Yeah, but sacrifices had to be made to make the game as big as they did, hence why some games have anti aliasing (LoZ Breath of the Wild for example) and some don't. It's pretty much my point. There is really no game we can go to and say "this is what Metroid on the Wii U would look like" and again, it is a sad thing.

The real fact of the matter is their is ALWAYS going to be hardware limitations. Even if the Wii U was as powerful as the PS4, there are going to be limitations, and it's nice to see how franchises take advantage of the hardware that is available vs what the franchise looks like in its next generation. The small niggling issues in Xenoblade Chronicles did not hamper my enjoyment of the game in the least. In fact I would go as far as to say I thoroughly enjoyed it dispite its shortcomings and am glad I got to play it now (and again prefer it) instead of having to wait until whenever it came out when the NX does arrive. That in turn increases my interest for the next installment when it does come out on NX, to see how that one stacks up.

Ultimately, what limitations would Metroid have on Wii U? Other than it would be 720p we'll never know for sure. How good would it have looked? We also will never know. Same as asking what limitations will it have on the NX (if it ever comes out)? We don't know. So you're asking for a solution for a problem you have no clue the game has (and other franchises like Fire Emblem, Kid Icarus, whatever IP we will never have the luxury of seeing on Wii U).

Yeah, but sacrifices had to be made to make the game as big as they did, hence why some games have anti aliasing (LoZ Breath of the Wild for example) and some don't. It's pretty much my point. There is really no game we can go to and say "this is what Metroid on the Wii U would look like" and again, it is a sad thing.

The real fact of the matter is their is ALWAYS going to be hardware limitations. Even if the Wii U was as powerful as the PS4, there are going to be limitations, and it's nice to see how franchises take advantage of the hardware that is available vs what the franchise looks like in its next generation. The small niggling issues in Xenoblade Chronicles did not hamper my enjoyment of the game in the least. In fact I would go as far as to say I thoroughly enjoyed it dispite its shortcomings and am glad I got to play it now (and again prefer it) instead of having to wait until whenever it came out when the NX does arrive. That in turn increases my interest for the next installment when it does come out on NX, to see how that one stacks up.

Ultimately, what limitations would Metroid have on Wii U? Other than it would be 720p we'll never know for sure. How good would it have looked? We also will never know. Same as asking what limitations will it have on the NX (if it ever comes out)? We don't know. So you're asking for a solution for a problem you have no clue the game has (and other franchises like Fire Emblem, Kid Icarus, whatever IP we will never have the luxury of seeing on Wii U).

The best anology for how Metroid could have looked on Wii U is probaby Halo 4, albiet with better textures thanks to Wii U's increased RAM capacity.

*snip*

Damn  shame we never got such a game. :(

There's far more factors in determining higher quality textures than just memory ... 

Beware that bandwidth, texture addressing and filtering units play a role in texturing performance ... 

Very hard to push that one platform has a definitive advantage over another if were talking about last gen HD twins and WII U since they all have a roughly equal amount of advantages along with drawbacks ... 

Not sure why you are stuck on Metroid, but I will say Metroid probably would have been the best case scenario for a core-gaming show piece because the gameworld is large and seamless yet also deals mostly in enclosed environments which does a great deal to ease the hardware burden. 

As for Fire Emblem, they've mishandled that game as far as technical stuff goes so badly it's sad.  Given the gameplay it SHOULD be one of if not THE most advanced showpiece on any given platform from a technical features perspective.  That it isn't is a testament to how little they invest in the series and it's disapointing. 

We don't know the precise specs for Wii U's GPU, (though devs have said it is better than PS3's or 360's) but twice as much RAM is a pretty signifiant advantage. Need for Speed, for example, was able to use better textures on Wii U than on last gen because of the increased memory.

That's not true, we have the amount of bandwidth figured out and even if were not given the rest of the specs we can put a hard limit on the amount of other units the Latte graphics has based on lithography technology and emulator documentation ... 

When half the die space is consumed by the on chip memory along with the other stuff and the GPU microarchitecture is a hybrid between the R6/700 and consider that it's made on Renesas's 45nm process node that gives at most 400 million transistors for Nintendo to play with ... 

You pretty much get the magic ratio of 160 ALUs, 16 texture units and 8 ROPs (It's most definitely 8 ROPs since since AMD never increases the rasterizer rate of GPUs below 1 billion transistors.) 

I don't deny that RAM is a significant advantage but it's not that clear and cut since bandwidth plays a BIG part of texture sampling performance ... 

The WII U has a bandwidth of 12.8 GB/s which puts it at a maximum of just over 3.4 billion texture reads at 4 bytes per texel per second whereas the Xbox 360 can do just over 6 billion texture reads at 4 bytes per texels a second ... 

The unofficial analysis of the chip is still a subject of debate though, we don't know absolutely for sure because even the techheads can't seem to agree on all the specific details.

And you're talking about the bandwidth of main RAM; Wii U, like 360, employs eDRAM with much, much higher bandwidth. But 360 has 10MB of it while Wii U has 32MB.

How many developers do you know that ACTUALLY often read texture samples from on the chip memory ?

See my edit.