Wii U Reported to Have 50% More Processing Power than PS3

When Nintendo showed off its Wii U last week at E3, its focus seemed to be a lot more obvious on the controller than on the games, and for that reason, few next-gen titles were even unveiled. From what we did see, it was difficult to surmise just how much better the Wii U’s capabilities were over the original Wii, and at the same time, many speculated that it couldn’t even match the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.

According to a report, however, that much is false. An analyst at Sterne Agee, Arvind Bhatia, spoke to a couple of Wii U developers and was told that the console was about 50% more powerful than the PlayStation 3 – a major bump from what the Wii’s processing power looks like. But even with this being the case, it’s hard to be too impressed. The PS3 is nearly five-years old and its graphics capabilities are already lacking in the eyes of many. If Microsoft and Sony come out with another console after the Wii U, the “50% more than PS3” statement is going to seem even less significant.

“It’s about the games, not graphics” is something we may need to remind ourselves of often with the Wii U, though to be fair, nothing was different with the original WIi. In my opinion, 1080p lackluster graphics is a major improvement over 480p lackluster graphics.

According to Jon Stokes at Ars Technica, the Wii U having more power than a PS3 is made even less impressive when you realize that by the middle of the Wii U’s life cycle, a top smartphone will have 50% more computing power than a PS3 as well. At the same time, John Carmack last year mentioned that a PC was about ten times as powerful as the current generation of consoles, a delta that keeps widening even further as time goes on.

As Brett mentioned in an editorial last week, the Wii isn’t so much about kicking ass with graphics as it is getting people together to play games, and for the most part, the original console did a great job of that. Great graphics are not Nintendo’s focus, and as that stands, we should probably be thrilled at the +50% performance mention, because it could have been a lot worse!