The big reveal at the E3 games show this year was the Wii U, Nintendo's next-generation gaming system that's set to appear in 2012.
Like the Wii, the Wii U appears to be using modest technology that's affordable today, rather than the state-of-the-art parts that Microsoft and Sony chose for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 over five years ago.
According to Japanese publication Game Watch, powering the graphics in the Wii U is an AMD Radeon HD 4000 series class GPU. Yes, this does mean that the Wii U, which is still a year away from market, is already spec'ed with a GPU that's decidedly last-generation.
Still, despite it being quite old in the PC world, it's still more advanced than Microsoft and Sony current offerings. The ATI GPU in the Xbox 360 and Nvidia GPU in the PS3 are of the DirectX 9 generation and feature Shader Model 3.0.
The Wii's GPU is based off of the RV770 core, which is of DirectX 10.1 generation with Shader Model 4.0.
Nintendo's use of Xbox 360 and PS3 game footage as its own at the E3 keynote may have raised a few eyebrows, but with this GPU, the Wii U should have no problem at least matching the graphical output of the current generation.
