According to Neogaf, the Wii U has 8 ROPs, 8 TMUs, and 160 shaders, at a clock speed of 550MHz. This is lower numbers on paper than the 360. And members also said they believed there was no secret sauce going on, that the Wii U was flat-out worse than the 360/PS3.
However according to WUF members, at least some of the games far exceed the technical abilities of the 360/PS3.
You'd have to be blinded to say that the Wii U's CPU is no better than the 360's/PS3's. However, it's no Core i7 overall either - is there really a secret sauce to it?
Then you've got the Wii U's special GPU RAM, with the high bandwidth, and I suppose it's possible this is part of the picture. But 360 also had some super fast memory, of a smaller quantity.
Then you've got the idea that Neogaf is actually correct, that there is no secret sauce to the Wii U, and that the Wii U is actually only as powerful, or even less so, than the 360/PS3.
I am not blind. I have seen Mario Kart 8. However, looks can be deceiving - we really don't know how fast something is without seeing benchmark numbers.
Do we believe the multitude of lazy devs that claim the Wii U is slow, or the small number of skilled ones which call it impressive? And which results is your average dev going to see?
I'm not trying to cause a flame-war. It's just that, I have thought about making a video game for the Wii U some day. And the way I see it is, I'm going to find out eventually that the Wii U is pretty slow, or that it's absolutely marvelous hardware wise. But given that a Wii U dev kit costs $3000 last I checked, it's something that is kind of good to know ahead of time.
Edited by Porridge, 23 April 2014 - 09:37 AM.