To conclude this article, we would like to emphasize, once again, that as usual with modern day Nintendo, very little is officially known on the technical side of their new console entry. Therefore, the speculation presented in this article is not to be mistaken with other more factual Beyond3D entries.

Now, having spelt out any doubt of misunderstanding, we can conclude and say that even if Wii U won’t probably be a monster of graphical power in 2012, it’s still something we welcome wholeheartedly here at Beyond3D. This GPU, or GPU U, to use our own codename for it, marks Nintendo entry in the modern era of (almost) fully programmable graphics.

 

As one can see, based on the table of Nintendo consoles over the years, until Wii, Nintendo has always delivered consoles that were offering the best graphical bang for your bucks of any given period they were released. Some people were adamant to believe that the Wii situation was a result of something more encompassing than simply budget and technical matters, a sort of large scale marketing test, and therefore a singularity. Their thesis, quite cogent in itself, was that now Nintendo was back as a market leader, that their Wii bet turned out successful, they would get back to their old ways of providing powerful hardware in their consoles. Handhelds have historically been considered as a different matter, and Nintendo never competed with a graphical edge on that market. So, the proponent of a “Wii singularity” theory in terms of power expected Wii U, Wii successor, to be the equivalent of a hypothetical PS4 and Xbox 1080.

 

Everything we know and hear about Wii U points to that the console is not as powerful as a hypothetical new console may be in 2012 from either Sony or Microsoft So does it mean we’re facing Wii Redux type of scenario? Not at all. Unlike its predecessor, Wii U is an entirely new design and uses, albeit very reasonably, a modern architecture for its GPU. Also, whereas Wii released a year after Xbox 360 and at the same time as the PS3, the Wii U has the stage for itself this time around. Sure, if Sony or Microsoft decide to jump the gun and release their next-generation consoles in late 2012 or early 2013, the graphical power gap between Nintendo and competition will widen once again. But unlike last time around, Nintendo’s console wouldn’t have an entirely ancient and totally different rendering pipeline to offer developers. The GPU U might end up being leagues away from what’s inside PS4 and Xbox 1080 in terms of sheer computational power, same thing with the CPU and the RAM amount, but the Wii U would still be feature-for-feature compliant with the other two (conditioned that no graphics engineering breakthrough happen in the next months). To make an analogy with the PC space, something we said we wouldn’t do earlier, but here we are now, it would be a bit like the difference that exists between the minimum required specs for a game and playing the same game on the biggest gaming rig money can buy. It won’t run the same, it won’t look as good, but the basics are common. Now does that mean all developers will want their engine built around Wii U and then ported up to PS4 and Xbox 1080? No, many of them will not want to accommodate the lower specced console, but unlike the last time around, they won’t have the legitimate excuse that GPU doesn’t support modern shaders

A big round of thanks to AlexV, WillardJuice and AlexG for their input and assistance for the timely release of yet another B3D article!