Digital Foundry vs Xenoblade Chronicles X: "A Wii U Technological Master Class?"

When looking at open world games on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and even the Wii U itself, there are scant few that offer a truly stable frame-rate - but that's exactly what we have here.

Oh you
 
Everything including art direction sounds good and par the course for a Monolith game, however...

More noticeably, Xenoblade X exhibits significant pop-in even when playing the game from a faster external drive. We've tested the game on both the Wii U's internal storage and using an external drive but in both cases, we encountered a significant amount of object pop-in. Running through the city, you'll see huge Skells and crowds of NPCs appear out of thin air just metres from the player. Thankfully, we only found this distracting while exploring New Los Angeles, the game's central hub. Once out in the wild, pop-in can still be observed but it becomes somewhat less noticeable.


Image pop in is probably one of the worst things in open world games :( A blight on the world

Another curious thing we noticed stems from the game's collision detection or, more appropriately, the lack thereof. As we run through the city the player ghosts right through the cars, NPCs, and Skell as if they weren't even there. It's not clear if this type of thing is designed to save performance but the results are certainly bizarre.

It sounds bizarre...
 
Not surprised....the WiiU is sort of in between this current gen and the last gen of the 360 and PS3 performance and power wise right...? so it should look ok texture wise and all but what makes it shine is the environment size and art and the creature design and all...
 
But what of the plasma state?

Tests are still pending. However, as Xenoblade Chronicles X is purportedly not known to exist in the gaseous state, it is likely that it also does not exist in the plasma state. There is the possibility of sublimation+ionization (a novel phase transition likely worthy of the Nobel Prize) directly to plasma state, however, but this test is yet to be performed.
 
Not surprised....the WiiU is sort of in between this current gen and the last gen of the 360 and PS3 performance and power wise right...? so it should look ok texture wise and all but what makes it shine is the environment size and art and the creature design and all...

It's on the same level actually. this article has made me appreciate x tech a lot more. The lack of shadows really bother me, so do the character models though.
 
Looks beautiful and solid performance to boot. Good work. From what I remember the memory bandwidth on Wii U is crap even compared to X360/PS3, so pop-in is not surprising, but still a great technical achievement.
 
Not surprised....the WiiU is sort of in between this current gen and the last gen of the 360 and PS3 performance and power wise right...? so it should look ok texture wise and all but what makes it shine is the environment size and art and the creature design and all...

CPU is weaker than both Cell and Xenon, GPU is apparently more efficient than Xenos, twice the RAM for games, bandwidth is much slower ect.

I'd say it ends up comparable to 360 and PS3, stronger in some ways, weaker in other ways
 
One would imagine a leap into the water below would result in death, right?

Not if you played Xenoblade and spent a lot of time in Colony 9

As for the rest of the video, I sorta figured the pop-in would be bad for a game like this with minimal loading although the car collision is sort of a head scratcher
 
The scale is definitely gorgeous. But man, I don't think I'll ever be as impressed as seeing art direction, visual fidelity, and solid frame rate (in single player) meld together like when I fired up MK8. That game is gooooorgeous.
 
Much better than Xenoblade which tanks when more than 2 enemies appears on screen.

Not surprised....the WiiU is sort of in between this current gen and the last gen of the 360 and PS3 performance and power wise right...? so it should look ok texture wise and all but what makes it shine is the environment size and art and the creature design and all...

It's better than the last gen. I don't know what people mean by efficient. The GPU is more powerful with the eDram being 3x bigger than the 360's. If used right you get FRN and Zelda Wii U with Xenoblade X resources being put making a huge open world with no loading while traversing. The CPU is it's bottleneck but it uses GPGPU that handles task the CPU would do.
 
It's better than the last gen. I don't know what people mean by efficient. The GPU is more powerful with the eDram being 3x bigger than the 360's. If used right you get FRN and Zelda Wii U with Xenoblade X resources being put making a huge open world with no loading while traversing. The CPU is it's bottleneck but it uses GPGPU that handles task the CPU would do.

Where was it said that Xenoblade uses GPGPU?
 
It sounds bizarre...

I think there is a lack of collision detection on many things because when you are walking/driving around with a skell, you want to move fast without getting stuck on things. It's no GTA where you want to crash and destroy everything. Surely it's partly also for the performance, I'm guessing it was just the easiest solution.
 
Is it really pronounced "Zenno Blade?"

I think it's fine either way, but I prefer that one. How do you say xenophobic or xenomorph?

On topic: I'm glad that the lowest it seems to dip in normal gameplay situations is just by one frame (maybe more with late game superbosses when effects are flying everywhere).

Will they be doing any further updates to the article when they get access to the disk game by comparing pop in/load times with and without data packs?
 
I think it's fine either way, but I prefer that one. How do you say xenophobic or xenomorph?

Zenno

That's the correct pronunciation: "zennoblade"

Unless the game's actual creators say otherwise. That's the word root and that's how it's pronounced.
 
Zenno

That's the correct pronunciation: "zennoblade"

Unless the game's actual creators say otherwise. That's the word root and that's how it's pronounced.

As a diehard Zenno guy Zeeno has been growing on me lately. I might be a convert.
 
I think it's fine either way, but I prefer that one. How do you say xenophobic or xenomorph?

On topic: I'm glad that the lowest it seems to dip in normal gameplay situations is just by one frame (maybe more with late game superbosses when effects are flying everywhere).

Will they be doing any further updates to the article when they get access to the disk game by comparing pop in/load times with and without data packs?
At the very least, I'll check it for myself. I'm planning to buy the disc version for my collection but getting a US copy so it might take time. This is definitely a game I want in my collection, though!
 
Zenno

That's the correct pronunciation: "zennoblade"

Unless the game's actual creators say otherwise. That's the word root and that's how it's pronounced.

Xeno can also be pronounced "Zeeno" if you will (\ˌzen-ə-ˈfō-bē-ə, ˌzēn-\). I'll be honest, I've never even considered any form of xeno as being pronounced with anything but a hard e so this was surprising to me that anyone pronounced it as anything but "Zeenoblade".
 
Zenno

That's the correct pronunciation: "zennoblade"

Unless the game's actual creators say otherwise. That's the word root and that's how it's pronounced.

This is correct.

You shouldn't mispronounce things just because you want to. Language has meaning. Respect language. Respect it.
 
Unfortunately solid performance doesn't translate at all to screenshots. :(

the game looks so bad in direct feed, he only has 5 screenshots of gameplay, really if you compared it 360/ps3 open world games in screen shots its look really bad even compared those, honestly feels he's being very nice to the game's graphics based on those screens. he should post more pics.
 

It does seems odd for them to do that. I mean shouldnt it get compared to the other 8th gen consoles?

Technically as some have said the reason they said that makes sense.....sorta.
 
Solid performance is so much more important than bleeding edge graphics with a bleeding framerate.

it was definitely something I was very worried about with this game. It's hard to get comfy and maintain that suspension of disbelief when the framerate is chugging all over the place. Very good news, although I kind of already knew because of dark10x's posts.

I mean I'm mainly a PC gamer and I've had a 120hz monitor for a long time. But I'm fine with console games that can maintain a locked 30, for example I've never had a problem with Destiny and put hundreds of hours into it.

edit: can we please not make this another ninjablade thread.
 
the game looks so bad in direct feed, he only has 5 screenshots of gameplay, really if you compared it 360/ps3 open world games in screen shots its look really bad even compared those, honestly feels he's being very nice to the game's graphics based on those screens. he should post more pics.
Oh joy...
 
Bit of a shame they didn't (play enough of the game to be able to) go into a skell to really test the performance and loading when flying high up in the sky, or move superfast in the driving mode. I've seen footage of flying up high and it looks awesome, but it'd be interesting to see that put to the test with their seamless loading.

the game looks so bad in direct feed, he only has 5 screenshots of gameplay, really if you compared it 360/ps3 open world games in screen shots its look really bad even compared those, honestly feels he's being very nice to the game's graphics based on those screens. he should post more pics.

We know you don't like the graphics, why do you so badly feel the need to prove to everyone how bad the game can potentially look? The DF even mentions the performance is superior to comparable titles (on comparable consoles), so even if it looks 'worse' technically, the reason is performance.
 
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