Face-Off: Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 on Wii U

[wraggster]

So let's recap. What we know of the Wii U spec strongly suggests that the new Nintendo machine should be something along the lines of an enhanced Xbox 360. We have a tri-core IBM CPU, an improved, more modern AMD Radeon graphics core, twice as much RAM available to developers and we even see a substantial boost in the volume of fast eDRAM directly attached to the GPU. There are trade-offs in any console design, but the key ingredients suggest that 360 ports should transition across to the new hardware fairly easily. Unfortunately, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 proves that the situation is not quite so straightforward.Based on a visual analysis at least, it seems clear that developer Treyarch thought its best bet in bringing Black Ops 2 to the Wii U was to transplant its existing Xbox 360 work lock, stock and barrel across to the new hardware. In putting together our usual comparison videos and galleries, what struck us was the level of parity between the 360 and Wii U games - aside from gamma issues, we're essentially looking at exactly the same presentation.All of this means that the new version gets the same 880x720 native resolution, with the same sharp upscaling filter employed on the Xbox 360 release. There's even 2x multi-sampling anti-aliasing (MSAA) - the first time we've seen hardware AA deployed in-game on a Wii U title (admittedly, it's early days there).To illustrate how close it is, and how the Wii U version of Black Ops 2 sits within the hierarchy of releases available, we've put together an exhaustive series of comparison videos. Here you'll see Black Ops 2 on Wii U compared with Xbox 360, PS3 and PC versions. We also have our first quad format comparison gallery (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-22-call-of-duty-black-ops-2-quad-format-comparison-gallery) for you to pore over.Our PC and Xbox 360 assets are based on our work on the existing Black Ops 2 Face-Off (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-black-ops-2-face-off), but as Treyarch has released a patch to remove some of the excessive blurring from the PlayStation 3 game, we went back and recaptured that in order to give the most up-to-date comparisons (the original Face-Off has been updated too with the latest video).Pretty much everything we said about the image quality on Xbox 360 in the original Face-Off applies here with the Wii U version - it's a remarkably close conversion, from a visual perspective at least. While the PC game provides the benchmark, Treyarch's upscaling algorithms work just as well as they do on Xbox 360, providing a good, clean presentation - quite remarkable bearing in mind just how extensive the horizontal upscale actually is. Despite the removal of the additional blurring added in the 1.02 patch, both Wii U and 360 are still a class apart from the more compromised PlayStation 3 version. One minor difference concerns v-sync - the Wii U version has no tearing whatsoever, while the PS3 and 360 games occasionally tear right at the top of the screen (this is basically unnoticeable during gameplay though).

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-black-ops-2-wii-u-face-off