The Wii U is able to stream content wirelessly to the touchscreen GamePad contoller with just a sixtieth of a second latency.
The news comes from the mouth of Michel Ancel, who is working on the colorful 2D platformer Rayman Legends.
The lag has impressed Ancel massively; in fact he calls it a “crazy” achievement.
“It’s crazy because the game is running in full HD [on the television], we are streaming another picture on the GamePad screen, and it’s still 60 frames per second. And the latency on the controller is just 1/60 of a second, so it’s one frame late. It’s crazy, it’s so fast,” Ancel explained to Nintendo Power magazine (thanks Nintendo Everything). “It’s almost instant. That’s why it responds so well. So it can be used as a real game-design thing.”
“This is where Nintendo is really out in front of things,” he continued. “The technology inside the controller is quite a bit more advanced than what people might think. It’s really responsive. The response time is crazy, in fact, and I think the competitors will need some time to [get their solutions] this responsive.”
It’s true most HDTV’s do lag a significant as standard, usually at three to four frames a second though it is possible to get hold of sets with a special “Game mode” that reduces the lag by stopping some of the post-processing utilized in standard TV and cinema.
