I honestly think the lower framerates are caused by Wii-U's slower cpu. But that said, it has been clear for a long time that you shouldn't buy a Wii-U for multi platform titles.

Crisper textures on roads and cars ? Sure. For objects and building exteriors, I don't think so ... Also NFSMWU's organic textures isn't better looking at the mid-left of the image as well as this one.

The lighting scheme for both games are different but Watch Dogs takes a step above NFS in terms of ambient lighting with SSAO. 

Plus NFSMWU doesn't have to deal with skin rendering either which simplifies a lot of things. 

I'll admit that NFSMWU is good at capitalizing the graphical effects better than Watch Dogs did but from a technical standpoint it's a smidge more imposing than NFSMWU since it's dealing with a lot more materials and graphical effects. The higher resolution is definitely a big bonus for the image quality though ...

Building textures seem about equally unremarkable between the two to my eyes. NFS definitely has the better textures overall, in fact the devs said for NFS they used Wii U's extra RAM to include better-than-last-gen textures. By contrast, WD on U just uses the last gen 512MB-of-RAM assets.

The "ambient" lighting in WD looks more like a lack of lighting to me; it doesn't seem to have any of the HDR, numerous light sources, bloom, etc. that NFS employs.

As for the material system, I'd wager almost none of that made it into the Wii U/PS3/360 versions of Watch Dogs, that's more of a PS4/Xbone/PC thing.

Watch Dogs on Wii U is the more CPU intensive game, I'll give it that. But NFS makes much better use of Wii U's GPU and RAM.

I still can't figure out why anyone would ever be surprised. The Wii U is VERY close to the PS3 in performance:

-Basically equal GPU. Maybe 25% stronger at most
-Weaker CPU
-A lot more ram...kinda. 1 GB (Remember 1GB is for OS) > 512MB but it isn't big enough to really use textures or AI numbers anywhere remotely near the PS4. So why even bother adding much more?

This kind of seals the fate for the Wii U when Ubisoft mentioned it would be there last major title.

- Confirmed by devs to be several GPU gens ahead of PS3's, DX10/11 capable, GPGPU.

- God forbid a dev should take pride in their work and try to deliver the best product they can...

I don't understand why you arm-chair developers can't get over the fact that the wii u is struggling to outperform the ps360.

- Wii U is NOT directX 10/11 capable. Purely Direct3D9 territory.
- Wii U GPU is a Radeon HD design from way back in 2008. It is only a few manufacturing generations ahead of the PS3, but it is still in the same ballpark.
- The best looking games on the wii u such as Mario Kart and Smash are well within the capabilities of an Xbox 360. Xbox 360 would run all those games on par with the wii u.

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2013/09/developer_interview_black_forest_games_on_bringing_giana_sisters_twisted_dreams_to_wii_u

"The Wii U has some PC-like dx10/dx11-like systems like geometry shaders"

The "best looking games on Wii U" are games like Trine 2: Directors cut which was confirmed by its developers to be beyond the capabilities of PS3/360:

http://www.geek.com/games/ps3-360-cant-cope-with-trine-2-wii-u-graphics-1521231/

Those shaders don't count as DX11 if they are in 1152x648 :p

At super-low resolutions, even a potato ( 🍠 ) with crocodile clips-HDMI adapter could run DX11 shaders.

I doubt those shaders are DX11 at all; it's likely a quick and nasty port of the PS3/360 version with triple buffering thrown in.