An anonymous developer is said to have revealed the Wii U specs to Eurogamer. Besides the technical specifications, the developer said that the Wii U’s power is “comparable” to current generation systems, and “a bit more powerful than that”. They also mentioned that Nintendo originally thought of supporting 4 Wii U GamePads at once. This was later cut down to 2.
Regarding memory, the console is now rumored to have 1 GB of RAM available for games. One of the developers said for their E3 demo, they simply “dumped the whole game into memory and never used the disc”. It was previously rumored that the Wii U would have 1.5 GB of memory. We’ll have to wait and see which is true. The Wii U CPU is still said to have 3 cores running at unknown clock speed. Here is the full specs rundown, according to Eurogamer’s sources:
Reported Wii U specs breakdown:
- 3 core CPU, based on IBM Power PC, clock speed unknown
- 1 GB of RAM
- GPU is based on AMD Radeon 7 series, supports DirectX 10 and shader type 4, has 32 MB embedded eDRAM.
The Wii U GPU is said to be a powerful graphics chip with “more oomph” than the current gen consoles, with a more modern architecture and shader support. Because of the powerful GPU, they expect the Wii U version of current gen games to look better. However, it only supports DirectX 10, which could be the reason we won’t see Unreal Engine 4 on the Wii U, since it requires DirectX 11.
While these Wii U specs sound reasonable and close to what’s expected, we’ve had some bad experiences with news coming from Eurogamer before: they intentionally mislead people with a headline last week, so we’re taking this news with an extra grain of salt. We’ll simply have to wait until the console is released before we know the final hardware specs.
