Digital Foundry: Hands-on with Bayonetta 2

[curl-6]

fatslob-:O said:

curl-6 said:

The main performance hitch in Wii U games (besides a lack of optimization) doesn't so much seem to be heavy use of shaders as scenes with tons of AI/animations/physics going off at once, which comes back to its lower clocked CPU.

Bayo 2 vs the 360 version of Bayo 1 seems to be a fairly good representation of the two consoles; same resolution/AA setup, but the Wii U's RAM and GPU advantages net it larger and more detailed worlds, and v-sync.

Your underestimating the impact of shading performance ... Almost every effects that you see in games such lighting, shading, ambient occlusion/global illumination, depth of field, and even post process anti aliasing! Hell, some GPUs are smart enough that their capable of ordering the fragments in the UAV's to be able to provide programmable blending through the pixel shader! 

Sure the CPU could be an issue but animations are mostly handled through the vertex shading stage of the GPU and physics can be GPU accelerated so that the CPU doesn't have to worry about that aspect. 

Bayonetta 2's world can be attributed to having more RAM but as for the GPU though there was a clear trade off in framerate in order for that to also happen. 

The CPU still has to run the animation skeletons and AI though. Dips generally correlate with large numbers of NPCs.

And even with bigger and more detailed worlds, higher poly characters, and more elaborate setpieces, Bayo 2 isn't that far off the 360 version of Bayo 1 in framerate, but with none of the rampant screen tearing that plagued the 360. (Which makes sense; a more robust GPU wouldn't have to submit incomplete frames to keep the refresh rate up)