Digital Foundry: Watch Dogs Wii U

[ICStats]

bonzobanana said:

ICStats said:
Big surprise there...

I could understand having problems like famerate due to CPU issues. Open world games like Watchdogs are CPU heavy, and that's a weakness for Wii U. I don't understand how the graphics could not be improved, like not even bumping up texture detail to use Wii U's extra RAM & GPU power.

I guess the poor port deserves the poor sales, and the poor sales deserve the poor port.

I don't agree withi the poor port sentiment. The wii u is underpowered hardware and we have seen no wii u versions of games at all of cpu intensive multi-platform games that perform well only games with low cpu requirements.

The wii u is a console that needs games designed from the ground up for it. Games that don't have high cpu requirements.

The wii u has 3 32bit underpowered 1.25ghz cpu's and likely a mobility radeon gpu of 176gflops performance. Despite this the gpu still likely outperforms 360/ps3 in many areas but its not  powerful. If your trying to get an open world cpu intensive game engine working on wii u you will likely steal some compute functionality from the gpu in order to assist the weak cpu's. This is likely the reason why the wii u version has poor textures etc. Lets not forget the wii u only has 12.8 GB/s bandwidth from its main memory. Far less than 360 and PS3 and we know this as fact as the ram chips are labelled.

Ubisoft have done their best with very weak hardware. The same can't be said of Nintendo who have tried and failed to sell an incredibly under-powered console at an inflated price. The reason Watchdogs wii u is poor is Nintendo's fault not Ubisoft. 

I really struggle to see how its fair to criticise Ubisoft when they have provided wii u support unlike other publishers. Many wii u owners have completely unrealistic expectations of the performance of the console and are in denial of reality and somehow  it's Ubisoft's fault that they can't produce ps4/xbone quality versions of games on what is basically a weaker console than ps3 and 360 in many areas.

Well if you read, I was saying I can understand if there were CPU issues but not about the graphics.  The GPU is more powerful, and more than that, the Wii U has more RAM to up-rez textures from PS3/360.

I think they just didn't see the value.  The sales are atrocious, and even if they made the game look a little better than PS3 & 360 I doubt it would improve the sales in a significant way.