What does the Wii U's upscaler really look like in action? You be the judge. I capped a bunch of direct-feed screenshots below. Each group has 3 separate shots in the following formats:
- Wii, component, 480p (16:9)
- Wii U, HDMI, 480p (16:9)
- Wii U, HDMI, 720p
If you're wondering why the 480p shots look squished, that's because the 480p standard is actually 720x480 (3:2), which is adjusted by your TV to display in either 4:3 or 16:9 due to non-square pixels (I think). I could have stretched the images below to fill out a 16:9 ratio to more closely resemble what you'd see in the end result, but that would kind of defeat the point of showing exactly what picture your console is sending through its output. (EDIT: If you want to go to the trouble of doing so yourself, you can stretch the width of the 480p images to 854 pixels to get the correct aspect ratio.)
The images below are a pixel-for-pixel match with what the console outputs, with no lossy compression or post-processing. I used a set of Monoprice multi-system component cables for the Wii and the pack-in HDMI cable for the Wii U.
Personally? Can't say I notice a difference in quality between the different display methods, but as long as the Wii U's upscaler is fast (and it seems to be), it's an appreciated feature.
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For kicks, and since I already went to the trouble of hooking this up, I decided to do some direct comparisons between NSMB Wii and NSMB U to see how much the HUD was actually changed to be less-overscan friendly.