Wii U will be fine. As long as the shaders are there and the engines can scale down enough to run, it'll be fine. I see no reason for this to not happen.
Plus I'm still expecting the next XBox and Playstation to considerably underwhelm game media people and game forum goers. Jeff Gerstmann at Giant Bomb still expects a "standard" (whatever that means) generational leap, for example. I doubt this very much.
Yeah, pretty much this... I can see PS4 going "~x8" (roughly 6870) in 2014, but unless they are insane and pull another PS3, that will be the absolute ceiling next gen, and likely won't see a lick of difference between x720 and ps4 games even if a 25% increase of performance exists.
But the main thing to remember guys, is that with modern hardware, you can make something that looks like that Zelda tech demo, or the Bird tech demo, something like UC3 or even Gears3... Games will look great next gen, and have that masterful lighting, but most importantly, we will also gain larger games, bigger worlds with more content, because developers will bring their current engines forward, less dev time spent on eye candy, and more spent on game play hours.
I don't know about you, but I own a 360/PS3 and it's very hard to find games that can't be beaten inside 10 hours on those consoles, we need to give developers a chance to bring back those much longer games that we see on Wii, and past generation console.
I've had all of those consoles. My concern is that Nintendo decided (for the right business reasons) to pull out of the hardware wars. I'm not sure to what extent they are committed to jump back in.
They could release WiiU with the same power as PS360 and it would still sell millions and make a ton of cash. It would still have Mario games and Call of Duty to satisfy most users. It would still look good. So why would Ninty go any higher?
For the 1 year that Wii U will be out before x720 and PS4, they have a chance to win back a LOT of hard core gamers that they lost this gen, that is the reason they are really pushing for a Wii U at all. They want those ~10m cod sale numbers on their console, they want that extra 50m users to buy Wii U, in order to pull over hard core users, they will need about 3x the performance of the 360, that however is the baseline, you customize a chip, shrink it and can push the rumored 5x performance from it, that is indeed where Wii U should target, but even at 3x there is absolutely a powerful console there, especially if we see 1.5gb ram or more which was easily the biggest thing holding 360/ps3 back.
I don't know about your list, I think generally, people says Sega 8/16bits hardwares were more powerfull than Nintendo ones.
IMO, the point we need to never forget, is that the most powerfull hardware never wins. Probably because of the release price for starting.
Actually from a mathematical perspective Nintendo's consoles pushed more pixels, they were the stronger boxes of their gen, and Sony's audio hardware in the SNES made it very clear that it could do stuff that Genesis simply could not.
Now, the most interesting thing I read in this thread for a while, is Microsoft next console power. I think the smartest move for Microsoft is to place their hardware a little above Wii U. That way, the future installed base for Wii U+Xbox720 will be unstoppable and the primary objective for 3rd parties. If so, sony will be in great trouble, impossible for them to capitalize on the presumably extra horsepower of the ps4, or if they do likewise Microsoft, presumably late to the party.
Yeah, This is the most important and most overlooked thing about next gen. Microsoft doesn't fear Nintendo, they both have very different agendas, so Microsoft targeting a box that is competitive with Wii U, but stronger, is the most logical step, because there is absolutely nothing that PS4 will do from a media perspective, that X720 couldn't. The living room is microsoft's goal, not simply to sell games to customers, but to sell their services.
