Hardware Two Gamepads, or One?

[3DPiper]

How many gamepads can the Wii U use?

I've read one and two ...

?

 

[Shuji1987]

The WiiU supports two as far as I know. However gamepads won't be sold separately for the time being. Due to availability of the gamepads as well as no games supporting multiple gamepads yet.

 

[Deltaechoe]

Last I heard is that the Wii U supports 2 gamepads, but just given the hardware in the system I have a feeling that perforance will suffer if you do this

 

[djbubba2002]

I have two gamepads but i never turn the another one on yet hehe

 

[DiscostewSM]

Nintendo has said that it won't support multiple gamepads at launch, but probably will in the future. As for performance with two, it was said that the frame rate on the gamepads will drop from 60 to 30. My belief is it will do a method of interleaving, in that for the odd frames, it will render from player 1's perspective and send to player 1. For the even frames, it will render from player 2's perspective and send to player 2. This way, there is no change to the amount of data that gets sent out wirelessly every frame.

So, if 3 were supported, it would be 20 fps per gamepad, and for 4 gamepads, 15fps.