By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - Nintendo - Would it be possible for the Wii U to run Zelda U at 60fps?

curl-6 on 08 January 2015
teigaga said:
curl-6 said:

The CPU generally handles tasks like AI, animation, and physics. From what we've seen so far, Zelda looks much more GPU/Memory bound; a good fit for Wii U's hardware, in other words.

Yeah, from the demo it doesn't look llike much is going on but I'm thinking about the comments about it mirroring the real world. This could simply be day cycle day/night time cycles or it be much deeper with wildlife,  complex AI with scedules etc. I'm just assuming that what we saw in the demo isn't a good representation of the majority of the game because its extremely empty.

Oh I'm sure the game will not be as empty as recent gameplay suggests; the reveal trailer showed goats, farmers, a free-roaming boss, etc.

Wii U's CPU isn't so weak that it can't handle a moderately populated town, for instance. Also, its got a GPGPU, which can pick up the slack by handling some traditionally CPU-assigned tasks.



Around the Network
Materia-Blade on 08 January 2015
sc94597 said:
baloofarsan said:
This question also comes from a place of ignorance:
Are 60fps and 30fps the only options?
Is it possible to lock the framerate at 40fps or 50fps?

Consoles don't support v-sync, from what I recall. You'll have a lot of screen tearing if you run the game on a 30hz/60hz display at anything that isn't an even or half multiple of 60. Basically the 60hz means the screen refreshes 60 times/second. If you have an fps locked at 30 you'll have a frame for every other refresh. Or if your television supports 30hz, you'll have a frame for every refresh. Now if you have say a framerate of 40 fps, every so often you'll have an extra frame that occurs in between two others (rather than there being a frame every other refresh.) This leads to tearing of the image where your eye sees part of the previous and next frame. There are techniques that can accomodate for this in PC gaming, since they can't really lock framerates for all PC's. These are called v-sync, g-sync, etc. For consoles, however, if a game is 40 fps they'll have to accomodate for this tearing some other way, and in many cases they might not be able to without expending more resources which would bring down their framerate to 30fps anyway. So usually developers either lock their game at 30 fps or 60 fps. And if it is 30 fps they provide more graphical features. 

Also for PAL countries, the televisions have refresh rates of 50 hz and the games run at 25 fps, if I recall correctly. All displays tend to support 24hz, because that is the standard for television and movies. 

Thanks for the usefull information. It's been a while since I have the same question as baloofarsan.



TallSilhouette on 08 January 2015

I'm expecting 720p30 for Zelda U. 60fps on an open world title like this would be impressive.



TallSilhouette on 08 January 2015
umegames said:
Nintendo always goes for 60fps over anything else

Wind Waker HD and Pikmin 3 say hi.



Frogger on 08 January 2015
umegames said:
Nintendo always goes for 60fps over anything else


No, they don't. They have plenty of examples of games that run at 30fps, or less.



Around the Network
Goodnightmoon on 08 January 2015
spemanig said:
umegames said:
Nintendo always goes for 60fps over anything else


No, they don't. They have plenty of examples of games that run at 30fps, or less.


On Wii U?
-Mario 3d world
-Captain Toad
-Smash Bros
- Bayonetta 2
- DK Tropical Freeze
-SNMU/SNLU
- Mario Kart 8
- Nintendoland

... And Splatoon, Kirby and Yoshi are 60fps too, so there are... 2 games by Nintendo at 30fps? Plenty of exemples...



Frogger on 08 January 2015

I think that Nintendo getting Zelda U to run at 60fps would be monumental. As far as I know, there has absolutely never been a console game with a world that large running at 60fps.

People like to shrug off MK8 and Smash because it is not atypical to see those kinds of games running at decent frame rates on consoles, but open world games running at 60fps is literally unheard of. On consoles.



Frogger on 08 January 2015
Goodnightmoon said:

On Wii U?
-Mario 3d world
-Captain Toad
-Smash Bros
- Bayonetta 2
- DK Tropical Freeze
-SNMU/SNLU
- Mario Kart 8
- Nintendoland

... And Splatoon, Kirby and Yoshi are 60fps too, so there are... 2 games by Nintendo at 30fps? Plenty of exemples...


The Wii U is one console. You said Nintendo and you said always.



Goodnightmoon on 08 January 2015
spemanig said:
Goodnightmoon said:

On Wii U?
-Mario 3d world
-Captain Toad
-Smash Bros
- Bayonetta 2
- DK Tropical Freeze
-SNMU/SNLU
- Mario Kart 8
- Nintendoland

... And Splatoon, Kirby and Yoshi are 60fps too, so there are... 2 games by Nintendo at 30fps? Plenty of exemples...


The Wii U is one console. You said Nintendo and you said always.

I didn´t say anything, and this thread is about the WiiU so if someone tells you "Nintendo always goes to the 60fps" is talking about Nintendo on WiiU, obviously, and is right, almost every Nintendo game on WiiU, not only looks great, also runs at 60fps.



hsrob on 08 January 2015

It's been stated my numerous people that "Nintendo always go for 60fps", THIS IS NOT ALWAYS TRUE.

Zelda games are usually NOT 60fps, even when other Nintendo games on the same hardware were,  this holds true all the way back to at least N64 days. Nintendo will do what they feel is best for this particular game, for them it's all a matter of priorities.

Not much more than 6 months ago people were saying we would never see 1080p60fps on the WiiU aside from 2D Indy titles. Then we got Smash Bros, because Sakurai felt that resolution impacted gameplay when the screen was zoomed out. Luckily we also got 60fps, but that clearly was at the expense of shader/effects use, which we can see if we compare Smash to Nintendo's other recent first party efforts.

I think it's possible that we will get 1080p30fps if Nintendo decides that image quality/distance visibility has an important impact on the gameplay, but how often is this likely to be an issue?

I think it's possible we will get 720p60fps if Nintendo feels it has a significant impact on the fluidity of the combat in the game, but how much combat is there going to be in the game?

I think it's possible that we could get 1080p60fps if Nintendo wanted to but given the level of visual fidelity displayed so far (compared with Smash for example), I honestly don't think that is the direction they are taking.

I think it's most likely that we will see 720p30fps because I feel with Zelda Nintendo is most likely to prioritise the creation of a rich, seamless, continuous world with little to no loading times, above all else.