The 3DS library is far superior than Vita's. But man, I feel like the 3DS aged way worse than the Vita. I mostly don't use my 3DS at all nowadays; Its size, screen resolution and battery life really bothers me, I can't go back for it especially now that the Switch is around. But my Vita... I basically use it as a portable PS4 and I also hacked it. It's an incredible retro machine that you can also do some awesome stuff with homebrew.

So for me it's a though one. I like the 3DS library of games better, but I prefer Vita's hardware and functionalities. Based on just my recent usage I'm gonna go with the Vita, since I use it way more than my 3DS.

MH Wii looks better than MH PS2, a game built from ground up for 3ds has no problem to compete with Wii game, graphic wise.

To me, 3ds is GC portable, and New 3ds is Wii portable, if MH3 was built for New 3ds only, i don't see the "significant downgrades" still exist.

MH4 and Generations were built for 3DS and still had worse textures and effects than Tri on Wii.

Vita existed partway between the 6th gen/Wii and PS3/360; 3DS was much weaker and was more like a PS2 or Dreamcast with more modern shaders, though at a lower resolution than even those systems.

They even look worse than MH3 on 3ds. Graphic: MH3 3ds > MH4/MHG 3ds, but gameplay: MH4/MHG > MH3. Capcom sacrificed the graphic for better gameplay. And where are MH Stories or E.X.Troopers? Are they look bad too?

https://youtu.be/r46Jbq-ZNok

https://youtu.be/odBFeO5VOzM

About vita, i always want to recommend this:

https://youtu.be/STdtSa9kiXA

There are a couple of things the 3ds could do better than the Gamecube-Wii, such as shaders. This is a result of it being slightly more modern tech. It also had significantly higher ram and higher storage capacity than the Gamecube mini disks allowed for. But it is still overall a weaker system when it comes to number of polygons and texture quality. Comparing it to the Wii, it still has more ram, but the difference isn't as pronounced, and the Wii could push even more polygons and better textures than the Gamecube since it was more powerful in every way than the cube.

Not that many games really took advantage of what the 3DS could really do. Capcom's Resident Evil and Monster Hunter games, Kid Icarus Uprising, Mario 3D Land, Metal Gear Solid 3, Dragon Quest 8 and the fighting game trio of Smash Bros. Super Street Fighter 4, and Dead or Alive Dimensions are the only games that come to mind as really pushing the system and showing off its strengths. Resident Evil Revelations in particular is so advanced that it's hard to see it running on the Wii and especially the Gamecube without significant downgrades to its shaders. One thing I'm not sure of is whether the 3d effect ate graphical resources that could have gone to things like polygons and textures. I know there were games where it hurt the framerate or resulted in anti-aliasing being turned off.

What we see in Gamecube ports to the 3ds is interesting. Luigi's mansion has small downgrades from the original, and the Melee levels in Smash 4 are basically 100% conversions. Both were launch window Gamecube games, so not the biggest hardware pushers, while the 3ds versions launched later in the system's life and seem to be among the most advanced games on the system. I'd say that the 3DS at its best could push what you'd expect from a very early Gamecube title, but that would include Rogue Leader, which was very much a hardware pusher and probably far beyond what the 3DS could handle.

The New 3DS had one major flaw that held it back - they didn't improve the GPU performance at all. This meant that older games didn't run any better and was a serious bottleneck on getting the most out of the improved CPU and ram. The CPU allowed for much better performance as well as more enemies on screen in Hyrule Warriors and the ram allowed for better textures in Monster Hunter 4 than the same games for the base model. But very few games take any advantage of those improvements. Xenoblade was in my opinion a bad choice to show off the upgraded system's power because while it was impressive to see such a huge game on the handheld, the 3ds was never meant for games like that and the big environments were wasted on the small screen, Plus it had one of the worst uses of 3D I've seen on the system. Resident Evil Revelations looked as good as it did because it kept the environments small and packed with detail.

Again 3DS used a mobile chip from 2005. So it was not on par with Wii in GPU. It had more ram and better shaders. Much like Switch can not match PS4 power wise but can run some PS4 games with sacrifices.

Sure, if you want to use video footage of Golden Abyss downscaled to 640x360p with washed out colors for comparison...

Here is better footage of it:

GPU, sure. But CPU and Ram?

Also, Switch was never meant to be ps4 portable, it's more like Wii U plus portable.

Or this: https://youtu.be/uGx_cscKUGE

Vita is a Switch Ultra-Lite without Nintendo games.

A mobile CPU that's older than DS let alone 3DS.