Earlier this year, at GDC 2012, Epic Games revealed their latest upgrade to the Unreal Engine. The creatively named Unreal Engine 4 isn’t a terribly large leap in technology, but it sports more advanced shaders and better resolution. At the time, there was no word on whether next gen consoles, like the Wii U, will be able to run the new engine.
Today, there is no confirmation on whether or not Wii U will run Unreal Engine 4, but Iwata has addressed the subject in a recent interview. Nintendo global president had this to say on the matter, “I think that the Wii U will be powerful enough to run very high spec games but the architecture is obviously different than other consoles so there is a need to do some tuning if you really want to max out the performance.”
While this is no confirmation, it does affirm that the Wii U is more powerful than some would give it credit. It implies that the Wii U may be able to run Unreal Engine 4, or at least something of similar architecture.
Iwata went on to say that the Wii U has more third party games in development than were shown at E3 this year. The reason the company left them out of their showcase was that they wanted to focus on the games that would be available during the launch window of the new system. These new third party titles will be announced later this year alongside the Wii U’s launch date and price.
