I'm more interested in 480p PS3 games than 1080p PS3 games

[Megadrive1988]

given the choice, I would rather see PS3 games developed at 480p than 1080p or even 720p.

am I wrong to say that PS3 (or Xbox 360, or any HD-capable machine) is capable of running 'better' actual visuals at 480p than at HD resolutions because of the savings on bandwidth, pixel fillrate, RAM, and other resources ? Imagine what freeing up roughly ~2/3rds or whatever it is, the resources that go into reaching just 720p. it takes about 3x the resources to go from 480p to 720p given the same graphics. imagine that spend on making the actual graphics (not resolution) and framerates better? more texture variaty at the expense of super highres textures? well you can still increase texture quality/resolution at a given resolution without going to HD.

what do you guys think? I think there is so much focus on HD resolution this gen, sans the Wii. even Xbox 360 and PS3 are not making an astonishing visual leap over Xbox and PS2, because so much of their resources have to go into getting to HD. I don't think it's worth it.

what could each respective system, Xbox 360 and PS3, do graphically at 480p that it could not do at 720p or higher res ? (Xbox 360 can do upto 1080i and PS3 1080p). certainly at least framerates could easily be 60 instead of 30, for starters. but am I wrong to think that graphics /effects could actually be even more complex if the burden of HD was lifted ?

 

[Arwin]

what could each respective system, Xbox 360 and PS3, do graphically at 480p that it could not do at 720p or higher res ? (Xbox 360 can do upto 1080i and PS3 1080p). certainly at least framerates could easily be 60 instead of 30, for starters. but am I wrong to think that graphics /effects could actually be even more complex if the burden of HD was lifted ?

I don't know. I think this has been asked before. Personally, I do think the increase in resolution does graphics a lot of good, but you can indeed also wonder if you could instead use the extra bandwidth to create more TV like images - after all, current computer games don't really look as good as most TV movies do yet, right?

I suppose you could partly test on a PC by just trying to see if you can run a game at maximum settings with a 640x480 resolution, and then compare it with the different levels of trade-off to get good looking results on increasingly higher resolutions, though of course that would be a fairly crude test as no optimisation would have been done for either.

 

[Rangers]

I think this ship has clearly sailed.

One aspect is TV's. Going forward most TV's are going to be fixed res 1280X720 (or thereabouts) LCD's. Anything outside that rez (up or down) will be drastically scaled, and look worse simply for being "non-native".

Your suggestion makes sense only for certain categories of TV owners: SDTV owners or, CRT HDTV owners. Both are shrinking percentages of the TV audience going forward (although SDTV owners are the current majority, no doubt). See the problem?

Next, the idea that 480p photorealistic graphics look better is debatable. I'm watching Miami-FSU on TV right now. A 14" flatscreen color. It does look very nice, maybe (surely?) even better than 360 Madden, but the low resolution is very annoying, and this on a very small TV that should hide many of the resolution flaws.

I know, after becoming accustomed to websurfing and gaming on a 1280X1024 LCD monitor, going back to SDTV for gaming with Xbox or PS2 was fairly excruciating, to the point we simply cant stand it and would rather not play those systems at all. My brother and I independently noticed this effect over time and discussed it with each other.

Another point, the jump to 720P did sap some power from the next-gen systems no doubt, BUT, it's a one time jump, the effect likely wont happen again. The other thing is, I dont care what people say, 480P 360 games clearly in most cases look vastly better than Xbox or PS2 games. Clearly showing the 360/PS3 is a major technical jump even taking into account the rez increase. Hell to be honest, I kind of thought GRAW 360 looked better on my SDTV CRT. It was certainly far above any current gen game at the same rez. Or Gears will be another that played on a 480P TV will clearly destroy any current gen title.

I think (obviously) a rez increase makes sense when the picture quality improvements outweigh the graphical losses. I think 720P right now is CLEARLY an overall picture quality positive. You lose some graphics but you gain far MORE in increased rez which makes things so much easier on the eyes imo. 640X480 is just basically intolerable.

I think the more interesting question is will the jump to 1080P be worth it (in videogaming) down the road (perhaps next-generation)? I think that will be a much more open question, where as in 720P I dont think there's any question it's worth it, simply because 640 is so bad. 640 to 720 is like "horrible" to "good" 720 to 1080 will be more like going from "good" to "excellent". Less compelling imo.

Also one more thing, average rez's seem to be increasing over time in PC gaming as well, a clear trend I think that says what people prefer (although again some may be down to LCD's inability to flex resolutions). I remember I used to game at 800X600 all the time. Now you hardly ever see benchmarks run even as low as 1024X768. As well, I dont worry too much about the power sapping effects on 720P on consoles because, by PC standards it's a pretty easy resolution, not even as demanding as 1280X1024. So consoles will still have the historical advantage of playing on an easier field resolution wise, which will help make up some of the hardware gap with PC's.
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[Crayon]

Perhaps some developers want to see their games in 480 for the same reason you do?

Assuming a willing publisher, there's no reason that they couldn't release a game in any native resolution they please . Except of course in the case of Microsoft's mandate of 720p support.

Does Sony have a similar rule regarding seolution? Or AA for that matter?

 

[SonyNinja]

The more pixels,the more detail you can cram in.
Right?

 

[expletive]

I agree with the graphics themselves but the HUDs and text are much better at HD resolutions. I like 'smaller' HUDs in my games and at 480p theres a limtied amount of pixels available to make a tidy little HUD. I understand not all games have them but it is one stumbling block against IMO.

 

[Megadrive1988]

The more pixels,the more detail you can cram in.
Right?

yes, the higher the resolution, the more pixels, and in some sense, the more detail you can cram in. but as i'm trying to say, only on a certain level. more pixels, finer looking textures.

but the thing is, you can watch the most incredible graphics ever made (film grade CGI movie)
at 480p, or even lower resolution (i.e. VHS) that are beyond anything in realtime.

with Xbox 360, PS3, or any game machine, you've got a limited amount of resources. developers can spend those resources the way that want. how much more graphically "awesome" could a game be at 480p or 480i if a X360, PS3 didn't have to spend the resources to drive 720p resolution?

I agree 720p looks better than 480p given the same visual, and is much easier on the eyes. I'm used to HDTV broadcasts in 1080i and i cannot stand watching SDTV broadcasts, not even digital SDTV. but games are different. given more geometry, more shaders, more textures, more effects at higher framerates might outweigh the benefit of higher resolutions this new generation. for certain games. i realize the ship has already sailed for 2 out of the 3 major players. its 720p for at least 90% of X360, PS3 games.

 

[JF_Aidan_Pryde]

I agree on this one but clearly there are limits.

Photorealism at 5x5 pixels is pretty useless. =P
But no more useless than 10k x 10k flat shaded graphics.

With time, detail and resolution will both increase. Given how long TVs have been stuck in the dark ages, I think some resolution increase is definitely granted. But for the purpose of interactive graphics, I definitely prefer better pixels to more.

 

[ArturNOW]

I had been thinking about the say and then thought that image would be render in very high resolution and then output in 480p to achieve TV-like graphics, but I can be wrong ;-)

 

[London Geezer]

I've been thinking about this a lot too, but in the end it's all down to the electronics markets.

The "new thing" is HDTVs. People might not realise this, but HDTVs are what will save some companies from the misery of equipment stalling.

Up until HDTV, people were very happy to sit at home watching TV on their good old 10 year old TVs. That means that Sony or Panasonic or ALL other manufacturers had NO revenue on their TV business except those people who upgrade their TVs either because they were broken, or just because they want a "new one". It's obvious that people will buy a new TV much more often if they think that the new TV has something the last one didn't. Lots of people were buying new CRT TVs to replace the old CRTs they had, and the "widescreen" era certainly helped too, but people weren't really pushed to buy a new TV simply because it was hard to convince them that the new one would be any different from the old one, which it probably wasn't!!

Enter HDTV - huge marketing campaign to convince people that we get "5 times more detail" - and people will certainly be interested in changing their TV sooner or later. Heck, even in the UK and Europe, HDTV (eventually, when we got our standards agreed, 10 years after the US or Japan) was and is a huge success, and this is a region which has always been seen as the "slow adoption" region.

Enter HD-Everything... HDDVD, Bluray, SkyHD, HD consoles, HD cables... It's all a new "era" that is just there to bring more money, more fresh revenue, to all the manufacturers involved in anything that has to do with High Definition. All these formats and manufacturers push each other in order for us to get into the HD ladder and buy their products. Even when they compete each other, they help each other by getting more and more people to buy HD stuff, which is a very interesting phenomenon.

Of course the focus is now on HD resolution instead of "more clever SD resolution"... Lots of people would love to have graphics like Finding Nemo, even if it means playing in 480p, but HD is the "new thing" and everyone is working their asses off to try and get as much revenue out of the brand name.

By consequence, console graphics will be slightly less "Finding Nemo DVD" but more "Half life 2 on PC" (just an example).


Hope this sheds some light. It's all about brand and money in the end.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The more pixels,the more detail you can cram in.
Right?

Not really. More pixels means you have more fidelity in your information, but with sampling you can get the same amount of information into less pixels. If you consider a non-AA'd XB360 game on a TV, you have one colour sample per pixel. Then consider a TV programme and you have, I dunno, 100 colours samples per pxel (likely thousands, but what that contributes over 100 is negligable). The actual information in the TV picture is far, far higher, but the fidelity is far, far lower with information having to share pixels. This all means you get finer detail in higher resolutions, where lower resolutions would blur data and give a soft look, but also more aliasing where there's less information.

Personally if the HD games are properly rendered and downsized, I'd take the IQ improvement happily as a quick fix. Potentially if SD res was targetted the devs could add more and still keep high AA and texture filtering with more efficient techniques, but that'd be a lot of hassle. SD on large screens, which is what everyone's buying now, doesn't look too great and I can see when a game at higher fidelity would look on the whole better. That's why we're getting HD movies too. But I dare say everyone who likes current 720p games would rather be playing true-to-life graphics at SD resolutions on that screen. It's just the graphical leap in rendering at the lower resolution won't be that high, and so the fidelity is more desirable.

 

[London Geezer]

Sorry about my marketing post before...

Technically speaking, all hardware released today on PC really has no problem whatsoever with rendering at 720p, which as a matter of fact is actually quite low by PC standards.

Games slow down and generally have a lot less detail than Finding Nemo simply because the hardware just isn't capable of replicating the effects and sheer computations needed for graphics to look like that, and lighting is the main culprit.

The hit from going from 480p to 720p is so negligeable on latest hardware that people will obviously opt for the very noticeable jump in fidelity.

We don't have Finding Nemo graphics in realtime because we're just not there yet, not because we're focussing on "high" resolutions. If it were so easy, we'd be seeing NOW hardware that produces those kinds of graphics in reatime, but in 480p. But we don't.

Add to that the fact that Animation in these CG movies is just completely and utterly on another universe from what we get in real-time, which is a huge factor when we see the difference between our games and CG movies, and that has nothing to do with resolutions, GPUs or fillrate.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The hit from going from 480p to 720p is so negligeable on latest hardware that people will obviously opt for the very noticeable jump in fidelity.

We don't have Finding Nemo graphics in realtime because we're just not there yet, not because we're focussing on "high" resolutions. If it were so easy, we'd be seeing NOW hardware that produces those kinds of graphics in reatime, but in 480p. But we don't.

I also think that because graphics development is in the PC space, and PC monitors render SD resolution like Lego blocks, they disowned low resolutions as quickly as possible. If GPU developers were targetting SDTV users instead, things may have evolved differently and the quality of graphics attainable on SD resolutions might have benefited from cleverer techniques rather than brute-force scalable graphics hardware found in GPU's that need to render from 800x600 up to 1600x1200 with the same techniques.

 

[Arwin]

After reading this discussion, there are a few things from past experiences I now remember:

- PS2 games converted to the PSP look incredible. This all has to do with the increased resolution, the PSP having 480x272 on a tiny screen makes the graphics more 'hi-res' than the same area on most current PC monitors.

- some old emulator games look incredible also. Populous 2, Gods, or Xenon 2 on the PSP screen look awesome. Same when you look at them in a small window on PC, using STEEM for instance.

- When I brought a new, standard PAL CRT TV to a GT4 LAN party (not that big, say, 20"), using a SCART RGB cable, some people really complained about the picture quality. The thing is, the image quality is really good on that TV, so good, in fact, that you can more easily see the individual pixels.

- on PCs, the increase in resolution allows much more detail and information to be shown on screen. This is bound to benefit games a lot too. However, the downside is that you will also be able to see the difference between reality and TV more clearly.

- In the end, the move from SD to HD is taking place on TVs also. Therefore, if games don't move along with the TV image, then they will look unrealistic and worse than reality just for that reason alone. This is definitely partly driven by the increase in TV size. That does make an increase in resolution important. It may even fully negate the advantage of 720p in that respect.

I also don't believe that, say, animating trees blowing in the wind is more limited by rendering power than processing power. So in that sense, stuff like the Cell should really help making things look more real. I think what will make games look more realistic isn't so much determined by graphics fidelity - we are quickly approaching the point where graphics start to look very real already. Many people mistook GT4 for reality, for instance, especially when I had a replay running. Of course if you knew where to look or were more used to autosports, you'd be able to tell fairly quickly, but even so.

I think the cost for rendering something at 480p or 720p isn't that big. You could even render everything at 480p internally and then hardware upscale if you think that looks better. Possibly they could even experiment with some PC settings so you can run a game with higher detail levels/framerates if you have an SD tv. Probably will never happen, but who knows?

1080p will definitely be a big advantage for browsing on your regular TV

 

[London Geezer]

1080p will definitely be a big advantage for browsing on your regular TV

Heh, i've seen the new Sony 46X2000 being used as a PC monitor (it can take PC resolutions up to 1920x1080p through HDMI) and it's actually a bit daunting... Absolutely gorgeous, both in size and detail, but my god that thing is big for internet browsing...

 

[Squeak]

One of the aspects of graphics where the concept of diminishing return are most apparent, are with regards to resolution. The visual fidelity or impressiveness from 16x16 to infinity is a rapidly flattening curve.

It's just the graphical leap in rendering at the lower resolution won't be that high, and so the fidelity is more desirable.

You can only base that "knowledge" upon seeing what happens when you turn down the resolution of a PC games and turn up the effects.
But thing is, PC games are not optimised for running at lower resolutions at all, in fact one could be rude an say that they aren't optimized for anything.

I'd say that 480p with good AA and lots of shading ops pp. will look much preferable to 720p with 360 level of AA and fewer shading ops pp.

 

[ninzel]

I tend to agree so far..although it may change later as more games get better graphics on top of higher resolution. The two latest game's I played were COD2 and Dead Rising. Both of these games look last gen with the exception of higher resolution. There are some added shader effects,but that's about it. So far next gen is not looking so next gen.T he only games I've been impressed with graphically are the ones like Prey and Condemmed that are in small dark areas. But again that was being done last gen with games like Doom3.
In terms of texture detail,animation and lighting I've yet to see any huge leaps over what was being done last gen.

 

[SonyNinja]

1080p has - 2,073,600 pixels
720p has - 921,600
480p has - 307,200

 

[SonyNinja]

In terms of texture detail,animation and lighting I've yet to see any huge leaps over what was being done last gen.

D post

How about this?

http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=10869&type=wmv&pl=game

 

[Squeak]

1080p has - 2,073,600 pixels
720p has - 921,600
480p has - 307,200

The trouble is that 720p doesn't look three times better. I'd say at most something like 1.5 times, based on how otherwise identical pictures look when they have been scaled to either resolution.

One of the most glaring things for to me in many 360 games is the 30fps, most seem to run at.
It really brings the overall impressiveness of the whole game down by a lot. 480p games wouldn't need to cut framerate down like that.