Is Nintendo's Wii U truly Powerful?

image taken from nintendo.com.au/wiiu

The Wii U is an upcoming console from Nintendo and is going to be the successor to the insanely popular 2006 console the Wii. The Wii U is a console that I have mixed opinions on so far, but the main question that everyone is asking, is  the console more powerful then current competition such as the PS3 or Xbox 360?

Now the consoles hardware runs on a IBM based Power Architecture-based multi-core processor. Apart form this nothing else has been revealed in detail about this hardware.Nintendo stated that the Wii U supports 1080p graphics and has 2 GB of memory; 1 GB as system memory and the same for game memory. Which is more than 20 times the memory of the Wii. This all sounds impressive however when you put this into perspective the Wii was an extremely dated piece of hardware falling behind the 360 and PS3. 1080p gaming is a standard now and its finally good to see Nintendo supporting this resolution format, however with the RAM built in the system 2GBgb is not that overall impressive. Most Mac’s/PC's today include 4gb of RAM standard on their systems, now as a console I’m not sure if it is going to be as powerful. 

Image from http://au.gamespot.com/new-super-mario-bros-u/

The big draw on this console is the graphics, the card is very brief but been exposed as a “GPU: AMD Radeon High Definition GPGPU”. The above image is from the launch title New Super Mario Bros Wii U. Nintendo have always stated that games should be about fun and not graphics, however in this competitive era of games graphics are considered important.  From the demo videos I have researched and screen shots so far nothing has blown me away in terms of visuals, the games graphics are pretty industry standard from something you would find on a Xbox 360 or PS3. Most PC’s now run off AMD’s graphics so there is hope later on in the consoles life graphics will be mastered on the system and improve but for the time being its nothing too large.

So to conclude I guess only time will tell, its definitely a step up from  the last wii. However with the vague details revealed, is it really as powerful as the 360 or ps3? My opinion so far is that this console will be on par with the xbox 360 in terms of performance and graphics. 

Images from nintendo.com