Nintendo Wii U GamePad Latency Isn’t an Issue, Ubisoft Says

Ubisoft’s Michel Ancel, the creator of its popular Rayman series, has revealed that the Nintendo Wii U’s GamePad controller won’t have any latency problems, as the image being streamed to its touchscreen will arrive almost instantaneously thanks to the wireless connection.

One of the Wii U’s major selling points is its unique GamePad, a controller that features, besides buttons and joysticks, a touchscreen that can display various things, from menu interfaces to the actual gameplay, acting as a replacement for the TV.

While fans are quite confident in the features of the controller, many people are still reticent about its capabilities.

Ubisoft’s Michel Ancel, however, says that people don’t have to worry about latency issues with the Wii U GamePad, as the controller displays gameplay almost instantaneously.

“I think this is where Nintendo is really out in front of things,” he told Nintendo Power, via NE, about the GamePad. “The technology inside the controller is quite a bit more advanced than what people might think. It's really responsive. The response time is crazy, in fact, and I think the competitors will need some time to [get their solutions] this responsive.”

According to Ancel, based on his work with Rayman Legends for the Wii U, there’s just a 1/60 of a second delay between the image appearing on the TV and the one on the GamePad’s touchscreen.

“It's crazy because the game is running in full HD [on the television], we are streaming another picture on the GamePad screen, and it's still 60 frames per second. And the latency on the controller is just 1/60 of a second, so it's one frame late. It's crazy, it's so fast. It's almost instant. That's why it responds so well. So it can be used as a real game-design thing.”

You can expect Nintendo to flaunt this impressive ability even more ahead of the Wii U’s launch next month all around the world.