So this is a bit of a technical thread but I'll try to explain it in as simple terms as possible.

One of the main issues with the Wii U, especially when it comes to porting games from PC's or other consoles is that the Wii U features a very underpowered CPU. The PowerPC based card is still based on the over a decade old Gamecube architecture. Of course this card features a bunch of new bells and whistles as well as much faster clock speeds and multiple cores, but in essence what we have is a souped up PowerG4. Compare this to the Cell in the PS3 and you'll be able to see that the Wii U's CPU is quite a few times less powerful than the six year old PS3 and even a fair bit less powerful than the 360 CPU which is based on the PowerG5 architecture.

On the other hand the Wii U GPU is modern in design and several times more powerful than the PS3 and 360 GPU's. So what we have is an issue where CPU specific tasks will be extremely limited while GPU specific tasks will be easily handled. Now what if there was a way to make the GPU perform CPU specific tasks, in a sense sacrificing some graphical fidelity to improve, say, physics calculations? Well luckily there is. It's called OpenCL and it's a feature supported by all modern PC graphics cards. The question is, does the Wii U GPU feature something similar? If it did then developers would have a way to port physics heavy games like those running on Frostbite2 or CryEngine3. A good example would be the opening scene in Epic Mickey 2 where the liquid physics drop the framerate down to single digits. If the GPU could perform those tasks then it would take a major load off of the CPU, drastically improving the framerate.

Of course all of these problems would be mitigated if Nintendo had went with an Nvidia graphics card. With built in PhysX support it would be easy to calculate physics on the GPU and for other CPU specific tasks, the Nvidia CUDA system is a hardware accelerated feature that does what OpenCL does just much better. Of course all three console makers seem to have chosen AMD for their next gen systems. What can I say, go for the cheap option and get what you pay for. Okay bitterness over.

Anyways, I was just wondering if the Wii U GPU could do this and if so how difficult it would be to implement it in existing engines.