curl-6 said:
Technically Wii U can stream from hard drive; Xenoblade Chronicles X does this. And since pretty much every multiplat was designed with PS3/360's hardware in mind and the ported (Often by second tier teams) to Wii U's different architecture, it's hardly surprising that performance suffers. Especially when you consider devs had 6-7 years more experience with PS3/360 than with Wii U. And you missed Bayonetta in your list of games that perform better on Wii U. :p |
Not every wii u owner will connect a hard drive and usb 2.0 doesn't match the bandwidth of sata. I installed skyrim on a 360 usb stick and the load times were absolutely terrible compared to the 360's tiny 60gb hard drive.
Your second point is makes no sense. The games that were developed for wii u were often developed by the same teams that developed the ps3 and 360 versions. The processor architecture is the same, powerpc and the radeon graphics well documentated. No matter how much you try to work around it there are only 3 dated 32bit processors in the wii u running at 1.25ghz. This delivers pitiful performance c ompared to even ps3 or 360. Let's not forget either that ps4 and xbone have moved to 64bit processors so their mips rating is based on the ability to process 64bit chunks of data at a time, not always required but where code is optimised to use 64bit every instruction they can process twice as much data, hugely significant. As mips is just a crude benchmark for how many millions of instructions are processed per second it clearly underplays the ps4 and xbone's huge advantage over the older generations 32bit processors.
The reality is many people don't understand graphics enough to determine how much processing is required underneath to generate them and this seems to favour Nintendo who produce very pleasing to look at non-realistic graphics of a cartoon style. However a simple technical check of the console itself, the low performance components, the power hungry older fabrication process but low actual power consumption and of course the very low bandwidth memory chips give clear indication of the wii u's performance level which fits perfectly with what the wii u is actually delivering in gaming performance.
Even Xenoblade X if think about what they deliverd on wii and then think how much better the resources are on wii u, 5x wii cpu performance, 30x wii memory capacity, 15x wii gpu performance etc its no surprise they have managed a 480p to 720p upgrade with much enhanced textures and draw distance.
As for Bayonetta 2 I thought that was a relatively simple on rails hack and slash type game. Not the sort of game that pushes hardware because the gameplay is relatively simple. It's not my sort of game, same as smash bros which is another game I don't play. I played the original Bayonetta a bit on 360 and hated it. However even if this game had absolutely amazing 1080p 60fps graphics on wii u its still not the sort of game that is going to require much in cpu resources surely. I remember the original xbox had some absolutely stunning on rails games for its time that its open world games could not match. Open world games are far more significant in analysing console performance levels as they are hugely more resource hungry.
