I do not own a HDTV. All my life I watched TV shows on old, big, bulky TVs. I played games on them as well. Now, Most console games are going to be 1080p. I have often wondered what a major game developed for 480p would look like. Personally, I think they would look great. Will a Ps4 or 720 developer ever make a high budget game that uses 480p? For example, imagine playing through an episode of the Walking Dead.
480p -- Dreaming of what could be done.
- Thread starter babcat
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You don't need to dream - there's no shortage of games rendered at low resolutions on current gen consoles. Typically they are rendered at low res and then upscaled to 1080p before overlaying the UI. Maybe not quite as low as 480p but there's a few big names in the 540p area. Alan Wake springs to mind as a good example if I remember.
In short - the games would likely look almost exactly the same as they do now - just the text on the screen would be unreadable.
PS: last speculation I read on here about XBox 720 was that Microsoft is including multiple display planes to help developers keep doing this low res rendering optimisation. If accurate it seems very likely that games will continue to be rendered significantly below native resolution.
In short - the games would likely look almost exactly the same as they do now - just the text on the screen would be unreadable.
PS: last speculation I read on here about XBox 720 was that Microsoft is including multiple display planes to help developers keep doing this low res rendering optimisation. If accurate it seems very likely that games will continue to be rendered significantly below native resolution.
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Gradthrawn
Veteran
Holy crap! You've been one of the loudest voices about the next generation needing more power and extra components (like the 9970's SPUs in the PS4) and you're still playing in SD? Seriously?!?
Please tell me I'm misunderstanding.
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Holy crap! You've been one of the loudest voices about the next generation needing more power and extra components (like the 9970's SPUs in the PS4) and you're still playing in SD? Seriously?!?
yes. that is correct. and even though I have only played on SD, I have not seen one game that looks like a TV show. I wish instead of pushing higher resolutions that game developers would make realistic 480p games.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Sure but CRT doesn't necessarily meant 480p.
I was playing Subspace at 1800x1440 resolution back in 1997 on a massive (in size AND weight ) 20" (or was it 22"?) Sony Trinitron CRT. That actually gave a tactical advantage in game as the battlefield wasn't scaled to resolution. More resolution just allowed you to see more of the battlefield.Anyway, if all games were limited to 480p on CRT TV at typical living room TV viewing distances, the IQ would be absolutely incredible if we assumed a good video feed without heavy color bleeding (component video or even s-video at a minimum), while the text would absolutely annoyingly HUGE in order to be readable.
Lots of techniques that would be impossible at 1080p or just unplayable at 720p would be feasible at 480p.
Move that close enough that you can discern finer detail, like a computer monitor at ~2 feet, and that starts to fall apart pretty badly, however.
Regards,
SB
You'll never get a game that looks as good as a TV show by targeting the same resolution directly. Only by dealing with a much larger amount of information could you begin to come close, at which point it's comparatively not that much more expensive (if at all) to just output at that higher resolution.
RenegadeRocks
Legend
To get a TV or movie quality IQ, the games will have to render at much higher resolutions and then downsampled to 480 p to see the kindof detail u see in movies on ur TV. If movies were directly recorded on 480p, frankly, u wouldn't see half of that detail.
It will be back to square one.
It will be back to square one.
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Bagel seed
Veteran
Film is roughly equivalent to 4k isn't it? There's no way to render a native 480p game and make it look life like no matter how much power. It'll still be jaggified to the max.
the low resolution of tv show on VHS or VCD really kill details but the picture look realistic to me. It seems the way the light affect the objects and shadows give the impression of "Realistic"
RenegadeRocks
Legend
Exactly, i once had this same discusson with my friends and the reason we see so much details in a 480p movie is because the parwnt format is super high res and all that detail gets dwonsampled to a 480p screen leading to a crisp and detailed picture. There is no way a native 480p image can look that good. Devs will still have to render at higher res and frankly, why not then just watch it at higher res.
But this does bring up a point: for ppl who are using 480p dislpays, wouldn't it be great if devs still render at 1080p(next gen) and then downsample it to 480p(aspect rati adjusted) and then dislpay it? Rahter than rendering at 480p for them? Wouldn't that bring in a better picture for those with CRTs.
It's not just that effectively film is downsampling a much higher resolution image it's also that the real world is essentially using:
5D rendering (motion blur & defocus blur)
fully converged ray tracing (including subsurface scattering, transparency, etc)
area lighting soft shadows
using very high detail geometry
using very high detailed textures
participating media
perlian noise functions for grime and dust
perfect motion capture/animation
physically realistic animation of objects (muscles, wind, fire, etc).
super sampled antialiasing
etc etc
We can't do most of these things realtime at 480p yet let alone all of them at the same time while running game code. We're bounded by the lack of algorithms, the amount of memory on a GPU, the amount of processing available, bandwidth and to a much lesser extent the cost of going too far outside the fixed function pipeline. Fortunately that means there's still lots of work for us to do in hardware design and rendering techniques but it isn't the case that rendering at 720/1080p is just a silly choice and if we hadn't gone down that route we could be rendering photo realistic SD resolutions.
5D rendering (motion blur & defocus blur)
fully converged ray tracing (including subsurface scattering, transparency, etc)
area lighting soft shadows
using very high detail geometry
using very high detailed textures
participating media
perlian noise functions for grime and dust
perfect motion capture/animation
physically realistic animation of objects (muscles, wind, fire, etc).
super sampled antialiasing
etc etc
We can't do most of these things realtime at 480p yet let alone all of them at the same time while running game code. We're bounded by the lack of algorithms, the amount of memory on a GPU, the amount of processing available, bandwidth and to a much lesser extent the cost of going too far outside the fixed function pipeline. Fortunately that means there's still lots of work for us to do in hardware design and rendering techniques but it isn't the case that rendering at 720/1080p is just a silly choice and if we hadn't gone down that route we could be rendering photo realistic SD resolutions.
we can achieve that on PC using supersampling (or is it Ubersampling on The Witcher ...). Some Xbox 360 games also does that. The game rendered on 720p but downscaled to TV resolution.
The result are There almost no aliasing to be seen but as usual, text are unreadable :/
The games that render in low resolution when connected on SDTV give more stable frame rate, have aliasing problem, the text are bigger and readable. I think IDOLM@STER does that.
Oh dear God, please never subject me to companies marketing 5D technology. Ever.
It's not really marketing - it's how we are supposed to render pixels... A pixel's colour in a film uses 5 dimensions. The x,y normally used. The u,v, position on the camera lense (i.e. Depth of field) and the integral of the motion over time t.
pixel = f(x,y,u,v,t)
There's nothing special about using more than 2-3 dimensions and to get realistic results you have to:
http://bps11.idav.ucdavis.edu/talks/09-towardBlurryRasterizerMunkberg-BPS2011.pdf
While it would be interesting to see what devs can come up with at 480p resolution with the new consoles it is something I wish they never go after. As someone who does have an HDTV I like the new benchmark set by the standard in terms of visual fidelity. Standard 480p just doesn't have the muster any more and watching TV shows at that resolution just looks dated. The pixels just don't have enough detail for me any more and it would be a giant step back both in terms of gaming and actual TV. I remember buying my first HDTV and it having blown me away when watching Dave Letterman late at night. I set up the old TV (a Sony Trinitron that had very good picture quality for its time) and new one side by side. David Letterman was wearing a sweater that had some patterns on it, on the Sony the pattern came up as red circles with a hint of yellow, on the HDTV it could be observed the shapes were actually red squares with a border of yellow around them. It was a dream. Then hooking up the Xbox 360 to it and seeing the difference HD resolution truly makes means that even HD resolution is a substantial bump in imaqe quality for games. A higher resolution is just better, it makes the image overall sharper. I love the fact that I can see wrinkles in people's even in commercials for beauty products.
And some games only works on HD... (remembering the horror of LA Noire examining every junk on ground)
RenegadeRocks
Legend
u,v would be parameters, not dimensions. x, y, z, t are the dimensions we work in. An in film, 't' is limited to FPS and shutter duration+interval, so we're not really working with full freedom in the 4th dimension. So it's definitely 3D that films work in (3D films, 2D films work in 2 dimensions per frame, natch), not 5D.
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