Mario Kart 8 pushes Wii U to the limit?

[curl-6]

garywood said:

curl-6 said:

If games like Mario Kart 8 and Art of Balance look this great in the Wii U's second year, I can't wait to see what the prettiest third year titles look like, as they get more familiar with the hardware and learn how to squeeze the most out of it.

Art of Balance isn't really in the same league as the AAA games though. It certainly looks nice but it's a very very simple game that has very little computation needed and has only a few objects to render. What pushes systems to the limits is how they manage when it comes to huge open games with many moving parts.

All the best looking games on every system use tradeoffs to get there, like Beyond Two Souls (and to a lesser extent God of War) having an almost totally scripted camera.

Art of Balance on Wii U uses 4k-8k textures, subsurface scattering, physically based shading, 512 samples per light ray, renders the whole scene three times for optimum reflections, runs at 60fps with v-sync, and has 240Hz physics. It technically outdoes anything released on the system so far, including AAA releases.