A detailed look at the until now mysterious innards of the Wii U suggests that Nintendo’s machine will be eclipsed by the upcoming PS4 and Xbox 720.
The tech heads at Digital Foundry have examined the results of a detailed teardown of the Wii U hardware. The result is a machine that “is in a completely different league†to the upcoming hardware from Sony and Microsoft.
Indeed, the site goes as far as to say that the results “finally rule out any next-gen pretensions for the Wii Uâ€.
It adds that while Wii U out-specs current machines like the Xbox 360 in some respects (it has 1.5x the “raw shader powerâ€, apparently), it foresees few titles being able to squeeze out complex 3D processing in 1080p.
Also examined is the fact that multiplatform titles such as Call of Duty: Black Ops II tend to run worse on Wii U than the likes of Xbox 360, despite the seeming power advantage enjoyed by Nintendo’s console.
DF reckons Wii U’s 1.2GHz CPU is the likely culprit, which itself is a re-working of a chip seen in the Wii – which itself was an overclocked version of a GameCube processor!