Wii U "can rule out any next-gen pretentions"

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 U”.

It adds that while Wii U out-specs current machines like the Xbox 360 in some respects (it has 1.5x the raw shader power”, 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!