How big is the power gap between Wii U and PS3/360?

Zee-Row

Banned
Looking at Zelda for Wii U , it just looks so beautiful and to me beyond what the PS3 and 360 can do. I also think that a game like Smash Bros Wii U wouldn't run on the PS3 and 360 without framerate issues.

I remember people on here saying that the Wii U has more RAM than the PS3 and 360 but its clocked much slower that it doesn't really help it as much, but was that really true now with the games we see coming out for the Wii U?
 
I think you're just caught up in the hype. I don't see anything from that reveal that couldn't be done on 360/PS3. Sure it has decent art direction but from the limited footage we've seen it's not a technical marvel.

"WOW I can go to those mountains?!!"
 
I think the Wii U is significantly more powerful. I always thought people overrated 7th gen game graphics. Everytime someone says game x looks good it just looks okay to me. And at the same time everything Nintendo on the Wii U is stunning.
 

Alchemy

Member
I believe the biggest advantage the Wii U has is in GPU architecture being more modern, and having (significantly) more RAM. Outside of those I believe the raw horsepower of the system is comparable to the PS3/360. Nothing on the Wii U yet (even Mario Kart 8) looks like a generational leap graphically.
 

kiri

Member
I am sure there are other threads detailing this topic if OP searches. Probably on the diecast thread will have some basic info at least. I don't know if this really warranted a thread.
 

Fularu

Banned
Judging from everything I've seen they're on pretty even footing.

The 360 and PS3 can't hold a candle to the WiiU as far as textures and shaders go (a lot more ram and a much more modern GPU will do that). Still, the system has hardly been pushed (beeing 18 months old) and probably never will be.
 

Huff

Banned
hard to tell based on some slight differences. pretty easy to see its not in the same league of the ps4/x0
 

BakedYams

Slayer of Combofiends
Unique art styles have a lasting effect on the eyes. It'll look like eye candy since practically a few popular games use 3-D modeling with barely any work on colors.
 

SFenton

Member
Okay maybe "significantly" was a knee-jerk reaction to all of the Wii U skeptics but I still think there's no question Wii U games are more technically impressive than PS3/360 games.

Some of them, but on the whole, no. And that's a side effect of developers not caring as much about it, but I'm pretty sure CoD (while at a higher res than 360/PS3) and AC, huge franchises on all systems, run the worst on Wii U.

The only standout, absolutely better between all three systems game I can think of is NFS.
 

Zee-Row

Banned
How easy is it to make games for Wii U? Does it have any bottlenecks that keep it from being popular with 3rd parties?
 
I think you're just caught up in the hype. I don't see anything from that reveal that couldn't be done on 360/PS3. Sure it has decent art direction but from the limited footage we've seen it's not a technical marvel.

"WOW I can go to those mountains?!!"

Art style with "good enough tech" is better than pure tech with just going for the realistic approach. Nintendo showed a perfect example of this with Zelda U, it looks so damn impressive compared to the parity look of the PS4/XBOX One games this year, but yes it is of course more powerful overall than the 7th gen consoles.
 

npa189

Member
Haven't the Metro 2033/LL guys said the CPU is garbage? Wasn't LL going to be on Wii U at one point? From my very primitive understanding it is a GCN cpu with 3 cores clocked at 1.3ghz. RAM and GPU can only do so much, but it is probably better than the 360.
 

meanspartan

Member
Like an Xbox 360 but with 2gb of ram instead of just 512mb.

So with four times the Ram, it will probably be able to do more than last gen, but still well behind current gen.
 

HUELEN10

Member
The answer that matters is simply this: It's more than powerful enough to be called an 8th gen console not only by release time, but by its first-party content.

The real answer? With Nintendo's secrecy in spec documentation since at least Wii days, we will never truly know for sure.
 

Hubble

Member
Beautiful art style can shadow hardware. Just look at Sunset Overdrive, that game looks beautiful as well. It's just that for some reason too many PS/360 games lack art style and are bland.
 
Nintendo doesn't push for 1080p like a large portion of other devs for a start.

That's because it's hard to do on the U.

Okay maybe "significantly" was a knee-jerk reaction to all of the Wii U skeptics but I still think there's no question Wii U games are more technically impressive than PS3/360 games.

It's hard to define those types of things. For example, we've seen no games on the Wii U that compare to Uncharted 2/3, or GTA5. Now that's mostly because no one is funding projects that would push the hardware to those levels.

So I really don't see anything on a technical level that shows it's more powerful, but just based on the specs we know it is when weighing all factors.

How easy is it to make games for Wii U? Does it have any bottlenecks that keep it from being popular with 3rd parties?

It's biggest bottleneck is the lackluster sales.
 
Look at bayo 1 vs bayo 2.... WiiU is more powerful in different aspects. But one thing to keep in mind is the wii u is doing more earlier than the 360 and ps3.. it ran late gen ports not built for the system fairly well and sometimes better.

It isnt a huge performance increase but like I said it is better in different ways.

Most first party games on the e3 show floor ran at a liquid smooth 60fps without frame drops. The 360 or ps3 never did that consistently or with vsync on.
 

SJRB

Gold Member
Okay maybe "significantly" was a knee-jerk reaction to all of the Wii U skeptics but I still think there's no question Wii U games are more technically impressive than PS3/360 games.

Okay, so on a technical level explain to me the difference.
 

Cuburt

Member
I lol at how people debated how much more powerful the PS3 was/weaker the 360 was for 6 years and then the Wii U comes out and it's "as powerful" as both of them. Some people want the idea to stick so bad that it's more of a slightly suped up last-gen console rather than a weaker current-gen console that they try to put it on par with the 360.

The question should be how much more powerful is the Xbox One really if it can't pull of 1080p like the PS4? That seems to be the metric people want to use for next-gen now.
 

meanspartan

Member
I lol at how people debated how much more powerful the PS3 was/weaker the 360 was for 6 years and then the Wii U comes out and it's "as powerful" as both of them. Some people want the idea to stick so bad that it's more of a slightly suped up last-gen console rather than a weaker current-gen console.

Not to derail, but was this ever in question? Simple really, 360 had better multiplats (though Ps3 improved as time went on) because it was easier to make games for it. Ps3 had the annoying Cell. Annoying, but powerful- first party studios learned it well apparently. Nothing on Xbox 360 looks as good as Last of Us or God of War 3, at least to my eyes. Hell, outside of resolution, I think God of War 3 holds its own even against some current gen games.
 
The WiiU is definitely a bit stronger.


Based on what?


Need for speed most wanted , rayman legends, bayo 2 , mario kart 8, super mario 3d world, project cars....Anything built on the Wii U from the ground up looks and runs very well in comparison.

60 fps with vsync on without drops om most all first party games... 360 and ps3 never had this many games that ran so smooth at 60fps... most games werent even native 720p / 1080p outside of a handful of titles.
 

Cuburt

Member
Not to derail, but was this ever in question? Simple really, 360 had better multiplats (though Ps3 improved as time went on) because it was easier to make games for it. Ps3 had the annoying Cell. Annoying, but powerful. First party studios learned it well apparently. Nothing on Xbox 360 looks as good as Last of Us or God of War 3, at least to my eyes. Hell, outside of resolution, I think God of War 3 holds its own even against some current gen games.

I took the consensus of many to be that the power of the Cell only mattered for exclusives and that the poor performance of many PS3 ports (especially early in it's lifecyle) made the difference a moot point. It was all about multiplatform performance, which is why people now are having field days with the difference between the 1080p PS4 versions and the 900p/720p(?) versions of the Xbox One.

Plus the smaller amount of RAM that the PS3 had gave it certain disadvantages that made the debate more plausible.
 
Haven't the Metro 2033/LL guys said the CPU is garbage? Wasn't LL going to be on Wii U at one point? From my very primitive understanding it is a GCN cpu with 3 cores clocked at 1.3ghz. RAM and GPU can only do so much, but it is probably better than the 360.

I believe the CPU is identical to the Xbox 360. It is a tri-core IBM CPU, it was downclocked from the original 3.2 ghz. But I think they upclocked that back to stock speeds in an update. So just like an Xbox 360 CPU just with more eDRAM (32MB compared to Xbox 360's 10MB).
 

Renekton

Member
Let's focus on the Expresso CPU. CPU seems to be the sticking point since the GPU (Radeon HD6000 class) and RAM (2GB) are obviously better than PS360. But what about the CPU?

- Three cores at 1.243125 GHz
- Symmetric multiprocessing
- Each core can output up to 3 instructions per clock
- 32-bit integer unit
- 64-bit floating-point
- 3MB L2 cache
- L1: Core 0: 512 KB, core 1: 2 MB, core 2: 512 KB
- 4 stage pipeline
- 5 Execution Units per core (15 EUs total)

I believe the CPU is identical to the Xbox 360. It is a tri-core IBM CPU, it was downclocked from the original 3.2 ghz. But I think they upclocked that back to stock speeds in an update. So just like an Xbox 360 CPU just with more eDRAM (32MB compared to Xbox 360's 10MB).
Apparently they are very different. X360 xenon is three Cell PPE, while Broadway is a custom based on PPC7.
 

FyreWulff

Member
It has twice the RAM and a much larger Blu Ray disk than the 360, which made a lot of games have lower quality assets just so they could fit on DVD. That's going to make a difference on it's own, let alone the more modern GPU.

See also: Most Wanted devs simply checked the 'PC textures' option in their engine for the Wii U version.
 

Tain

Member
I'm really hoping we get a detailed breakdown of Bayonetta 360 vs Wii U. Not that it would answer anything definitively, but I'm still very curious to see if there are any trade-offs. I'm assuming the Wii U is notably more powerful overall, but maybe not in every single area.
 
I think the Wii U is significantly more powerful. I always thought people overrated 7th gen game graphics. Everytime someone says game x looks good it just looks okay to me. And at the same time everything Nintendo on the Wii U is stunning.

Everything Nintendo on the Wii U is "stunning"? And everything on the PS3/360 is "just okay"?

Well, I don't know what to say. You must just like the look of Nintendo games.

Some Wii U games look great (MK8) and others look pretty middle of the road (NSMBU) to me. I think it does have a bit more power under the hood than the PS3/360 which especially shows in the IQ and lighting.
 
Not to derail, but was this ever in question? Simple really, 360 had better multiplats (though Ps3 improved as time went on) because it was easier to make games for it. Ps3 had the annoying Cell. Annoying, but powerful- first party studios learned it well apparently. Nothing on Xbox 360 looks as good as Last of Us or God of War 3, at least to my eyes. Hell, outside of resolution, I think God of War 3 holds its own even against some current gen games.

Side note but I'm a huge fan of The Last of Us but I think it's a game that tried to do too much with the hardware it was on and suffered for it. Personally, I think some parts of that game are down right ugly.
 
Need for speed most wanted , rayman legends, bayo 2 , mario kart 8, super mario 3d world, project cars....Anything built on the Wii U from the ground up looks and runs very well in comparison.

60 fps with vsync on without drops om most all first party games... 360 and ps3 never had this many games that ran so smooth at 60fps... most games werent even native 720p / 1080p outside of a handful of titles.

This will never be true no matter how many times it's said

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241

Most games on both consoles are 720p. Yes, both did have a decent number of sub-HD games, but they weren't the majority. Most of them came at the beginning of the consoles when developers didn't understand how to use them and at the end when both consoles were being pushed to their limits.
 
60 fps with vsync on without drops om most all first party games... 360 and ps3 never had this many games that ran so smooth at 60fps... most games werent even native 720p / 1080p outside of a handful of titles.

That is completely inaccurate. Most games on PS3/360 were native 720p. The games that weren't were the exception to that rule.
 

Mine01

Member
This will never be true no matter how many times it's said

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241

Most games on both consoles are 720p. Yes, both did have a decent number of sub-HD games, but they weren't the majority. Most of them came at the beginning of the consoles when developers didn't understand how to use them and at the end when both consoles were being pushed to their limits.

what about 60 fps?

anyway, the size difference between a 360 and a wii u is hugeeeeee, im more impressed that the wii u is on par/slighly better than a 360 at that size.
 

garbagejuicer

Neo Member
Haven't the Metro 2033/LL guys said the CPU is garbage? Wasn't LL going to be on Wii U at one point? From my very primitive understanding it is a GCN cpu with 3 cores clocked at 1.3ghz. RAM and GPU can only do so much, but it is probably better than the 360.


GCN is a GPU architecture, but the wii u afaik is based on the hd 4000 series which is a couple generations newer than 360. Also again afaik the CPU is a quad core IBM similar in design to the wii. Clock rate only tells part of the story. If my facts are wrong I apologize in advance.
 

SmokeMaxX

Member
Not sure how updated this thread is, but a good reference for resolution/frame rates of WiiU games: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=736354

The fact that the WiiU is running 1080p/60fps games means that some developers should go back to basics and figure out how to optimize their games so they don't run like shit. No reason games should be shipped with unstable frame rates or shitty resolutions if the games don't demand it.

what about 60 fps?

anyway, the size difference between a 360 and a wii u is hugeeeeee, im more impressed that the wii u is on par/slighly better than a 360 at that size.
If you think that's impressive, you should check out the power draw of the WiiU compared to the 360/PS3/XBONE/PS4.
 
It has twice the RAM and a much larger Blu Ray disk than the 360, which made a lot of games have lower quality assets just so they could fit on DVD. That's going to make a difference on it's own, let alone the more modern GPU.

See also: Most Wanted devs simply checked the 'PC textures' option in their engine for the Wii U version.
Lol I never even knew Wii U used bluray till this post!

Learn something new everyday :)
 
Not to derail, but was this ever in question? Simple really, 360 had better multiplats (though Ps3 improved as time went on) because it was easier to make games for it. Ps3 had the annoying Cell. Annoying, but powerful- first party studios learned it well apparently. Nothing on Xbox 360 looks as good as Last of Us or God of War 3, at least to my eyes. Hell, outside of resolution, I think God of War 3 holds its own even against some current gen games.

That's the point I think. A lot of people have no issues admitting the PS3 is more powerful than than the 360 based on just specs, but almost everyone doesn't want to give credit to the Wii U even though it has considerably more RAM and a much more modern and powerful GPU. Some people just lump it with the previous Gen but have no issues separating the PS3 and 360.
 
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