Last week, and quite unlike Nintendo, they revealed some Wii U tech specs during the Japanese Nintendo Direct presentation. Satoru Iwata proudly said that the Wii U will feature 2 GB of RAM, 1 GB for the OS and 1 GB for games. This is about twice as much as current gen consoles have.
Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime recently did an interview with Kotaku, where he touched up on the Wii U specs issue, and whether the Wii U is powerful enough to last for years to come. And Reggie certainly believes it is, despite the next round of consoles from Microsoft and Sony, which are rumored to be very powerful.
Reggie said that the Wii U has two things that the Wii doesn’t: powerful HD graphics, and a robust online system. This, according to him, is enough to attract the best from third party developers, and he gave an example with the upcoming Black Ops 2 on the Wii U. But when he was asked whether the Wii U will be powerful enough to run the newest Call of Duty title in four or five years, Reggie was certain, saying:
“We’ve got a system that, based on our review of the world and our architecture, it absolutely’s gonna hold up and bring the best content from third-party for a long, long time”
Reggie also assured gamers that the Wii U will be fully supported with both third party and first party games, unlike the Wii, which didn’t see much action on the games front in the last year or two of its lifetime (besides Zelda: Skyward Sword, of course).
Finally, Reggie said what we’re all thinking: a console’s performance has “absolutely nothing to do with longevity and support”. He gave the example of the GameCube, which was more powerful than the PlayStation 2, yet it lost the battle.
While the Wii U isn’t the all-powerful next-gen system, it certainly is more powerful than today’s consoles, has a much more modern architecture, more RAM, and supports 25 GB discs. The Wii U is also very power efficient, using only 75W during load, according to Nintendo.
