Wii U will be HD, supporting up to 1080p resolution just like Xbox 360 and PS3, but beyond that it’s unclear how powerful the hardware will ultimately be when it ships sometime next year. Nintendo never provides a full breakdown, although the company did say that the form factor is “near final.” While many assumed Wii U would be on par with the current HD consoles, word is coming in from developers that it’s quite a bit more powerful.

Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia commented today, “Some of the developers we spoke to indicated to us that the console will have 50% more processing power compared to the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. This is yet to be confirmed by Nintendo.”

At E3 last week, Nintendo did little to prove this point. During the press conference, footage of Xbox 360 and PS3 titles was used, although the company did show off an impressive tech demo of a bird flying around some trees, and Nintendo also created a very pretty tech demo to represent what a new Zelda might look like.

I got the feeling Nintendo, or anyone for that fact, knew exactly how powerful the final system would turn out. What I did hear is the Wii U can do some impressive things with rendering many different things happening at one time.

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