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Monday, March 5, 2012

Wii U Q&A: The Wii U to support 2560x1600 resolution?

The question I will answer today is "What is the Wii U's graphics card and what resolution will it support?  Also, I have read some articles saying that the Wii U will be underpowered compared to the Xbox 720 and PS4 and won't support as high of resolution as them, is this true," by anonymous.  The following is my answer.

AMD has confirmed that the Wii U is going to use a custom-designed Radeon HD similar to the Radeon R700 architecture. Some places such as IGN have said that the type of Radeon R700 that it's going to use is most like that of the Radeon HD 4850 (I believe it is most likely that the Wii U's version is on par or more powerful).  Assuming that this is true, I googled the Radeon HD 4850 and found its official specification page.  As you can see in the image below the Radeon HD 4850 supports 2560x1600 resolution also known as WQXGA.
 




That is 4,096,000 pixels which is more than 1.9 times higher resolution then full HD (1920×1080). It is even higher than 2K resolution. So when someone tells you that the Wii U is underpowered, that is not true (here's a good article comparing the Radeon HD 4850 and the HD Radeon 6670 [the Xbox 720's rumored graphics card]). Recently some people have gotten it into their minds that the Xbox 720 and PS4 will support higher resolutions than the Wii U, but it is most likely not true; one reason is that there are hardly any TVs that support 2560x1600 resolution.

5 comments:

  1. Those specs are the highest resolution the card will support, does not mean you can play the latest game on that resolution with playable frame rate. This is just silly.

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    1. @Anonymous

      Thank you for giving feedback (even though it's negative), the reason I believe the Wii U will support 2560x1600 at an "playable frame rate" (besides what is listed in the article) is: graphics cards in video game consoles are (most of the time) more powerful then the PC graphics card it was based on. I also do not espect the Wii U to support 2560x1600 at launch, instead I think it will be added a few years after launch, and even then only an unscaled version (like the Xbox 360 and PS3 with 1080p).

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    2. Oops, I meant "even then only an upscaled version (like the Xbox 360 and PS3 with 1080p)." instead of "even then only an unscaled version (like the Xbox 360 and PS3 with 1080p)."

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    3. I would easily have to agree with the previous post. Graphics card and CPU's are made to perform well over expectations for a console, and they do a lot more than a PC could hope to, if it had the same specs, but I dont think the Wii U will be able to play games at that resolution. I'm sure we will be luck if Nintendo can actually get the games to run in 1080p with 30+ fps. PS360 run most of their games at 540p, we would be lucky if Nintendo can double that let alone triple it.

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  2. Only 24 more days until we (hopefule) know for sure.

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