Wii U Review: Nintendo's Latest Is Out the Door

HAHA! I live on the outskirts of London and work in London, Would be interesting to see how accurate they got it xD
Yeah I'm not going to lie, I think the console does have a lot of potential, I don't think it will get left to gather dust as quickly as the Wii was in our house, if anything I'm actually looking forward to getting one now, been looking into videos and reviews for the past couple of days, getting as much info as I can and I have to admit, I really do feel it has potential, I just hope they continue to really push getting good games on it, even cross platform games would be fine, the Wii is the main and only console in the front room and if we can continue to get Call of Duty, Mass Effect etc... on the Wii U then it won't just gather dust like the Wii has.

Will probably pickup Lego City as well, hasn't got a confirmed date yet but is showing as this year so hopefully in time for Christmas!

I do agree I do hope they keep it up, next years line up has to bee a good one, but I'm holding out on Mass Effect because I would like to get the box set with all three in and so far there are only rumours of it coming out on the Wii U, but if it doesn't I'll get ME3 on Wii U as I love the idea of using the gamepad for the menu on ME, and get ME2 on Xbox, I've played through 1 but really haven't had the chance to sit down with the rest, but I've got some time off wouldn't mind getting them on the Wii U.

I think what helps the Wii U is the new online setup they have going for it, I think if they carry on getting that right then the system will really hit off. content wise from the word go I think they have got it right, lets hope the 3rd party support will keep up.

Hey everyone, new to these forums, but saw this discussion, and thought I could add some insight. I was doing research on the next gen AMD GPUs coming out soon, and the article explained that both MS and Sony are looking to use these GPUs in their next systems. AMD will be launching the 8870 and 8850 first before their top of the line 8970 and 8950 GPUs at $269 and $199 respectively. The 8870 will be on par with Nvidia's GTX 680 and the 8850 will match the GTX 670. Since the 7870 is = to the GTX 580 and the 7850 is = to the GTX 570 this sounds reasonable.

MS, and ESPECIALLY Sony, know how much it sucks losing money everytime you sell a console, so I guarantee you they will be cost nutral day one. Most likely the systems will ship at $350 (small storage,) and $399 (More storage,) to keep prices where people will pay. With all of this in mind using the 8850 GPU is extremely viable. I'd assume they'd both pair the GPU with a budget Quad Core CPU (Either from Intel or AMD,) to save money, and hit their goal of NOT losing money.

How does this compare to the Wii U? Well lets break things down. The Xbox 360 GPU is equal to the ATi 3850 in performance. The Wii U is supposedly slightly faster... so lets assume ATi 3870 performance levels except with modern day sharder models. In a modern day GPU this would be about as fast as the AMD 6670 (Technically it's not even that fast, but due to the 6670's memory limitations it'd be close... ish.) The short and skinny of it is you can see the differences looking at charts comparing the GTX 670 to the AMD 6670 (Even the 7750 if you want, but the Wii U is NO WHERE near that level of performance.) Expect the next MS and Sony consoles to command at least 4x the GPU horsepower of the Wii U.

This doesn't mean the Wii U is totally boned however. With the massive install base of the 360 and PS3 there's NO WAY Publishers are going to drop those consoles anytime soon. Call of Duty will not release only on a new console. They'd lose millions in sales, and billions of dollars, until the next gen install base is high enough then they'll drop previous systems. Also, next gen consoles want to deliver 1080P gaming. Lets face it almost NO 360 or PS3 games actually run at 1080P resolution. Most games run at 1024x576 or 1280x720, and usually at ONLY 30 Frames Per Second. The next gen will focus on making sure all games run at actual 1080P Res, and 60 Frames Per Second (Basically what PC gamers enjoy today.) This means the Wii U should be able to run those same games, but at lower resolutions 576P or 720P, and lower framerate 30FPS. The only issue with the Wii U is the lack of RAM. The Nextbox and PS4 will probably opt for DDR3 RAM due to the cheap price (keeps them in budget,) and it makes NO SENSE at all not to toss in 8GB as it costs consumers (you and I,) about $30 now, and they'll get it even cheaper. Post Windows 8 all MS OS's will be 64bit only, and the rest or the world will have to deal with it, so most likely the next consoles will be x64.

Obviously all of this is conjecture at this point, but all signs point to this direction. It makes sense for the publishers, as all systems are viable, just MS and Sony will produce a better looking/running game.

It's not about the RAM though that doesn't matter in a games console, if you put 8GB of RAM in a games console what does that achieve other than a really fast OS that won't use anymore than 1-2GB of RAM if that for it's standard features of the 8GB you have crammed into it, the gaming memory if 8GB or more would exceed the £300 mark for GPU alone costing roughly £800 to produce an 6GB GDDR5 GPU, so they are either going to be 1GB GDDR5 or 2GB GDDR5 nothing more, system RAM in a games console will not affect the gaming side of the system so development of a x64 OS for a games console is pointless expense and added development time to the dev's, trust me Sony is the only company who might pull a silly move like that to use it as a selling feature, the Xbox brand doesn't use standard windows based os as they use PPC CPU's that are incompatible with the same memory settings.

Next year it will be all bout the GPU performance and how well they perform an seeing as the Wii U uses a 1GB GDDR5 graphics GPGPU then I believe that the system will hold it's own, there will be a difference between all the systems as much as the PS3 and Xbox 360 are now.

Think what they have achieved with Halo 4 look how good that looks on a system that has max graphics memory of 256MB think what you can do with the WiiU's newer faster GPGPU and with 768MB of additional graphics memory and out of order CPU.

While Halo 4 looked pretty good, it's obviously memory limited. Low resolution, low texture res, low framerate. More System RAM and GPU memory is required to raise all of those areas. Although, I agree 8GB in a console at the moment may seem excessive, but you have to realize these things have to last 5-8 years (and MS/Sony would much prefer 8 if possible.) Games on PC are already being 64 bit optimized (Says it right on the back of Dishonored.) Since the industry is heading towards 64 bit over the next few years it makes sense for both companies to take advantage of that for minimal cost. 4GB RAM costs you and I around $20, and 8GB around $35. Even if the price increase is the same for Sony and MS (doubt that, but let's go with numbers we have,) the industry is looking to make use of 8GB systems already... I think they'd side with futureproofing and spend a few extra bucks. CPU side is where they can slack. Even a low-end QuadCore will be able to handle pretty much anything over the next 5 years or so (hell a Q6600 with a minor OC to 3Ghz still works great today.) That's where they'll find most of their savings, and invest heavy in the GPU. Next round of consoles (the next NEXT gen,) will be something interesting as 4K TVs will be come the standard, and pushing those resolutions will be interesting to say the least.

In a PC you need more system memory in a games console you need more GDDR, system memory is not dumped into games on a games consoles it might be only $20 for 4GB of RAM but times that by however many units you need to shift and at either break even or profit margin it becomes an expensive waist, the most your going to see in the next Sony and MS iterations will be 2GB of system memory, while I agree with the lower res yes this is true but the Wii U exceeds the Xboxes 256MB by 768MB of GDDR5, if the next Sony or Xbox product exceed more than 2GB of GDDR5 then expect either a console sold at a loss or a console with much less CPU and GPU power than expected, 3GB GDDR5 cards can be in the region of £390-£450 and the 6GB GDDR5 monsters out there are nearly £600, Sony must have learned their lesson by now I highly doubt they will exceed that price point or want to sell at a heavy loss again.