in %. Why do you care about that? You tried to correct the guy. If you do that give a correct number, if you made a mistake i dont see what is so shocking in admiting you were wrong. But oh well... doesnt matter.

Actually in the Playstation 3's case... The "System" I.E. Everything except the graphics processor was limited to 256Mb of Ram.
The RSX however could use it's 256Mb of Ram then start to access the Ram that's reserved for the system.
Keep in mind that GPU's are usually the most memory hungry processor in a gaming machine due to having to handle things like textures.

Say for instance you had a game that was only using 128Mb of system memory, the RSX could use it's 256Mb to make pretty pictures then start using the free memory in the other pool.

As for the Ram counts in the other systems...
You need to be realistic.
Alright.
* Xbox 360: 512mb. - 32Mb for OS. = 480Mb or 0.48Gb.
* Playstation 3: 512Mb. - 52Mb for OS. = 460Mb or 0.46Gb.
* Wii U: 2048Mb. - 1024Mb for OS and other functions. = 1024Mb or 1Gb.

Thus by extension, the WiiU as it currently stands has a 122% memory advantage over the Playstation 3 and a 113% advantage over the Xbox 360.
Over the next few years I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo freed up another 512Mb of memory, the system is young and it's always wise to take more memory than you need with a new machine as you can always give memory back, but never taketh it away.
It would then give the WiiU a 233% and a 220% advantage in memory compacity respectively over the HD twins.


As for the WiiU CPU being weak? Well. Yes and No.
It's a CPU that's designed to be incredibly efficient, it's using allot of the features found in the more monolothic AMD and Intel cores in the PC space but sticks with the PowerPC instruction set (Although PowerPC is RISC, so are x86 processors internally these days.), things like OoO exection, branch prediction and improved interconnect bandwidth and latency allows it to perform more instructions per clock than the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

Some tasks like integer and badly optimised code will literally shine on the Wii U, thanks to it's out of order execution engine and fat caches in comparison to the HD twins. (It can use the eDRAM as extra cache.)
However, the thing to keep in mind with the WiiU is that if you look from the outside, it's mostly designed as a console to take advantage of games today, not tomorrow, hence why Nintendo went with a Triple-Core design with a "Master Core" to take advantage of the fact that games always have a master thread which is more processor heavy than the other threads (Hence the additional cache on that core.) and that not many games exceed 4 threads even in the PC space.
That's not a bad thing by any stretch, it keeps things simple for developers.

Some branches of code will be better on the WiiU, things like iterative refinement floating point will be much much much better on something like the Cell. (Which is a processor that sucks at everything else.)

Textures, lighting, shadowing, geometry and what-ever-else-I-forget should all be of a higher quality on the WiiU compared to the HD twins, it's GPU hardware features are on parity with the Next-Gen twins, however it will simply not be able to handle as many of them at any one time, which is completely understandable, these aren't high-end PC's, they're cost sensitive low-end gaming machines, all of them.

Yep, thanks Pemalite for taking the time to write this.

The PS3's GPU can access both the system RAM and dedicated GPU RAM efficiently. GPU can read textures out of system RAM, or render to the system RAM too, for example for post-processing on Cell.

So having said that, as was already mentioned with more than double the RAM and a newer, more powerful GPU, we can expect Wii U to have better textures, better models, and higher resolution on Wii U than gen 7 hardware.

One issue could be bandwidth - you need higher bandwidth to go along with all the extra memory and I'm not sure how well Wii U can take advantage of the extra RAM with it's bandwidth.  What do you think?

My belief is still that it does come up underpowered vs PS3/360 in the CPU department, though I'm not directly familiar with it.  The on paper analysis and also (the few) developer articles make me think that.

Had it been a matter of poorly optimized code, or mostly integer scalar code, then Wii U could be competitive - but that's not the thing to compare.  PS3/360 game engines are optimized for 7+ years, and use FPU + SIMD.  That's what Wii U has to compete with, not theoretical benchmarks, and in that it seems underpowered.

Anyway, so I'm prepared to be proven wrong but I'm not going to take a "developers are lazy" as proof.

Games like Trine 2 Director's Cut and Need for Speed Most Wanted U were able to use higher resolution textures on Wii U compared to PS3/360 thanks to the extra RAM. Shin'en have also said higher res textures should be a "no brainer" for Wii U, and have promised to employ 4k-8k textures in their upcoming games.