Face-Off: Mass Effect 3 Special Edition on Wii U

Over the last six years, developers have sought to find balance in their cross-platform development, weighing up the pluses and minuses of the PS3 and Xbox 360 and looking to strike a good balance between the two. Microsoft concentrates on a stronger graphics core while Sony has put its efforts into an advanced CPU, but on a general level most games these days work out pretty well overall on both machines. With Wii U, the balance in processing power shifts again: Nintendo has beefed up the graphics core beyond current-gen standards, but all the evidence points to a weaker CPU.Bearing in mind the decisions the platform holder has made with the design of the Wii U, can the hardware handle Unreal Engine 3 - a middleware designed with the older HD console trade-offs very much in mind? There've been a number of alarming screenshots and video of the Wii U version of UE3 Batman: Arkham City, showing clear and obvious graphical drawbacks on the new Nintendo system - most notably low resolution shadowmaps. Numerous theories are circulating on why this may be an issue but the most plausible explanation involves the way Wii U memory is set-up. There's an enviable 1GB of RAM available for games applications (up from the 512MB found in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3), but it's significantly slower than the throughput of the GDDR3 found in the Microsoft console.To mitigate the issue, the Wii U has 32MB of ultra-fast onboard eDRAM integrated into the AMD graphics core and the new hardware almost certainly renders out directly from that. We're not yet clear on how texture fetching works on the new console but conceivably the challenge becomes a matter of importing assets from the main RAM into the GPU eDRAM in an orderly fashion and keeping them contained in that space before exporting the whole framebuffer to the video output. Shadowmaps take up a lot of space which may explain why they have apparently been downscaled on Arkham City. This ties in with why we've yet to see any Wii U title with multi-sampling anti-aliasing - each pass would take up valuable eDRAM [Update: We spoke too soon here as Black Ops 2 appears to feature it]. So where does all of this leave Mass Effect 3 - one of the most visually complex of Unreal Engine 3 titles?Let's answer that immediately by comparing Mass Effect 3 on Wii U with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game in a brace of video head-to-heads, backed by a triple-format gallery.

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