Both the PS3 and the 360 had GPU's of near equal strength.  That 2005 card was VERY strong.  Yes the Wii U has more much more modern architectures, but while that helps sometimes it doesn't make it any stronger.

My 3 year old 7970 is still noticably stronger than the brand new R9 285 even though the 285 has newer features.

Memory isn't the only contributing factor to the textures ... There are other ways to get around the memory limit such as streaming the textures from the disk. The textures for structures such as this is awful so it's not so clear and cut as to which game has the better textures as you make it out to be. 

HDR doesn't necessarily change anything about the lighting. It only allows for more contrast. Light's are more than just point lights. There are area lights and environment lights as well but SSAO improves lighting all around by trying to calculate how occluded the surfaces are from exposed light to improve upon the areas less exposed to light. 

The material system is flat out superior to NFS even on last gen consoles. With NFS, it doesn't even attmept handle anything more than plastic, concrete, or metal. Watch Dogs on the other hand takes an extra step further by adding in skin, cloth, glass, and wood. 

Most of the textures in NFS U are quite high resolution for the system, as they are sourced from the PC version. In Watch Dogs U, there are muddy, flat textures all over the place:

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Just watching the footage, WD U is seriously lacking in independent local light sources, whereas NFS has tons. Driving through a tunnel in both shows a stark difference.

And while the material system is WDU theoretically has more diversity, it doesn't do it very well; metal, plastic, and wet concrete don't look as good as their NFS equivalents, (the cars in particular sorely lack shading) while stuff like cloth and skin appear flat and basic.

Most of the textures in NFS remain untouched from the previous HD twins and Digital foundry publicizes that bumps in texture resolution are only made in specific areas. FWIW a good portion of the textures in Watch Dogs seem fine given the hardware they had to work with and that screenshot just proves my point. The muddiness likely comes from the lower resolution, not the textures. 

NFS may have more lights but Watch Dogs on the other hand has light occlusion. 

Neither games shade metal all that well. Plastic and wet concrete are just fine in Watch Dogs. Cloth is fine but you might have a point with skin ...

True, not every texture in NFS has been replaced, but Digital Foundry did point out that surfaces like roads, pavement, tyre patterns, and building fronts matched the PC version on higher settings. WDU on the other hand apears to have strictly PS360 quality texture work.

Considering the hardware I thought the metal shading in NFS was decent. It's not Ryse or Drive Club level, but this isn't the PS4/Xbone. In WDU on the other hand, metal seems to have either no reflectiveness or a very muted, basic application of it.

Honestly, even the PS4 version of Watchdogs had unimpressive skin and cloth compared to other games on the system, in my humble opinion. The materials  in Infamous and Shadowfall look a lot better to me.

The textures in Watch Dogs do seem decent at least for the interiors. 

The metal shading in both games are absolutely awful ... I can also understand why the skin and to some extent why cloth isn't up to par with the offline renderers. The reason why you find the materials to be more impressive on the current gen only HD trio games has to do with games moving on to physically based shading. When games start obeying helmholtz reciprocity and energy conservation, things start to become a whole lot more realistic. 

Metal shading on cars looked decent to me, certainly much better than the flat, dull vehicles of WD.

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Is that supposed to be a joke ? 

What?  It's a 7970 GHz.  Stronger than a 280X:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-r9-285-tonga,3925-6.html