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How fast is the Wii U GamePad? Does the ability to wirelessly stream gameplay from the main console come with any kind of lag penalty? Armed with a high-speed camera, we decided to find out.On a basic level, the Wii U hardware is capable of rendering dual framebuffers - one for the traditional console output, the other beamed over to the tablet controller, offering multi-screen gameplay. Alternatively, many games - including New Super Mario Bros. U, Batman: Arkham City and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 - have the ability to mirror the main display, allowing gamers to "detach" from the living room TV and "roam" to a certain extent. Mileage will vary, but we were quite impressed with a 10m range that included the ability to play in other rooms, with no line of sight to the main console required.
The mirroring function has other uses though. It offers us the chance to accurately measure the time taken for video to be encoded on the host console and then transmitted and decoded on the tablet. In our post-E3 Wii U hands-on, we'd previously given this a shot, only to find that the measurements were too good to be true: the GamePad units were tethered by cable to the consoles (a function of debug hardware) and we actually found that the tablet controller was running 116ms faster than the LG HDTVs Nintendo brought to the event. With retail hardware in our hands, it was time to get a more accurate result.
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