Since the Wii U was first unveiled, quite a few people have asked if the system was really powerful enough to handle HD graphics while pushing an 854×480 image out to the tablet GamePad wirelessly in real time. Has to come with significant lag, right? We haven't noticed any latency between the GamePad and the on-screen action in any of our hands-on tests with the system, but other reports differed on this score. Rayman Legends developer Michel Ancel has now confirmed the GamePad image on the Wii U suffers only 1/60th of a second delay.

"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," Ancel told Nintendo Power (as noticed by Nintendo Everything). "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."

While a one-frame delay might actually be noticeable by some of the craziest pro fighting game players, the minute difference is going to be practically undetectable for most gamers. On a game like Black Ops 2, for instance, the player using the tablet screen shouldn't be at any real disadvantage over the player on the HDTV.

Ancel's report gels with a Digital Foundry test from this summer which showed the Wii U GamePad actually mirrored on-screen content a few frames before it ended up being displayed on the TV, thanks to post-processing on the HD set. The precise difference in the two displays is probably going to depend on the particular software implementation, but Ancel's description seems to show that hardware won't be the limiting factor.

Elsewhere in the interview, Ancel called the Wii U GamePad's technology "quite a bit more advanced than people think." He mentioned competitors like Microsoft's SmartGlass and Sony's PS3/Vita connectivity would have to work hard to get to this level of responsiveness.