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Wii games upscaled (not natively rendered in higher res) on WiiU

fart town usa

Gold Member
I played some Xenoblade and klonoa earlier today and noticed the colors looked somewhat crisper, and things seemed less blurry. I immediately noticed the difference. It's not gonna make it look like dolphin or whatever, but on my HDTV it looks better than component on wii. Personally I think this Is great. As someone whose wii backlog is quite huge this will be a preferable way to play them IMO.

My thoughts exactly.
 

King_Moc

Banned
If the Wii U is performing the upscaling now, rather than the tv (as with the Wii), then this could well look much better than Wii games did previously. Anyone who's watched a standard dvd on a ps3 will know how good an effect can be gained from some decent upscaling.
 

RobbieNick

Junior Member
Played some Sonic Colors cuz...

A.) I'm a Sonic fan, and..

B.) There are tons of little details in the background of Tropical Resort.

You can see them a bit better now. Textures are a bit sharper as it doesn't have that 480P HDTV fuzz to it.
 
I've never understood the concept of upscaling. It's a fancy way of saying stretched right?

it's fairly obviously a portmantau of the words "Up" and "Scale". As in, to scale upwards. I can't understand how you can not understand. In particularly it relates to scaling a fixed image to a new size. The wii's images are fixed (eg. you can't change render resolution) and being scaled to a new bigger size. so you would say they have been scaled up.

stretched is a misnomer as you're not stretching pixels at all, you're adding more of them.
 

A Human Becoming

More than a Member
I played some Xenoblade and klonoa earlier today and noticed the colors looked somewhat crisper, and things seemed less blurry. I immediately noticed the difference. It's not gonna make it look like dolphin or whatever, but on my HDTV it looks better than component on wii. Personally I think this Is great. As someone whose wii backlog is quite huge this will be a preferable way to play them IMO.
But what if someone already has his Wii backlog installed on a HDD? Is it worth playing them off the disc instead?
 

iphys

Member
I don't have a digital camera good enough to make a difference at home, but I can see a major difference in the scaling between my Wii and Wii U when changing inputs.

The Wii U's wii mode output actually puts a slight black border around all sides of the image. The nature of the scaling artifacts is different from the output of my Wii (using component, not composite). Colors on the Wii U side are more vibrant, less washed out by the upscale. I am not sure if one or the other is "cleaner" in terms of upscaling artifacts. But the Wii U side looks less stretched and distorted.

Verdict: I would assume the Wii U is upscaling the image before sending it to the TV. The output looks nothing like the TV's own scaler on the vanilla Wii's input.

Edit: don't overhype expecting it to look vastly superior, I'm just saying it's visibly different. The colors do look richer tho.

Actually on a regular Wii there is a small black border all around the screen, but it's in the overscan region. I'm guessing your TV is just cutting out the overscan region from the component signal but not from the HDMI signal, which also means your TV is blowing up the component image more to fill the screen, so that's probably why it looks more stretched.
 
I just played Super Mario Galaxy 2 on it. It does look slightly better. Text is still bad/blurry, but the colors seem to pop more. I'm guessing it's my TV doing the work and not the Wii U.
 

Josh7289

Member
The Wii has a notoriously bad video output chip - it was considerably worse than the GC. As I mentioned above, I think that could be a major contributing factor to the difference.

Wait wait, I've never heard about this before. If you don't mind me asking, would you care to elaborate?
 

Neff

Member
Played some Sonic Colors cuz...

A.) I'm a Sonic fan, and..

B.) There are tons of little details in the background of Tropical Resort.

You can see them a bit better now. Textures are a bit sharper as it doesn't have that 480P HDTV fuzz to it.

Great to know, I love this game.
 

ChuyMasta

Member
I did notice some improvements, but nothing too big.

Wii mode on Wii U does not fill the entire screen.
IMAG0610.jpg

Wii does.
IMAG0611.jpg



Someone already explained the whole ratio deal. So I am assuming the Wii has always been "stretched" even on Widescreen mode.

Colors are more vibrant. I guess that's about it. MPTrilogy still looks glorious though. Replaying on Wii U right now. No HUD, no visor. *drools*
 

Seance

Banned
No, you're interpolating new pixels from the pixels you start with.

Doesn't mean it'll look better. In fact it often looks worse with ringing and other artifacts introduced in the new pixels caused by poor scaling.

360 games look significantly better when upscaled to 1080p.
 

Jac_Solar

Member
Why is this great or exciting? Doesn't upscale simply, like mentioned earlier in the thread, stretch the picture and blur it up? (And remove *a lot* of detail*.) Didn't certain TV's already do this with Wii games on the Wii?

Xenoblade Chronicles, one of the few games I've played on the Wii (Other games had the same issues.), looked bad when I played it on the Wii. Colors were slightly messed up, fuzzed (Like mentioned earlier about the Wii games.) and mixed up poorly in the whole picture, details were slightly out of focus, and it was extremely "jaggedy" -- in combination, it made playing very unpleasant (To the point where it made me wonder how anyone could play a game on the Wii and enjoy it.), so I didn't play for more than an hour or so. It reminded me of VHS quality. Does the WiiU and the upscaling have the same or similar issues with Wii games?

I really want to play several Wii games, but like I said, I don't want to play on the Wii, and I didn't like playing Wii games on Dolphin, so hopefully they are playable on the WiiU.
 
Why is this great or exciting? Doesn't upscale simply, like mentioned earlier in the thread, stretch the picture and blur it up? (And remove *a lot* of detail*.) Didn't certain TV's already do this with Wii games on the Wii?

There are many filtering techniques that can make 480p content look better... It also could simply "nearest neighbor" to 1080p and it can look better than 480p simply because the first time a modern TV does with a 480p signal is resample it with a horrible blur filter to fill your screen.

At least a nearest neighbor will preserve colors and sharpness. Even if that sharpness is on razor sharp pixels ;)
 

jbueno

Member
360 games look significantly better when upscaled to 1080p.

Perhaps from a considerable distance, but when playing a 720p 360 game and letting the system do the upscaling to 1080p on a 1920x1080 PC monitor, artifacts and jaggies are very noticeable and can be quite detrimental to the experience, specially for subHD games and titles that don´t have a good AA solution. Personally I don´t like how they look upscaled to 1080p after being used to PC games running in that native res, which is why I keep a 720p (1366x768) TV around

Anyways, whether it looks good or not I think that´s a matter of opinion of course, some of us are very nitpicky about image quality.
 
Why is this great or exciting? Doesn't upscale simply, like mentioned earlier in the thread, stretch the picture and blur it up? (And remove *a lot* of detail*.) Didn't certain TV's already do this with Wii games on the Wii?

The Wii renders at 480p and outputs 480p, leaving your TV to do the dirty work of resizing the picture to a 720p or 1080p display. The Wii U renders at 480p still, but it also does the dirty work of resizing the picture to 720p or 1080p. By letting the console do this and not the TV, games will look better and the TV will have less delay/lag due to it not having to do any extra work.

It sucks that Wii games aren't rendered in 1080p, but we already new that, and that led to the assumption that Wii games would output at 480p. That's why this is good news. If you didn't know about the other thing, then I guess this is just bad news. lol
 

Jac_Solar

Member
But does the processing power of the WiiU mean that the quality of the final picture will be nicer than images rendered by the TV's internal upscaler?

Not sure how variable this technology is, or how reliant it is on processing power, but based on what I've read about games and such, my impression is that upscaling doesn't boost quality to any significant degree, or it would have been common knowledge.

I mean, it doesn't add in new details based on existing detail or paint a new picture based on existing information, it simply copies and paste pixels by pixels on the smaller scale, right?

Anyhow, if it makes playing Wii games enjoyable it would still be great.
 
^
Seriously. I have no idea why that game is so blurry. lol

But does the processing power of the WiiU mean that the quality of the final picture will be nicer than images rendered by the TV's internal upscaler?

Not sure how variable this technology is, or how reliant it is on processing power, but based on what I've read about games and such, my impression is that upscaling doesn't boost quality to any significant degree, or it would have been common knowledge.

I mean, it doesn't add in new details based on existing detail or paint a new picture based on existing information, it simply copies and paste pixels by pixels on the smaller scale, right?

Anyhow, if it makes playing Wii games enjoyable it would still be great.

Upscaling an image technically doesn't add anything to an image. The thing is, upscaling a lower resolution picture on a higher resolution TV is an inevitability. It has to be done. Either the TV does it (which is generally poor quality and introduces delay) or the console/device does it (which generally has better quality, lag free upscaling).

How significant the difference is depends on your TV, the upscaling algorithm, and your attention to detail.
 

Eusis

Member
I don't get it, why would the colors change when you're upscaling?
I think it tends to be a fault either of upscaling by the TV or the hardware that outputs a signal, as noted apparently the Wii had a terrible video output chip (which now that I think about is REALLY DUMB when you're already on the graphical low end) and I swear most games on PS3/360 look washed out if I try to play them at 480p. So, making the Wii U scale it up can help with the latter, and if the former's addressed (possibly by HDMI instead of component, but maybe Wii U fixes it for both) that also helps.
I've read before that instead of rendering a full 480p image for widescreen, RE4 on Wii just crops out the black bars from the fullscreen image and stretches that out. It's the only thing I can think of to explain it.
Huh, I may need to compare the two after I do the transferring since I'd rather keep Wii use at a minimum until then to be safe. It'd be very disappointing if it did that given the Wii being stronger HOPEFULLY would've allowed a proper 480p display.
 

Sixfortyfive

He who pursues two rabbits gets two rabbits.
The Wii renders at 480p and outputs 480p, leaving your TV to do the dirty work of resizing the picture to a 720p or 1080p display. The Wii U renders at 480p still, but it also does the dirty work of resizing the picture to 720p or 1080p. By letting the console do this and not the TV, games will look better and the TV will have less delay/lag due to it not having to do any extra work.

It sucks that Wii games aren't rendered in 1080p, but we already new that, and that led to the assumption that Wii games would output at 480p. That's why this is good news. If you didn't know about the other thing, then I guess this is just bad news. lol
Precisely this. Being able to set the console to output video at the native resolution of your monitor/TV is always a plus and usually better than forcing your TV to do the job instead.
 
Worth noting on the "color change" is that component cables and HDMI cables carry video as different color spaces (YPbPr vs RGB), which may be interpreted differently by your TV depending on your settings.
HDMI can also carry YCbCr, the digital form of YPbPr, but I seriously doubt the Wii U is bothering to convert to that.
I'd like to see a comparison between direct-feed screenshots from the Wii U's component and HDMI outputs to see if they are really different, or if it's just the way people's TVs are calibrated.

Also, it'd be nice to know if the Wii U outputs Limited or Full Range RGB over HDMI, or if there is even a setting to change it like on the 360/PS3. I guess I'll figure it out when I get one.
 

TUROK

Member
Upscale is such a shitty word. It makes gullible people think that the games actually run in higher resolution, when all it really means is that it runs in the same shitty resolution except stretched over a bigger picture.

Basically it does nothing except add some blur.

Straight upscaling is not inherently going to make anything look better. It's just doubling dimensions. A lot of people don't understand this.
Wow, the ignorance being propagated in here is astounding.

There are many different upscaling algorithms. Bilinear, bicubic, nearest-neighbor, lanczos, and so on. Aside from nearest-neighbor, none of these algorithms simply "stretch" the image.

Ignorance and arrogance... Hell of a combination.
 

ZeroCDR

Member
Someone should try Resident Evil 4 and see if it becomes a bit sharper, its blurry as it is already on Wii xD

RE4 was the first game a tried, it's definitely not as blurry but brings to light some new graphical oddities. The game is being zoomed already in 480p so I'm not surprised. Upscaled is still the better way to play it though.

I'll still probably opt for the HD version on 360 for future playthroughs.
 

Eusis

Member
People who make condescending "juniors" comments are the dumbest of all.
Yet they sometimes do deserve it. And in this case the junior got banned for it.

Though now I peek he's been here for quite awhile. I wonder if it's a honest (but still incredibly dumb) mistake, thinking they were upscaling and upressing were one and the same?
 

Septimius

Junior Member
Why is this great or exciting? Doesn't upscale simply, like mentioned earlier in the thread, stretch the picture and blur it up? (And remove *a lot* of detail*.) Didn't certain TV's already do this with Wii games on the Wii?

Xenoblade Chronicles, one of the few games I've played on the Wii (Other games had the same issues.), looked bad when I played it on the Wii. Colors were slightly messed up, fuzzed (Like mentioned earlier about the Wii games.) and mixed up poorly in the whole picture, details were slightly out of focus, and it was extremely "jaggedy" -- in combination, it made playing very unpleasant (To the point where it made me wonder how anyone could play a game on the Wii and enjoy it.), so I didn't play for more than an hour or so. It reminded me of VHS quality. Does the WiiU and the upscaling have the same or similar issues with Wii games?

I really want to play several Wii games, but like I said, I don't want to play on the Wii, and I didn't like playing Wii games on Dolphin, so hopefully they are playable on the WiiU.

I hope you know your TV well enough to know how the sharpness setting works. Too high and it'll overdo the sharpness. Too low, and it'll look like a smeared turd.
 

madmackem

Member
This is what i wanted to hear, i had a feeling games would look a little better simply because it was being outputted over a digital signal. Now hearing it spits them out to the 1080p all be it without any real upscaling makes me happy i waited to finish the wii games i have as my tv fucking hates component 480p.
 

Margalis

Banned
The actual physical signal being sent out changes with connection type and different upscalers are different / worse.

The display and transmission of video is actually a really interesting subject, at least before everything went digital on at least the transmission end.
 

TheD

The Detective
Wow, the ignorance being propagated in here is astounding.

There are many different upscaling algorithms. Bilinear, bicubic, nearest-neighbor, lanczos, and so on. Aside from nearest-neighbor, none of these algorithms simply "stretch" the image.

Ignorance and arrogance... Hell of a combination.

The ignorance is yours!

"Stretching the image" is an adequate description and it can never make an image look better!

Grow up!
 

Haunted

Member
So is the WiiU internal upscaler better than that of your usual TV? Not that it matters too much but that'd be an improvement at least.


Dolphin still beats all by actually rendering the higher resolution, obviously. PC emulation always wins.
 
"Stretching the image" is an adequate description and it can never make an image look better!

It's sufficient as a summary of what happens, but he's right in that there are different algorithms that greatly affect the quality of the stretched image. If the Wii U's scaler is better than your TVs scaler, then it can in fact make games look better on that TV than they otherwise would. Colour / image quality improvement is possible due to not going through a DAC too (as on Component)
 

defferoo

Member
I've read before that instead of rendering a full 480p image for widescreen, RE4 on Wii just crops out the black bars from the fullscreen image and stretches that out. It's the only thing I can think of to explain it.
yup, resident evil 4 runs at 360p on GC and Wii, which is why it looks so blurry... would've been nice if capcom upped the resolution for the Wii version given the additional processing power, but maybe it wasn't enough
 
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