Yes I think the 540P 4XAA thing might have been the right decision...for this game. Because it allowed them to ratchet up the rest. And the game has a gauzy, dreamlike atnosphere and locale anyway, so it can work for this particular game. And it might work for something like The Last Guardian too.
[360] Alan Wake - Still awake
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Do they have to tile for 540p@4XAA at all or no?
yes, 540p 4xMSAA color+Z buffers are around 16MB in size.
Man, the OP in that thread is really harsh on H3's lighting. I disagree with him on that point. H3 was one of the first games where I thought "Wow! I can finally see!". Most other games are a bit too dark for my tastes. Of course, that could just be art rather than tech.
I really hope AW has a demo. I'm not particularly interested in the game, but I'd like to check out the visuals.
I really hope AW has a demo. I'm not particularly interested in the game, but I'd like to check out the visuals.
AW FB is 1280x720 so game can't be scaled from 960x540 to 1920x1080.
Interesting about the resolution. I never clued in to the scaling idea. The low resolution will definitely make for a softer image, but maybe the elimination of scaling errors really does make it a better choice than a resolution like 600p (1024x600). My only real question is whether 540p will provide enough resolution for detailed textures. There are a few exceptions (god of war 3, uncharted 2 etc), but most games we play are 720p or lower with noticeably low quality textures.
Remedy seems to pride itself in using high quality textures. Maybe they feel 540p is high enough to display reasonable quality textures relative to most other console games.
Edit: Trejser is right. They did say the framebuffer is 720p, so that does rule out perfect 1080p scaling.
Remedy seems to pride itself in using high quality textures. Maybe they feel 540p is high enough to display reasonable quality textures relative to most other console games.
Edit: Trejser is right. They did say the framebuffer is 720p, so that does rule out perfect 1080p scaling.
When outputting 1080p. How many XB360 users are running 1080p to make it a target resolution? I thought half of them were on SDTVs. Plus aliasing artefacts shouldn't be that much a problem with a decent upscaler. 720p upscaled to 768p sets isn't full of chunky lines like the Bad Old Days of non-native 640x480 upscaled to a 1024x768 LCD monitor. I can't see 540p having been picked with a view to a final 1080p output (irrespective of the 720p output).
ShadowRunner
Veteran
Come on guys, are we really supossed to believe 540p is better than 720p? its nonsense. I can guarantee you if they could have made AW run at 720 4xAA they would have. A dev making a decision to sacriffice resolution for performance reasons is one thing but lets not kid ourselves into thinking its anything other than that.
corduroygt
Banned
If half the 360 users are on sdtv's, doesn't this justify the 540p resolution? Why spend the budget on something half the people won't even see, and spend it on effects everyone would see at the cost of lower resolution to HDTV owners (but still higher than sd res)
Well, I agree with you 100% that 720p is better than 540p if all other things are equal. Otherwise, it's tradeoffs.
46% of US homes have an HDTV. I'd be very surprised if the percentage of xbox 360 owners with an HDTV wasn't quite a bit higher.
540 only makes sense from a resource saving perspective as far as I'm concerned. You are targetting 3 different levels of user, those with SDTV, those with 720 or 768 and those with 1080P. They want to bring the best quality image to the most users and they decided the performance tradeoff was worth it. Any suggestion that its better because of some scaling issue is laughable. These are the first guys that figured out that 540 was actually superior to 720 or 600 or whatever other resolution that games have been using after so many years? I don't think so.
I think it was Cliffy B who said 50% of Gears 2 players were on SDTVs. Nope, it was Mark Rein.
I'd be interested in seeing what data he is basing that on.
dragonelite
Veteran
I believe they just saw at what resolution the 360 was setup while people were playing gears 2. I do know some people that had their 360 setup at 480p with a 1080p hdtv they forgot to change the settings good thing i told them.
Svensk Viking
Regular
I've wondered this for quite a while...When you lower the resolution on a PC game, the framerate instantly becomes higher...And apart from that, you can enable many other graphical extras and have it playable
Seeing that many 360 owners still has a SDTV(myself included), would it be hard for a game developer to give us something extra?
I understand that they can't make 1 version in 720p and then another in 480p+extra effects, but for example, would it be hard to give us smoother/stable FPS, or even 60 FPS?
They could have made it run at 1280 x 720 with 4xAA though. They could have made it run at 60fps, 1920 x 1080 with 4xMSAA...
We already know that over 50% of Gears 2 players played using SD output, but this doesn't have to be at odds with the figure you posted. For example, just because a household has a HDTV doesn't mean that a 360 will be plugged into it.
FPS also depends on the game code, the controls, AI, physics, collision detection and so on. While some games have some or all of these systems running at even higher refresh rates, most (particularly those with more complex stuff going on) are stuck at 30fps or so. You can't just magically double the XCPUs performance so that it won't bottleneck SDTV graphics, the way that you can almost always buy a bigger processor on a PC...
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