32 replies to this topic

[Jonneh]

After playing the physical Wii U version of Arkham City, it got me wondering if the E-shop version streams the cutscenes in a less choppy manner? Xbox 360 games were often faster when stored to the hard drive and I would assume that certain external hard drives outperform Wii U's disc reading speeds. Has anyone examined Digital vs Physical in terms of performance? If so can anyone confirm if Digital games endure faster loading times or more seamless gameplay?

[3Dude]

usb 2.0 tops out @ 420 Mbits/s

Wii u has a 20x blue ray disc drive @720 Mbits/s

Doesnt matter how fast the external hdd is. It still has to go through the serial bus.

Edited by 3Dude, 21 February 2013 - 04:25 AM.

[quaddelta]

"Where the hell is the disk"-wise yes, digital copies are more practical.

[Reaver]

Digital copies suck in my opinion. It takes about 24 hours to download a big game, and then you start to run out of space so you delete it, then after a while you suddenly fancy a game on it again but you can't be bothered as it will take another 24 hours to download it again. I'm glad Nintendo give you the choice of digital or disc, disc wins every time for me.

[Gaymer]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Arkham City was confirmed to be another sloppy port with framerate issues. A digital version won't fix those problems.

[Hunter]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Arkham City was confirmed to be another sloppy port with framerate issues. A digital version won't fix those problems.

It was a bit sloppy, but the fact they added loads of cool features on the gamepad makes up for the framerate issues imo.

[Penguin101]

Weird I didn't experience any framerate issues :/

[alan123]

i would say that physical games are better, most consoles will take a amount of information & store it in memory or on the HD while streaming information from the disc, this way the data can be drawn from both memory/HD & disc at the same time, it is why the PS3 for example installs some data on the HD, the X360 also does on some games to.

[Gamejunkie]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Arkham City was confirmed to be another sloppy port with framerate issues. A digital version won't fix those problems.

The reviews have overall been very positive.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/wii-u/batman-arkham-city---armored-edition

[routerbad]

Weird I didn't experience any framerate issues :/

People complained about frame issues on ACIII as well, I have yet to experience any, but I am still very early on in the game. I have the PC version as well, and without looking at them side by side, the only very noticeable difference is the lighting and shadows, which Wii U should be able to do very handily but seeing as the devs didn't know how to take advantage of the dedicated lighting the Wii U gives them, it's understandable.

[cannonshane]

I just look at it this way. If you wish to prolong the life of your console run the games off a hdd that way your laser won't wear out. Each to their own though.

[syks-1]

disk fan here too,i would hate the day where you no longer go into a shop and buy a game with REAL cash!!

[Gamejunkie]

I just look at it this way. If you wish to prolong the life of your console run the games off a hdd that way your laser won't wear out. Each to their own though.

Unless you're constantly playing games every day for long periods of time there should be no risk of it wearing out any way. I've owned all the disc based consoles since the 3DO up until now and I've never had that problem.

[Jonneh]

I agree, I'm a disk person too but the question was whether performance is better on the digital versions (loading times and such)

[Alex Atkin UK]

Unless you're constantly playing games every day for long periods of time there should be no risk of it wearing out any way. I've owned all the disc based consoles since the 3DO up until now and I've never had that problem.

That's interesting, as its a VERY common problem on Playstation, Xbox, PS2, PS3 and Xbox 360. Although the latter two might be a lot to do with how hot those consoles run internally.

I think the next consoles will be more reliable as internally their heat is better managed, with them working pretty much the same as the Wii U - all the heat is coming from a single chip so easier to manage, plus mandatory HDDs for caching.

I always got the impression Nintendo use much better quality optical drives though, plus their consoles run much cooler.

I do think there are reports of Wii drives breaking, but I highly suspect those are on soft-modded consoles as its always harder on the drives to read CDR/DVDRs than actual pressed media.

Edited by Alex Atkin UK, 23 February 2013 - 03:05 PM.

[Gamejunkie]

That's interesting, as its a VERY common problem on Playstation, Xbox, PS2, PS3 and Xbox 360. Although the latter two might be a lot to do with how hot those consoles run internally.
I think the next consoles will be more reliable as internally their heat is better managed, with them working pretty much the same as the Wii U - all the heat is coming from a single chip so easier to manage, plus mandatory HDDs for caching.
I always got the impression Nintendo use much better quality optical drives though, plus their consoles run much cooler.
I do think there are reports of Wii drives breaking, but I highly suspect those are on soft-modded consoles as its always harder on the drives to read CDR/DVDRs than actual pressed media.

The only issues I had were with my first two Xbox 360's. In both cases it was over hearing that lead to problems with the three red rings in with the first one and with the GPU and on screen graphics with the second one. I've never had any disc drive or laser issues.

[cannonshane]

The ps2 was renowned for chewing through lasers. Over its lifetime I had 2 fail due to the laser stuffing up. And what some people done realise about the wii u os that the disc is still spinning even if your not actually playing the game.

Edited by cannonshane, 24 February 2013 - 01:43 PM.

[Gamejunkie]

The ps2 was renowned for chewing through lasers. Over its lifetime I had 2 fail due to the laser stuffing up. And what some people done realise about the wii u os that the disc is still spinning even if your not actually playing the game.

Whilst there were problems with the lasers in the PS2's the problems weren't as prominent as you make them out to be. At the end of the day with normal use there should be no issues with the lasers in any device. One of the problems with the PS2 was people using the swap trick method to get it to recognise import games which didn't help.

[cannonshane]

Oh they were very prominent, I have a good friend who worked and still works for Sony here in aus when the ps2 was released and through out its life time he has told me they were receiving units all the time with laser issues, including 2 of mine which had no modifications etc to them.

[Desert Punk]

I had 360 optical drive issues in addition to RROD. I think I went through the process of getting it sorted about 7 times. 2 of those times it was optical drive issues. One time the 360 went with RROD only and came back with the RROD sorted but the optical drive not working. I think because RROD was such a major issue it sort of dwarfed the optical drive problems. My early ps2 became quite picky over which dvd games it would play but still plays games on cds. I had an early wii that developed a problem with the mechanism. The wii optical drive is the least reliable part of the wii and many wii's won't load dual layer games. The amount of dual layer games is quite low so many users are unaware of the problem. Nintendo abandoned the early wii drive type as the gamecube compatible mechanism was both expensive and unreliable. It is claimed the optical drive for the early wii cost more than the whole pcb of the wii. When Nintendo moved to a non gamecube compatible wii it meant they could use a standard slot loading mechanism as used in cars etc and probably saved a lot of money.

 

With regard wii u downloaded games working better than shop bought versions this would seem possible if you could fit the game on the flash memory built into the wii u but with the usb ports only being usb2.0 probably less so. That said I don't know how fast the flash memory in the wii u is.

 

Even if they ran a fair bit better I'd still go with shop bought copies. You can buy wii u games discounted and once you've played them through can sell them on. If I bought a wii u game for £32, kept it for 5 months before selling it on for lets say £20-25 that game may have only cost me £7 to play but if I download it, it might cost £50 thereabouts. Do that for 7-9 games and you've basically got enough money for a ps4 for example when they come out. As soon as I got my wii u I sold on nintendoland for £30 as I didn't want it. If it had been pre-installed on the console I would not have had that discount on the price of the console.

 

There is still a real chance that the ps4 and xbox 720 will prevent secondhand games being used and if so downloading games makes a lot more sense but as the wii u doesn't prevent secondhand games working it makes huge financial sense to buy physical copies of games.