curl-6 said:
bonzobanana said:
To be honest as I'm owner of all three systems I'd say it was cut and dry the wii u was weaker overall.
Off the games available on all three systems its about 90% that are weaker on wii u, some considerably weaker.
For games that are bottlenecked more by the gpu than cpu then the wii u may win but there may still be parts that are weaker about the game than the other 2 consoles. For example Need for speed most wanted which has less online players, slower loading times and inferior control due to lack of analogue triggers on wii u. Also the issue that wii u doesn't support dolby 5.1 etc or have optical/coaxial output so the wii u has inferior sound unless you have audio hardware that supports multi-channel hdmi audio. The ps3 always wins here with a wide range of audio format support and different connections with a lot of 7.1 support.
The wii u is about its own exclusive games where it has versions of multi-format games the majority are inferior.
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The hardware specs say otherwise though. Multiplats may have been mostly poor, but that doesn't prove the hardware is less capable; look at Bayonetta 1 on PS3 vs the 360, would you say that proves 360 is far superior hardware?
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No the hardware specs are mixed but areas the ps3 and 360 are superior are far greater cpu performance, far greater main memory bandwidth. Also surprisingly raw gflops gpu performance but put into perspective with the fact the wii u gpu radeon is slightly later architecture and has the 32MB of embedded fast embedded memory then its clear wii u has the graphic advantage in most areas.
PS3 has a history of being hard to develop for, its gpu is less sophisticated than 360 and its cpu performance weaker unless you make use of the cell processors correctly in which case its much stronger. Many ps3 games were released without the cell processors doing much at all except for normal sound output processing and other elements. When you see games for the ps3 developed by capable developers they are clearly above 360 standard but when the cells aren't fully utilised it is below the 360. The wii u and ps3 are pretty similar in cpu performance if you don't factor in the cell processors. About 9,000 dmips for wii u and about 10,000 for ps3 for its 2 thread main powerpc cpu but then you factor in the cells as well it can be double that of 350 almost. Also both ps3 and 350 can make use of hard drives to use texture caching techniques that make games like GTA5 possible. Using both optical and hard drives to stream new data in.
The wii u is far easier to develop for. It's a simplified design by Nintendo, no use of multiple threads or cell processors to optimise. It's a much cleaner system.
The wii u across the board has slower loading and missing analogue triggers which effects many games.
So its not just the issue of the weak chipset of the wii u but its also its hardware configuration which lacks hard drive, analogue triggers and support for mainstream audio formats and output sockets.
The wii u is pretty much done now as we move towards Switch and can be assesed on its full range of software and its not hard to proof both 360 and ps3 are more powerful competent hardware and not just because of the wii's u lack of support either.
I often use a projector and low frame rates, lower resolution and low resolution textures are easy to pick out as is lack of anti-aliasing.
For a long time the argument that wii u was more powerful was the fact it had a 352 gflops gpu of later architecture and was supported by 32MB of high speed memory to compensate for the very low main memory speed and to be honest it was a good argument that I made myself but then games didn't seem to support this performance level. Factor in that actually the wii u only has a 176gflops gpu and it all makes sense. The later architecture and 32MB of main memory is enough to give it a small edge over 350/ps3 overall but you still have the dire cpu performance and having to run games with very low memory bandwidth both a killer for frame rates. Let's face it though if the wii u did have a 352 gflops gpu how would that work with 12.8GB/s memory bandwidth which is also shared with the operating system which takes 1GB of main memory. That gpu would have been throttled by memory bandwidth so it could never have achieved much.
It just seems really unfair to Microsoft and Sony if we pretend the wii u is more powerful. They created 2 incredible consoles of great performance where as Nintendo costed down their console to what they thought was the absolute minimum performance they could get away with. The wii u would have cost peanuts to make in 2012.
