I also find it bloody frustrating from our perspective, because we saw the bird demo, we can tell that it is a step up from what the PS360 can do, no one believes that it is a giant leap, but we know some things, like you can basically drag and drop 360 code into the original under clocked devkits and the games would run, which means that it has to be more powerful, because writing that close to the hardware, means you are tailoring the game to run on that hardware, it's just not possible for Nintendo's console to only be on par...
Wii U's Hardware that we actually know and how it compares to 360:
Wii U:
Processing node: 32nm (for those who think the box is too small)
Ram: 1GB+
Edram on GPU: 32MB
Shader model:4.1+
GPU processing:1000+ GFlops
CPU: 3 cores, ppc7 based @ ~3ghz
360:
Processing node: 90nm (for comparing sizes of the box to their power potential)
Ram: 512MB
Edram on GPU: 10MB
Shader model: 3.0+
GPU Processing power: 240 Gflops
CPU: 3 cores, ppe based @ 3.2ghz (3 slightly modified cell processors)
We don't know everything, like the clocks for the GPU, or how much over 1GB ram the system has, but we know that the GPU is very custom and that early dev kits used R700 series GPUs, the parts in the Wii U is many years ahead of the current consoles, it isn't going to be a huge leap over what the current consoles can do, but there will be clear differences:
Better lighting: The bird demo has some amazing examples, just watch the bird's underbelly as he flies over the water. (just make sure you are watching the floor version, and not the conference version) The Zelda demo and just what we know about how newer GPUs work, they will show off lighting that is natural that was done only prebaked before, and really is not possible on the current consoles.
Higher res textures: More ram means higher textures, also the large amount of edram on the GPU is very capable of producing higher resolutions than what we saw with the sub hd (in a lot of games) from the current gen.
Newer shader models: This improves a lot of effects, such as shadows.
Tessellation units: We know that the devkit's GPU had a Tessellation unit, but the custom one would likely have a more up to date unit.
I list all this stuff, because everyone coming into this thread to post the doom and gloom just don't know or understand what we have found out in the past 3 threads, Wii U won't be the jump that the industry is looking for, but the likely hood of the PS4 and Xbox3 to hit those goals if launched before the end of 2014, is very small, there is just not a radical change in performance on the horizon, so in the very worst case scenario, Wii U is a little less than half as powerful as the other consoles, that would allow it to still get down ports of every game on those consoles, likely lowering the resolution to 720p from 1080p would be enough to hit it.
