I wanted to go a little deeper into this article.

Criterion who were the masters of bespoke versions of multiplatform games on individual machines have finally returned to the Nintendo fold after a 10 and a half year absence. It's pretty important and an insightful look for a number of reasons. The main one of course being that these guys did middleware and traditionally have really dug into the guts of a system to see what the best is that they can do.

They said as much recentely about the U version of Most Wanted, that it was important that gamers knew, that it was them developing it and not some outsourced third party. The intent was there from the start.

"Well this is our first game on the hardware. We wanted to go back to like we used to be. If you know we're doing the game, you know we've looked at the hardware and said, 'What's the best damned thing we can do on that?' We're going to support everything we can. We support MiiVerse fully, online play." - Alex Ward, Criterion

So Eurogamers' Digital Foundry did a preview on the Wii U build they saw (link up top) which went in depth with Idries Hamadi, the technical director of the game. The interview and hands on with game threw up answers to a number of important questions:

• Why were the Wii U ports of multiformat games lacking in performance at launch?
• How mature was the toolchain?
• What is the architecture of the system like?
• Is the CPU slow and horrible?
• What about texture implementation and geometry?

For a start let's look at what Digital Foundry had to say about the Most Wanted Port:

"Whatever you may be expecting from the Wii U version of Need for Speed: Most Wanted, we're willing to bet that Criterion is going to surprise you. On a technical level, one of the best cross-platform development teams in the business wants to demonstrate that the controversial Nintendo hardware can match and even exceed the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 image quality while still hitting performance targets. The result is unarguably the one of the most impressive, technologically challenging cross-platform conversions the Wii U has in its roster."

So below starts the technical directors comments, it's interesting because he explains the process of getting the game up and running on Wii U from the very start and the difficulties they faces. It's notable because this is probably the same process many developers faced when porting their 360 games over. It shows that there is an architectural difference and that the toolset was not there and tech support was not there for launch. Many people have been all too quick to assume that U is no more, or even less powerful than PS3/360 but this article and the resulting performance of the game obviously proves otherwise.

Digital Foundrys text will be itallic

"The starting point is always, let's just get some running software and see what it's like - get something that's running and playable. When you start you're at some sort of frame-rate or other... you take out absolutely everything you can that's optional, get something playable, tune what you've got and get that up to an acceptable frame-rate, and then put more and more back in," he reveals.

"The difference with Wii U was that when we first started out, getting the graphics and GPU to run at an acceptable frame-rate was a real struggle. The hardware was always there, it was always capable. Nintendo gave us a lot of support - support which helps people who are doing cross-platform development actually get the GPU running to the kind of rate we've got it at now. We benefited by not quite being there for launch - we got a lot of that support that wasn't there at day one... the tools, everything."

High-end PC textures come to Wii U

The result is unarguably the one of the most impressive, technologically challenging cross-platform conversions the Wii U has in its roster. Owing to the 1GB of RAM available to developers - compared to the 512MB on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 - the Wii U version features the enhanced textures currently found only on the PC version. It sounds like an ambitious addition, but it proved to be no issue for the team.

"There's a switch in our build pipeline that says 'use PC textures' and we flipped that and that was all," Hamadi laughs. "I can take no credit for that, it was literally ten minutes' work... we are using PS3/360 geometry. It's just the textures we upgraded."

This is pretty important for a number or reasons, firstly the next machines from Sony and MS will feature massive memory about 4 times as much as U, which already has 4 times as much as PS3 and 360 so lets see what U can do. The Wii U is said to be a memory optimised system as Genyo Takada (Nintendo's head tech boffin) said. And a couple of developers like Michel Ancel and Shinen have said they could throw huuuuge textures at Wii U unoptimised and it still ran with no problem. We know that U's CPU features a fairly decent chunk of cache and more than expected 35mbs of superfast eDram as the main memory controller MEM1 which juggles information from the slower larger pool of 2gb RAM, MEM2. At the moment Nintendo has only let devs access half the system RAM but they have promised to free up more for the system with firmware updates. So at the moment we are looking at what Criterion can do with 1GB flat of RAM. What's important is just how easy the implementation of PC high resolution textures was, Idries says that they flipped a switch and it was 10 minutes work.

Baseline, this is what we should have expected from all current gen multiplatform ports. Wii U is obviously a machine targeted at 720p. Using console geometry, they have been able to implement high res PC textures on Wii U. Just how big of a difference does this make?

Here is a comparison between NFS Most Wanted 360 vs Wii U

360

Wii U

So in recent years we've had a trend of developers announcing PC technical enhancements for the PC versions of popular console games. Most well done Wii U ports of current gen games have the potential to look more like the PC versions of those games that the PS3/360 versions. With Wii U's more modern GPU capable of a near DX11 equivalent features, lighting, more advanced shaders, fixed functions and the larger RAM. Crucially at 720p with console performance and geometry, the actual look of the graphics in shaders, lighting and detail can make a significant improvment.

Questions about the theoretical bottlenecks of the Wii U hardware - the RAM set-up, the bandwidth - are left unanswered. Partly because we're straying into NDA territory and partly because we get the distinct impression that, for Criterion at least, it wasn't an issue.

"Tools and software were the biggest challenges by a long way... the fallout of that has always been the biggest challenge here," Idries reaffirms. "[Wii U] is a good piece of hardware, it punches above its weight. For the power consumption it delivers in terms of raw wattage it's pretty incredible. Getting to that though, actually being able to use the tools from Nintendo to leverage that, was easily the hardest part."

But hang on a second. This does somewhat dispute the established narrative suggested by more than one developer of a console using out-dated CPU technology derived from the Wii, which in turn was an overclocked, tweaked version of the GameCube. Ten minutes into our chat and Idries hasn't once mentioned the infamous lack of Wii U CPU horsepower. Wasn't this an issue for developing Most Wanted on the new Nintendo console? He pauses for a short moment while framing his answer.

And this upcoming answer is significant because reading carefully it's clear that he is only talking about the CPU comparison here.

"I think a lot of people have been premature about it in a lot of ways because while it is a lower clock-speed, it punches above its weight in a lot of other areas," he explains.

"So I think you've got one group of people who walked away, you've got some other people who just dived in and tried and thought, 'Ah... it's not kind of there,' but not many people have done what we've done, which is to sit down and look at where it's weaker and why, but also see where it's stronger and leverage that. It's a different kind of chip and it's not fair to look at its clock-speed and other consoles' clock-speed and compare them as numbers that are relevant. It's not a relevant comparison to make when you have processors that are so divergent. It's apples and oranges."

Usually one would suspect he was saying the CPU is weaker but other hardware components are more powerful like the GPU. Having read it several times, it seems he is only talking about the CPU, which is very enlightening because Idries is saying that all the weak clockspeed comparisons are not relevant. Some more info for you, when Nintendo were asked at an investor conference about U's weak CPU, Takada (Nintendo's head tech guy) said that he doesn't think the U CPU is weak. What he said was that in modern CPUs the logic portion was quite small compared to the memory portion and that it was a memory optimised design with a large SRAM cache. Wii U's CPU is clocked at 1.2 Ghz, if it was so terribly slow compared to 360s 3.2ghz CPU then why is Durango and PS4s CPU said to be clocked at only 1.6ghz?

Yes, I know those consoles have 8 cores instead of tri-cores, I'm purely talking core to core clock speed. If 360's was 3.2 ghz x 3 it would be 9.6ghz total, if you add together the 1.6ghz x 8 cores you'll see that the final figure cannot possibly be relevant.

Idries Hamadi chimes in with his final thoughts:

"The Wii U has had a bit of a bad rap - people have said it's not as powerful as 360, this, that and the other. That, by and large, has been based on apples to oranges comparisons that don't really hold water. Hopefully we'll go some way to proving that wrong," he says.

"Nintendo don't speak about that, it's not their core focus at all but they did their 'Iwata Asks' about the hardware and it talks consistently about how they got to keep it quiet with low power consumption, and they totally did that... but what they haven't really championed is how they delivered something that could do this as well [he points to the 50-inch Panasonic playing host to Most Wanted U]... It's possible. It's work. You have to think about it and put time and craft and effort and whatever else into it but you have to do that for everything that's worth doing in this business... I think people should either go all-in or not bother."

And this is what I like, this is what I have been talking about with regards to developers technical competence, commitment and what a publisher is willing to invest in a system.

When some talk about graphics they only talk about the hardware, it's only this powerful. Or they only talk about the games, show me the games. They don't factor in all of the above, they don't talk about tools or commitment, about the technical skills of individual developers, they don't talk about the budgets of said games, the number of artists and money involved with said publishers, they don't talk about outsourcing, or the aims in development of some games which aren't graphics focused.

Maybe Most Wanted will fail at retail, hell it's a very late port of a game people have already had the chance to buy on many other platforms. But they "put time and craft and effort and whatever else into it" and they understand that you have to do that to get good results. This is what I want to see on Wii U, not late outsourced ports to other developers who had nothing to do with the original game, who don't know the ins and outs of their code and who aren't technically competent and who don't have the money or time to put real effort into a good conversion. I don't want to read lame ass comments from gamers and journalists alike ragging on early launch ports made with unfinished hardware with unfinished tools -  and then complaining about how weak Wii U is. Devs need to dig in, they need to commit and gamers need to get more informed.

Most Wanted is rock solid proof that Wii U can do a lot more than underperforming 360 ports.

And yet, it's still a version of a multiplatform game. Not many people will make ground up, budget and technically pushing games on Wii U. Most will be making those kinds of games on PS4 and Durango and downporting to U. Which is expected but sad to a degree. Nintendo doesn't really push graphics in it's games, they will aim for gameplay above all so 60 FPS is often their objective. When Ubisoft were asked about if their 60 FPS game was the best graphics they could do on Wii their developer scoffed "Of course not, we're 60 FPS". It's pretty well understood that you can push more at 30 FPS.

So far X looks very good, beyond what the others systems can do in terms of games of that size, smoothness, in relation to textures being as detailed far away as they are up close. That is a huge open world game. When you shrink an environment you can apply more detail to a smaller area so I am excited to see what other smaller scaled games can do. I'm not expecting anything that will compete with the best of what PS4 can pull off, don't get me wrong. But for me, Wii U seems unquestionally a notch above the current gen consoles.

I hope that Retro still have enough of the Prime games artists to wow us with their next metroid game.

And yet despite them pushing the graphics tech, Criteron's Ward seems to have a handle on what Wii U is about:

"Everyone wants to talk about this and that on the hardware, and it's not as interesting to me. What's really important is what we're doing with the player experience. The games I'm playing on Wii U—Nintendo Land and New Super Mario Bros. U—what Nintendo [does], they just deliver excellent gameplay. It's probably one of the big problems in the industry at the moment. Everyone—you guys—like to talk about specs and this and that. We've got to get back to just playing the game. And that's what this game is about. It's about a simple, fun experience. It's not about 10,000,000 polygons and who does this and who does that."