Mike12Nite

Shin'en has given us some vital information on what the Wii U is truely and effortlessly capable of. If you think about it, what developer really focused on pushing the hardware this year? Of course we have 3d world, pikmin 3 and zelda, but those are highly stylized and most likely not focused on really taking advantage of every bit of the consoles power. 3rd parties are not putting any effort to take advantage of any of the Wii U's newer capabilities in ports, there's been confirmations on neogaf that devs arent using the dsp, they're only using about 10mb of the edram and of course the ps360s cpu' are very different from the Wii Us. fourthstorm on neogaf reported hearing that compute shaders weren't fully usable. With all of this going on for the year and gaming websites like eurogamer nailing the notion that the console is underpowered into every Wii U article, it can really mess with everyone's perception about the system, when in reality we dont know jack about the console.

Shin'en however, for some reason are constantly raving about the console. They seem to be having a breeze making a true next gen game on the system.

Here's what shin'en has confirmed about their upcoming Wii U game Fast Racing Neo:

4-8k textures
Deferred render
Vsync enabled
Cascade filtered soft shadows
Hdr
Tessellation
60fps

Now they haven't come out and told us the resolution, but I dont think shin'en would bother using 4k-8k textures if the resolution was going to be 720p as it wouldn't be as noticable. They didnt bother making nano assault neo 1080p because it didnt make much of a visual difference.  Im going to go ahead and guess this game is also going to be 1080p because they bothered to go with not just 4k but 8k textures too, and they'd likely want it to be as  visable as possible, otherwise 2k textures would be enough.

Now the fact that the Wii U is achiving this in it's second year by a 5 man team speaks volumes about it's power. It would take a pretty decent gaming rig to run something like this game.

Some other interesting things we've heard from devs

Project cars using particle shadows and multi threaded shadow rendering

Two tribes finding a "new" hardware feature in the Wii U that shaves off 100mb of texture memory.

Its so easy to get caught up in the first year of a console, and let the uninformed gaming sites and comment sections drill that overly negative "underpowered" montra into our heads, but if the Wii U can have game that is a defrred render, using 4k-8k textures, with vsync enabled, tessellation and at 60fps, it sounds damned future proof to me, and sounds like shin'en werent talking hot air.

Btw sorry for the sucky writing , im on a phone.