Not now since the price and constant flow of great games but earlier on they were pretty poor with even the PSP topping it. And my point was that Monster Hunter Tri came to the Wii because PS3 development costs were too high not because the Wii had higher sales. Monster Hunter fans will come to any console if it has Monster Hunter so even on a console with terrible sales Monster Hunter would still sell immensely well. That's Monster Hunter is so important companies like Nintendo and Sony because it gives consoles a massive boost in Japan.

I'm not sure I'm explaining myself completely. HD console development costs being a factor in why Wii got a Monster Hunter isn't something I have argued against. There simply so much more to why Capcom didn't create a Monster Hunter for the PS3 at the time than simply the high developer costs of HD development. It has to do with the market within Japan where Monster Hunter contains majority of its audience. The investment wasn't worth it compared to the market that existed for HD consoles within Japan at that time or now for that matter. Wii had a larger market, it wasn't too difficult to share resources from the PSP, and it represented a lower investment. The Japanese market is far too small today for extensive development on a franchise unless it has some significance in the West.

Not really the 3DS is getting to Monster Hunters despite poor sales. Wii got Monster Hunter solely for cheaper development costs not because of sales. I'm pretty sure it will, Monster Hunter's on PS2, PSP, Wii, 3DS, PS3 and even the Xbox 360 so I think are chances are pretty good. Heck Capcom said they were going to put it on the Nintendo DS but it wasn't powerful enough so they went for PSP.

The 3DS sales haven't been poor. Currently the handheld looks to out pace the first year sales of DS. The thing is regularly the top selling hardware in Japan since the price drop. Nintendo simply didn't push hard enough with the 3DS to maintain momentum at its previous price, but the DS suffered similar handling. Monster Hunter is a Japanese focused franchise. This is why I stated that the only way Wii U would get a Monster Hunter release is if the Wii U sells well in Japan. So much of the Japanese market is handhelds thus why this franchise with most of its focus in Japan has for the most part stuck with handhelds this gen. Monster Hunter for the 3DS is a natural fit for the Japanese Market. Monster Hunter for Wii U not so much. We'll have to see if the new controller helps the console create a market significant enough to warrant Capcom making a Monster Hunter game for the console.

Monster Hunter originally went to the Wii because of the franchise's Japanese market focus. There simply wasn't enough of an audience for the franchise to warrant HD developing costs because primarily the Japanese console market is too small to warrant that sort of investment. Wii U is going to have to over come that issue if Monster Hunter is ever going to grace its library. The touchscreen controller may very well help the console in that regard.

Monster Hunter going to the Wii U depends greatly with how good the Wii U sells in Japan. So much of the Monster Hunter's market is Japanese, which is why when the Japanese market moving toward handhelds instead of consoles the series moved to being a handheld focused franchise. Wii got a version of Monster Hunter partly because of its sells compared to PS3 and it represented far less of an investment for Capcom. The Wii U's presence in the Japanese Market is going to have to be significant for this franchise to ever see a console launch.

Hopefully not to close

So far to my knowledge the only limitation is that you more or less have to be in the same room, but otherwise you don't have to be too close to the console

It was developed mostly on Wii so even if they did upscale graphics how would they make larger worlds or many different Pikmin then previously intended? If they add a new Pikmin then originally planned then they have to reimagine everything to put those pikmin to use in puzzles & combat. The maps won't that huge or they once again have to start from scratch. If they did a complete HD makeover with all the extra stuff then it would take a few more years. So don't expect a Pikmin game that would blow you away. At least the graphics will look nice

This is Nintendo we're talking about. Many of Nintendo's developers especially Shigeru Miyamoto will throw out a game and start over if ideas and concepts added don't mesh with work already done. It wouldn't surprise me if development changed greatly after the decision to move the title from the Wii to the Wii U was decided. Pikmin 3 itself likely switched consoles during development when ideas and concepts the devs wanted to try couldn't be done on the Wii. Its not entirely impossible that because of the switch to Wii U that not only will there be more Pikmin on screen than was possible with Wii, but improved graphics and new concepts than were originally done for the title before switching platforms.

Hard drive's seems to be the best choice. One, it's very reliable. Two, you can transfer data between one hard drive, to another.
I think Nintendo should go for the hard drive this time around, if they use an SD card, I will be highly upset.

I think they should make two models, in both $300 and $350 form. (Or $350 and $400 form, whichever.)

The $300 form will have no Hard Drive (however, you can purchase one at a later time if you should want to) and will use external memory to save.
The $350 form will have a Hard Drive (The amount of gigs is TBD) and can also use external memory to save, and you can transfer data from the Hard Drive to the external memory card.

Just my two cents on it anyway.

The reason that Nintendo isn't using an internal hard drive is that they simply aren't reliable enough as well as the extra costs that an internal hard drive adds to a system. Hard drives add more moving parts than Nintendo is comfortable with increasing the likely hood that something breaks. This is primarily why Nintendo likes solid state memory. You will never see a Nintendo console with an internal hard drive. The wide variety of options open currently from SD cards to external hard drives is more than enough storage. For the average consumer 8GBs is more than enough for those who need more at least there will be options to supply that.

firstly i really hope this epicly high power rumour is true, are the quotes definite or possible quotes anyway regarding reasons not to make games for wii u, it seems there should be none untill u realise that the sliders arent clickable like R3 and L3 on ps3. i hate to give bad news but this may make life harder for developers plz someone prove me wrong but i dont know what buttons can replace the click buttons on ps360 controllers. how would you sprint in battlefield

This shouldn't be an issue. The touch screen can handle some functions removing them from face buttons.

Improving the fidelity of the Wii Remote will have to wait until Nintendo releases a new remote for the Wii U. The only way really to my knowledge to increase the fidelity of the Wii Remote after Motion + is to replace the camera within the Wii Remote with a higher quality camera. The technology behind the Wii Remote is quite different than that behind PS Move.

Although I know that (unless something HUGE happened in the industry) Nintendo will never fork over the Metroid license to Crytek...

The prospect makes me tingly inside.

The best thing that could happen for the Metroid franchise is simply for Nintendo to beef-up Retro and hand the franchise back to them. It was the most popular it has ever been in the 3D gens in their hands and its doubtful that anyone else would be able to engage the current fanbase to a higher degree. First I'd rather Retro handle another IP perhaps a full blown Donkey Kong not merely a retro side scroller, but no doubt no one would better revive the Metroid franchise than Retro. Crytek themselves are a poor choice for Metroid anyway. Metroid is so much more than merely a third or first person shooter. Crytek's specialties don't really apply to the creation of a game like Metroid.

If we go according the rumors based on my own estimates Nintendo should be able to manufacture the Wii U even if the chipset is on the high end of the previous rumors for $250-290 dollars US. $299.99 looks to be completely within the realm of possibility even with profit at the beginning. The issue is that some rumors and speculation I've read at Neogaf would mean that the Wii U is going to be noticeable more expensive than the previous GPU rumors would paint it. Still I doubt it will be more expensive than $349.99 US.

This is very exciting news but why do i feel so skeptical about the wii u?? Maybe crytek could be making the next metroid game?? That would be insane!!!!

I highly doubt Nintendo would hand one of its franchises over to a western developer that they themselves don't own. The second coming is more likely to happen tomorrow than Crytek ever producing a metroid game.

Well, no doubt Nintendo are trying to hit a sweet spot, between making the current gen consoles obsolete, thus forcing Sony and MS to bring out new machines, and having a console with enough power so that if the competition does bring out those machines anyway, the Wii U itself does not become obsolete.

With all the hysteria about console wars online right now, it is difficult to predict who will do what, but it is hard to see why Sony and MS would launch their next gen machines now. They can more easily keep in touch with the Wii U by adding more ram and, in the case of the Xbox, a higher capacity disc drive, to their current consoles.

Only time will tell, but we can be sure, whatever the competition do, the Wii U will be relevant for some time to come.

Outside trying to keep the Wii U relatively affordable while remaining within a level of improvement over the current HD consoles that would stop PS4 and Xbox Next from completely overshadowing them I don't think Nintendo cares much what Sony and Microsoft do. Nintendo's strategy going forward still has itself firmly rooted in their blue ocean strategy with the Wii. They'll be competing far more directly with their rivals' systems true, but the focus in on differentiating themselves from Sony and Microsoft and giving unique experiences that don't exist outside their own hardware. This is why 3D was added to the 3DS and why Nintendo is going forward with the tablet controller. The rumored power of the system already makes the PS3 and Xbox 360 obsolete anyway.

This seems relevant.



It says Nintendo Wii vs PS360, but he just made a typo.

This merely goes along with the rumor that the Wii U uses a GPU based on the RV770 series of ATI Radeon GPU. This narrows the expectations down to a specific range, but still were talking about a GPU from about 3 to 5 times as powerful as current HD consoles, but with developers earlier pointing toward the Wii U's GPU being around a Radeon HD 4850 and more recent rumors of it being around a Radeon HD 4870 in power we can at least hope that the Wii U is around 4 to 5 times as powerful as Xbox 360.

Forget the rumors.... lets talk about the my first question. I asked a question which i thought had facts to back it up. we know nintendo made billions off the Wii. so can they not afford to put more up to date tech into their console. i was just posing a question and every nintendo fan on here took it as a personal attack on them. open up your mind people!

This is merely Nintendo creating console hardware based on the same principles that went into the creation of practically every console ever made. Individuals forget or simply don't realize that using the latest tech has never been within the equation of creating console hardware before the Xbox 360 and PS3. The tech behind consoles in the past was old by time the consoles hit the market often by several years. The gap on the age of the technology within a console has steadily decreased since the Nintendo Entertainment System, but still for instance the age of the GPU technology rumored to be used in the Wii U is rather equivalent with what we saw in the previous generation of consoles at launch.

This isn't anything really to be worried about itself neither Sony nor Microsoft are likely to use bleeding edge tech in their consoles though certainly more up to date than Nintendo. How far behind the capability of Nintendo's Wii U is to their competition really depends on what sort of memory they use, clock speeds, amount of customization, ext. Technical issues will greatly limit the capability of consoles this coming generation primarily because of high wattage from chipsets. I certainly expect Sony and Microsoft to have an edge regarding power, but it isn't going to be anything like the Wii in regards to the Xbox 360 or PS3.

From what I gather from Neogaf this rumor from 01net is either completely bogus, an over reaction from some of the earlier dev kits which are known to have several issues, or simply someone not understanding that generally hardware development at this stage is usually clustered and haphazard to begin with. An individual from Neogaf with connection with this issue stated that the latest dev kit fixed the streaming issues with the controllers, so apparently that no longer is an issue.

Firstly the extra 64 megabytes on the wii is buffer memory for the dvd drive and sound. The gamecube only had 16meg of slow buffer memory but it only had to buffer a single layer 1.4GB optical disc. The wii makes use of a full dvd disc so it was increased. The xbox replaces the dvd buffer memory with 768meg of cached hard drive memory for each game. Remember the hard drive itself has some cache memory. So that 64 meg is there because of a lack of hard drive and its still much slower but does mean the wii can load level data continously and doesn't need to pause to load new level data in the same way as the dreamcast for example.

The wii has 24 meg of main memory and 3 meg of video memory. 2meg of video memory is the frame buffer and 1meg for textures. The 2meg limits the resolution of the wii to 480p and the 1meg texture memory creates heavy restrictions on the amount of textures that can be used. Hence why many of the wii's best games are cartoon type graphics due to the texture limitation.

Xbox has 64meg of unified memory of which upto 12meg can be used for graphics. I guess that would be needed for 1080i games. Most games only use about 6meg I believe. 3 meg frame buffer and 3 meg textures I guess. Remember the Xbox has 32bit colour where as wii is only 24bit colour so xbox needs 33% extra memory for the frame buffer.

If you want to believe the wii is more powerful than the original xbox back it up with facts. You haven't made any case at all. Of course the hard drive is important. Maybe you believe the powerpc chip at 720mhz is more powerful than the Celeron at 733mhz in the xbox. Benchmarks proof otherwise. The xbox gpu is much more powerful than the gamecube/wii gpu.

The wii has more memory bandwidth overall but its a very limited console. The soundchip in the xbox was state of the art for the time producing a huge number of channels and with true 5.1 sound, the wii has a 2 channel sound chip.

There is nothing like Half life 2 on the wii. That game on the xbox had a full physics engine. We are certainly going off topic with the discussion but its clear the wii is inferior. Can you think of a single wii game with realistic graphics that is superior on wii to a similar title on xbox? Something like Call of Duty 3 on the wii has lost the excellent 5.1 soundtrack, its lost the 32bit colour range and been downgraded to 24bit colour. Some of the detail in the game is missing to fit into the 24meg memory of the wii. Treyach really went to town with the wii version and it's the wii's most successful first person shooter selling over 2 million copies but its still inferior to the xbox version. Far Cry is far superior to Call of Duty 3 on xbox but it would be unfair to compare Far Cry xbox to Far Cry Wii.

The fact is people assumed the wii was more powerful than xbox because it came out later, the reality is that it isn't. Many xbox games are hugely ambitious and the likes of which have never been seen on the wii due to limited memory and lack of hard drive.

Just to summarise;

Xbox is best for;

GPU
CPU
Memory
hard drive
sound

wii is best for

memory bandwidth

Your still not getting it. Certainly there are some features the Xbox GPU has that the Wii's doesn't, but overall in raw capability the Wii surpasses the overall capabilities of the Xbox. The hard drive on the Xbox isn't capable of acting like RAM. You can load game data onto the hard drive and pull it directly from there, but you still have to run game data through the slower memory bandwidth. It may or may not be faster to load data from the hard drive I'd have to do further research than I think this topic requires. A hard drive hardly has any effect on the capability of a console its a nice feature that's quite welcomed in the case of the PS3 because of the slow Blu-Ray drive, but its not going to magically improve a console's capabilities. Wii is a console only meant for standard definition obviously and fixed function so the feature set of Hollywood and Xbox's GPU is quite different. You again have to understand that regardless of what you may find on the Xbox's GPU in real world situations because of one restraint or another it wasn't considerably more powerful than the Gamecube. Architecture improvements and a higher clock more than makes up the difference. The largest advantage of the Xbox over the Wii your going to find is programmable shaders. Its possible as quoted by devs to reproduce the shader effects of the Xbox, but most don't bother to do so.

Its been considerably more difficult to search up some of those old threads and news releases regarding the capability of the Wii compared to the Xbox than I thought it would be, but still using Google you should be able to find sources that explains why Wii is technically more powerful than Xbox in far more detail than I can. The CPU Broadway is more powerful and regardless of its own limitations Hollywood has several advantages and technically capable of more in regards of real world situations. The Wii simply hasn't been pushed graphically. Majority of third party developers focus more on making Wii games as cheaply as possible since they haven't been historically successful on the console and many developers have admitted to the fact they don't really try to push the console.

Individuals shouldn't worry too much about how Wii U will compare to Xbox 720 or PS4. If these consoles launch a year after Wii U technical issues would keep them from jumping anymore than fifty percent more powerful than Wii U if indeed the console is about equivalent to a Radeon HD 4850. Even if these consoles launch nearly two years after Wii U it would still be impossible to place Wii U in the same situation as the Wii.

How on earth do you consider the Wii noticably more powerful than Xbox? The xbox had high resolution graphics upto 1080i resolution, 32bit colour not 24bit colour, true 5.1 sound, a more advanced gpu, a faster cpu, 64meg of main memory not 24meg plus 3 meg video, a built in hard drive with the ability to cache in extra game data quickly. How are you gauging the Wii has more power than the Xbox? I've got both and the best Xbox graphics easily beat the wii. Games like Soul Caliber II run at 720p on xbox. Some games run at 1080i. Have you actually seen Far Cry on the original xbox? Still a stunning game visually.

The 64MB of unified memory within the Xbox was for everything while the 88MB on Wii is split. The unified memory is superior that's certainly not something I'm arguing, but if you think all that 64MB is for GPU work you need to do more research. On average I doubt Wii has less memory available to the GPU, and at the resolutions used by the Wii it really doesn't matter. Wii's GPU however is superior in some ways to the Xbox while inferior in others. Overall however the Wii is more powerful than the Xbox its not even arguable. The only significant advantage the Xbox had over the Wii is programmable shaders. A hard drive hardly has anything to do with the capabilities of a console so that's a mute point. Developers choosing not to really push the Wii really doesn't make this any less true. I'm gauging the Wii's power based on info that's been found by various sources. You have to realize that in real life applications the Xbox wasn't extremely more powerful than Gamecube and the enhancements to the architecture from Gamecube to Wii as lack luster as the console was surpassed what was actually capable on the Xbox.

We still don't know the final specification of the Wii U. Nintendo don't make a loss on consoles and the Wii U console itself is quite small only marginally bigger than the Wii. I've read comments from developers that have sounded at times its less powerful, the same power or more powerful than 360/PS3.

For example the GPU will more than likely be bottom of the range similar to Xbox 360 and may be underclocked to prevent overheating in the Wii U case but the fact it will be using slightly later technology and have more high speed video memory will give it advantages. One comment I've read is it can use higher resolution textures.

Until we get a final specification we won't really know the power of the console. Remember the Wii was launched well after the original Xbox and yet was far less powerful.

Nintendo were happy to use PS3/360 graphics to showcase the Wii U at E3. You would think if the console was as powerful as modern PCs they would have used PC graphics to showcase Wii U graphics. I think we need to put our realistic hats on.

I do believe Skyrim will be fantastic on Wii U though and as its got to come later to the format it will probably come with many of the bugs already fixed. Bethedsa games always seem to have major issues and require patches. I just hope the patches the Wii U version will need don't fill up the Wii U's flash memory.

Nothing supposedly from developers have placed Wii U at or below current HD consoles. For the most part developers aren't willing to talk about graphical horse power and more than likely Nintendo has told them to say nothing regarding this issue. How the console relates in power to the other HD consoles has been practically a no comment issue. Practically all developers have said is that it is an HD console and that its architecture fits their current business model. Currently by piecing together information regarding current Dev Kits that's leaked it seems because of a heating issue they had to be down clocked because under too large a load the kits crashed. Otherwise the GPU for instance is supposedly from multiple rumors within the range of a Radeon HD 4850. We'll have a better idea of the consoles actual abilities sometime this month once the new Dev Kits get into the hands of developers willing to leak info.

The Wii wasn't far less powerful than the Xbox. In fact it was noticeably more powerful than the Xbox. The only capability Wii lacked was programmable shaders a feature Nintendo at the time really didn't like.

Nintendo apparently used PS3 and Xbox 360 footage because Wii U footage available to them from 3d party developers wasn't noticeably better than the PS3 and Xbox 360 footage. This was Nintendo trying to prevent the issue that occurred to Microsoft when showing early Xbox 360 footage that lead to the belief that Xbox 360 wasn't noticeably more powerful than Xbox. Many of the rumors regarding the GPU should allow Wii U to play any modern PC game at high. Perhaps it would of been smart to showcase some of the latest PC games as an example of what the console is capable of, but it is obvious that their focus was the controller.

Most current information and rumors from developers telling IGN that Radeon HD 4850 was the closest commercially available GPU, the rumors of R700 series GPU, specifically RV700 core, and Power7 based CPU all point to Wii U being at least about four times as powerful as Xbox 360. I certainly wouldn't call it next gen, but it should be able to pull off anything current PC games have accomplished and perhaps a little more with optimized code.

The Wii U likely runs four to five times as hot as the Wii without being any more than 42% larger in volume. The design of the Wii U simply has to accommodate design choices that keep this thing from melting or breaking while in use.

Wow the PS2 only had a 299Mhz processor? That sure is a big jump. However, I don't think you could expect the Wii U processor being 1,000% more powerful with a 30GHz processor, that technology doesn't even exist

There may never be a 30GHz processor. Current trends are leading to numerous small less expensive cores and architecture redesigns that increase performance without increasing clock speed considerably.

Would only 50% more powerful be bad. I think that is good. I don't see the next consoles from Sony or Microsoft to be no more than 75% more powerful. Being that is what the developer is saying only 50% could mean more as developers haven't even tap out the current gens power.

It would be bad for long term third party support. Nintendo would potentially maintain support for the next one to two years it takes PS4 and Xbox Next to release and then they'd potentially lose support depending on Wii U's popularity. Still regardless the success of Wii may lead to Wii U maintaining better support even after Sony and Microsoft's next consoles hit, but Wii U would quickly end up in the same situation as far as support goes depending on what happens even potentially having a shorter lifespan than Wii depending on its popularity. I expect the next Xbox and Playstation to be five times as capable as their current incarnations at least. This would mean lower prices, smaller consoles, and profit earlier than this previous generation if not right away. That's close to the jump earlier rumors placed Wii U. Don't buy into nonsense both Xbox 360 and PS3 have been tapped out as far as raw capability. This is partly a limitation based on RAM, but still even with more RAM you couldn't get much more out of current HD consoles outside the possibility of PS3.

I don't know how they came up with the 50% more powerful figure is basically I don't think its wise to focus on this. For all I know this comes from a report that Nintendo's chipset runs 50% faster like I said or the CPU benchmarks at 350 gflops. At 350 gflops it would only have 50% more processing power than PlayStation 3's cell processor, but around 4x the processing power of Xbox 360's Xenon processor. If the processor is simply a tri or quad core CPU and not some strange architecture like the cell that would also mean roughly four times the general processing capability of current consoles. Then like I said most don't understand tech instead of single precision gflops developers may of given double precision gflops info. A figure of 120 gflops or 144 gflops doesn't look impressive unless you can distinguish whether its single precision gflops or double precision gflops. A figure of 120 gflops or 144 gflops would place Wii U around 50% more powerful than Xbox 360 depending on if you go with the real world benchmark figures or if you use the theoretical figure, but if instead of single precision gflops the figure is double precision gflops those same figures are 2 to 2.5 times as powerful as Xbox 360. An that's merely in double point precision operations we still would have to figure out the single precision gflops of the chip, which could vary greatly based on architecture. As an example Playstation 3's cell at best in real world figures has 15 gflops to a theoretical 17.2 gflops regarding double precision operations compared to the theoretical 230.4 single point precession gflops figure given to same chip.

Nintendo won’t be sharing the technical specifications of the Wii U anytime soon. We’ll have to wait for a full teardown when the console releases for the juicy details. But as a very rough guide, an industry analyst shared that “Some of the developers we spoke to indicated to us that the console will have 50% more processing power compared to the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.”

That sounds pretty decent to me. Developers are still managing to wring more power out of the current systems, so 50% more power is plenty of room for developers to play with.


http://wiiublog.com/the-wii-u-is-50-more-powerful-than-the-xbox-360-and-ps3/

This isn't anything to really pay attention to. How exactly did they come up with that 50% figure. Most individuals don't understand squat about tech or how to judge how capable one chipset is compared to another. For all we know a few developers told them the Wii U has a 50% faster clock speeds. This was more or less expected in any of the predictions of Wii U's hardware and is in no way an indication of the chipsets raw power, but to the uninformed they may think Wii U is only 50% more powerful because of 50% faster clock speeds.

It was only the third-party games, though; the ones like the bird at the hanami (cherry blossom place), the Zelda one, and any first-party games are the ones ran on the Wii U.

There actually weren't any first party games for the Wii U this E3. Battle Mii, Chase Mii, Super Mario Mii, ext were merely prove of concept demos for the functions of the controller not actual games or prototypes of games in production.