Topic: Wii U touch screen HD

Is the Wii U game pad screen HD like the iPad?
I cant find info about it

It's not HD.
But apparently games still look pretty crisp on it nonetheless.

The resolution is 480p on the GamePads 6,2 inch screen. Same as Wii with component cables.

Not HD.

That kinda sucks I was hoping for a HD quality picture on the tablet
What a shame

It's not really needed though since games will be made for the WiiU hardware, not the GamePad hardware. With an Ipad you need that hardware in the tablet since it's a singular product. The WiiU console streams all the content to the GamePad, so essentially it's the console doing all the work.

If you play a Ps3 on a non-HD TV the games still look great. It's gonna be the same with the GamePad.

According to this http://wiiudaily.com/wii-u-gamepad/ "6.2 inch touch screen with 854 x 480 resolution with stylus support". So it's not HD, but it I think it's alright.

Cheers guys

Cheers guys

The measurement that matters is PPI (pixels per inch). The GamePad has 158PPI, the new iPad has 264PPI and the original iPad and iPad 2 had 132PPI.

This. It's a smaller screen, so it can have a correspondingly smaller res and still look good. There may be problems with some blurring for stuff like text, due to mismatched resolutions (think the 3DS playing DS games) but I wouldn't expect it to be a huge problem.

@Wheels2050
Well I'm sure there won't be much of a problem with resolution mismatch given the games will be designed to work on the GamePad from the start. Ontop of that even if they did run legacy software on the GamePad itself it's a screen with 480 pixels vertically. So for content it already has the entire Wii and Gamecube library running natively at 480p as well as all the software on consoles before if not running at 480 running at a very friendly 240. Very different to scaling 192 vertical pixels to 240....

That's probably true, but it does depend on how the streaming to the gamepad is handled. For example, if a game uses 2D assets (icons, sprites etc) that are intended for a 1080p screen, then they may not scale well to the gamepad screen unless extra, lower-resolution copies of those assets are also included. Simply scaling those assets won't serve to fix the problem.

However, it's really down to the developer - if they put in the work, it will look great. If they don't bother, it'll probably still look fine but may be a bit blurry. Probably not a big deal, but something to be aware of. Keep in mind that, for the older consoles, they weren't necessarily 240 pixels vertically (e.g. the SNES had a variety of vertical resolutions) and so might suffer from scaling/cropping issues on the gamepad (as well as the TV, for that matter).

Scaling down doesn't cause problems assuming you use any fairly reasonable scaling method. It can cause serious jaggies if you do a really, really bad job of it but using the more common scaling method, like the one the 3DS uses, you get results like this when down scaling:

Not bad at all.... especially given the original image was hovering around 4k...

Also every console pre-GC that's likely to appear has already been done in 480 via the Wii VC so there shouldn't be any problem there either.

@skywake: ignores most of the post, lol
I don't care what system, but we need another Yoshi's Island game.

@Erica_Hartmann
Image was one of the only "2D gamey" super high-res images I had that was also Nintendoey. Point is that despite me using a very primitive scaling method I could scale a beautiful high res image to a much, much lower resolution without it looking muddy or horrible. Downscaling doesn't produce the same problems as upscaling......... also it's a very pretty wallpaper.....

I agree that upscaling is worse, but downscaling can also cause problems.

For example, what do you do with a 1-pixel wide line when you downscale? Either you lose it, or it becomes thicker in proportion to the rest of the image.

@Wheels2050
You lose detail sure but what normally happens is it's averaged out giving you something similar to AA. So if you give most scaling methods a one pixel wide black line on a white background scaling it down will give you a 1~2 pixel wide grey line. If you give it a thicker black line you'll end up with a black line with grey edges. With a white line on a black background the effect is the same and the overall impression is very close to the original.

What you're talking about is scaling with little to no processing at all. One which when scaling down three pixels to one picks the middle pixel, first pixel or something similar. With that method, which is pretty much never used for this very reason, the first line example would either give you one black pixel or one white pixel where the line was. It looks "sharp", it's very quick.... but pixels randomly disappear.

Most scaling done on TVs and such is bi-linear which is a compromise between quick and accurate..... and is what I used for the Yoshi's Island image above and explained at the start of this post.

Does that mean that the GamePad screen will look as good as my iPad2? Because that's funking amazing

@Towels
On PPI alone it should be marginally better but there are other things to consider like colour reproduction, pixel response, contrast ratios and such. It's like someone saying that a PC with 2GB of video memory and 8GB of system memory is better for gaming than one with 1GB and 4GB. It means something but it's not everything. The first system might have a significantly less powerful CPU and GPU and you might be playing games in a single monitor setup for example.

Isn't the original 3DS' PPI 132? So roughly the same density as the iPad 2... but yet for the reasons Skywake mentions, it's still an inferior screen.