Nintendo Wii U To Be 50% Faster Than PS3, X360

The recent E3 shed a lot of light on Nintendo's eighth generation console Wii U. Interestingly, after having faced a lot of grief from gamers about the Wii's lack of grunt, the Japanese videogame veteran may have been reconsidering its gameplay-over-graphics ethos. We already know that the upcoming successor to the Wii will ship with IBM's Power Architecture based 45 nm processor. IBM has also confirmed that the custom-designed CPU will be derived from its Jeopardy-acing Watson supercomputer. The multi-core processor is well complemented by AMD's 4000 series graphics chipset. While a two generation old graphics subsystem may seem outdated, the Wii U's GPU will be a derivative of the Radeon HD4890. When combined with IBM's meaty processor, this GPU will potentially make the Wii U more powerful than the PS3 or the X360.

Game developers with early access to the Wii U have unofficially confirmed this by claiming that Nintendo's upcoming platform will be 50% more powerful than the consoles from Sony and Microsoft. This has spurred analysts across the spectrum to view Nintendo's future console in a positive light. "Some of the developers we spoke to indicated to us that the console will have 50% more processing power compared to the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. This is yet to be confirmed by Nintendo," stated Arvind Bhatia, an analyst at Sterne Agee.

Despite all this, Nintendo doesn't seem too inclined to brag about the Wii U's graphical prowess. Global President, Satoru Iwata, explained in an interview with AllThingsD that the Wii U's hardware prowess is meant to bridge the HD gap that was lacking in the original Wii. "Wii has already achieved very impressive things, but there were two things we were not able to realize: We could not keep up with the hardcore gamers and the Wii original was not compatible with HDTVs. This time around, Wii U is compatible with HDTV, so we now expect the Wii console to be as powerful as any other console", explained Iwata.

Considering the impressive specs of Nintendo's Wii upgrade, Full-HD graphics through its HDMI output will be achieved with consummate ease. The inclusion of an unorthodox controller housing an independent screen is a sign that Nintendo is still committed to gameplay and design innovation over pure graphical muscle. The Japanese gaming major seems to have learnt its lesson with the Wii, which explains why it doesn't want to alienate the hardcore gamers this time around.

However, this strategy will work only if Nintendo can rope in third-party developers willing to channelise the console's grunt into games more amenable to the tastes of hardcore gamers. Read: FPS games. Does that mean we can expect flagship FPS offerings from Activision, Crytek, Epic, and their ilk on the Nintendo as well? Only time will tell.