Zeckensack said:
It isn't useful to move it to software because you need it all the time.
I never argued with the HD scaling issue - I argued with the SDTV support, which Has to be in software, whether we like it or not.
You don't? You'll want to account for aspect ratios on the application end, whether you scale or not. A 2D puzzler would react to a change in aspect ratio in an entirely different way than a 3D game. You can't hide this information from the app.
Which was my point exactly - there is no such thing as automatic conversion to SDTV without compromising quality and/or playability of the title.
Developer has to explicitly implement support for SDTV if we want it to be good - and the option to downscale (in hardware) is there regardless of any external scaling chips.
The difference is still the same. You either have a common method of performing the scaling as per the parameters you require or you don't.
There's nothing common about how SDTV is supported on 360 thus far. So yes, the difference is all the same - I have to implement support for SDTV resolution in my code, if I choose to scale, and whether it's with the GPU or another chip doesn't change anything.
There's a certain other game that renders at 1280x1024 ("wrong" aspect ratio for any TV format) and scales that to anamorphic widescreen with slight supersampling.
Technique that was common place for many last generation titles, possibly even majority on some platforms - and none of them have done it through external scalers.
The issue here, without flexible, general scaling, is two-fold:
1)You can't scale -- duh
I'll need this one explained to me, because as I mentioned above, people have been doing scaling without it for past 6 years - I'd argue majority of PS2 library does it (back and front buffers have different sizes) in some way or another.
2)You can't output that native "improper" res and expect TVs to display it properly.
No - for that you need explicit support in the title - but the issue is still relatively trivial, all you need is to adjust frontbuffer size to match that of TV setting.
Again, I was never refuting the stupidity of not having some way to address HD resolution outputs. In particular, why Sony didn't have the foresight to address this through development guidelines if they messed up on hardware side, but that's another debate alltogether.
