Wii U Virtual Console in Europe will use a 50Hz refresh rate
Posted on January 25, 2013 by Austin(@NE_Austin) in News, Wii U, Wii U eShop
It all sounds like technical mumbo jumbo at first– after all, why should you care about the refresh rate of a console?– but when you watch the following video you should notice a difference between the left and right images:
It’s not terribly striking, is it? I didn’t think so either, but the one on the right is using a visual refresh rate of 50Hz (standard for older PAL releases) as opposed to the NTSC standard of 60Hz. What does this mean? It means, essentially, that the European version literally runs slower (visuals and music included) than the other versions of the game because their televisions used to only refresh at a rate of 50 times per second. You notice in the video that the NTSC player gets much farther much faster than the PAL player– that’s due to the PAL version’s slowdown.
It also apparently makes the image slightly blurrier and more compressed looking… apparently. Someone should capture it in full HD so I can decide whether that is worth getting up in arms about or not!
