I tried to explain this back in October 2015 to a lot of you guys but it went on deaf ears. Two unrelated sources reported the same type of impressive Tech Demo running on early NX SDK. One of the sources of course more credible than the other with the WSJ being more trusted, but both matching and with Nintendo Forums reporting it 1 day before I confirmed with the WSJ. That was definitely an "OMG...just got real" moment.
I read Nintendoforums' rumor back then, and i was actually ready to believe it (or at least, not to immediately dismiss it) but there was a statement that made it sound like he was making it up, and it was the bolded:
Specifically, one software demo included with the kit crunches so many polygons that it's currently impossible to run at 60fps using a current-generation Intel (we're assuming a Core i7 Skylake) CPU and a nearly top-of-the-line graphics card (no specifics provided, but they probably used a single graphics card).
Saying a core i7 Skylake was having troubles running a software demo for a console that we speculated to be based (in the best case scenario) on ARM A57/72 or Puma cores was just laughable, and i stopped paying attention to that rumor, especially because i remembered very well some things i read before the Wii U's reveal.
But now that i read it again, it's a bit different than what i remembered. He says that they're
ASSUMING it's a Skylake i7, non that
IT IS a Skylake i7 that's having these issues. For what we know, it was an i5 4460 or Skylake equivalent (i5 6400?). And the near top of the line GPU, which doesn't mean 980ti or Fury X, could very well be a 970 or a 390.
Now of course a 4460 and a 970/390 are
way, way more powerful than whatever the NX will use, but
it can make sense that a tech demo of a console even in the same ballpark as the Xbox One would cause these troubles AND look fairly impressive for today's standards. Just look at Rise of the Tomb Raider for the PC. That's a game that went through actual development and optimization from a studio to run on current PC hardware. And yes, it's far from being perfectly optimized, it also features some enhancements made for high end PCs, but this is a commercial product, something that was made to be sold to customers. The demo we're talking about here was.. i don't know, an example of what the machine could do? A target render? It certainly wasn't as optimized as a commercial product, so it can make sense that something made for even Xbox One level of hardware, without proper optimization, would have trouble running on far more powerful hardware at 60fps. Software that it's likely to be better optimized than this demo is causing trouble as well. On a side note, there many hints of NX using Vulkan API, and we have benchmarks showing how Vulkan is currently unoptimized (Talos Principle runs better on DX11 than Vulkan).
Now it's impossible to establish if the new console will be more or less powerful than the other two based on this rumor (or others for that matter), and this is definitely not a confirmation of anything of course, but at this point the only thing we have against these reports and the consequent line of thought that the NX will be roughly in the same ballpark as PS4/Xbox One, is ShockingAlberto's laugh, for which we still don't have any context.
Maybe you're right, this guy from nintendoforum and the WSJ guy ("industry leading chips" stuff) had the same or a similar source, and it would be a bit odd if these two heard very similar things, and these things happened to be complete horseshit.
