You'd have less vertical resolution...and the hardware scaler doesn't support vertical scaling! If you could scale vertically, dev could stick with 1280x720 and upscale to 1080i/p.
[B3D Article] "Ripping off the veil: The mysterious PS3 hardware scaler exposed"
- Thread starter Arun
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There is no mention of whether this horizontal scaling has any effect through an HDMI connection. Any TV with HDMI can do the scaling itself after the HDMI connection. The only issue with scaling thus far has been over analog connections, and over analog connections, horizontal scaling is a simple matter of adjusting the ratio between the RAMDAC's pixel clock and the horizontal scan rate, as I said earlier.
If this horizontal scaling does take, say, a 960x1080 image and output a 1920x1080 signal over HDMI, then of course digital supersampling would be required, and if this is done more or less without burden on the game, then there is something of a conventional video scaler in the PS3.
No. Besides most people don't realize that 90% of the so-called 1920x1080i broadcast material they watch is already a 1440ix1080i w/a three-quarter aspect pixel ratio...
No one has said it doesn't - it's just not exposed.
no scaler present from what I can see...
Sounds to me that there is no hardware scaler present and that Sony may be doing the scaling through the use of an SPU. I would not be surprised if they have simply freed up 4 MB that used to be in reserve for the OS and have put that in reserve for the horizontal scaling. Perhaps when they free up another an additional 4 MB we will get the vertical scaling as well. The only unfortunate thing about this is that 8MB will most likely never become available for other uses.
C'mon, if Sony had a hardware scaler available it should not have any impact on memory resources... the only way Sony is handling this problem is by taking away from some of the memory they had over allocated to the OS.
Sounds to me that there is no hardware scaler present and that Sony may be doing the scaling through the use of an SPU. I would not be surprised if they have simply freed up 4 MB that used to be in reserve for the OS and have put that in reserve for the horizontal scaling. Perhaps when they free up another an additional 4 MB we will get the vertical scaling as well. The only unfortunate thing about this is that 8MB will most likely never become available for other uses.
C'mon, if Sony had a hardware scaler available it should not have any impact on memory resources... the only way Sony is handling this problem is by taking away from some of the memory they had over allocated to the OS.
No.
Sorry, worded that wrong.
What a strange solution.
960x1080 doesn't really make a whole lot of sense as a render resolution. However, and I figure this must be a motivating factor, it directly and precisely adresses one specific complaint: the poor support for TVs that can accept 1080i but not 720p. 960 pixels across is more than enough for those, while the height is needed to make the interlaced output easier.
960x1080 doesn't really make a whole lot of sense as a render resolution. However, and I figure this must be a motivating factor, it directly and precisely adresses one specific complaint: the poor support for TVs that can accept 1080i but not 720p. 960 pixels across is more than enough for those, while the height is needed to make the interlaced output easier.
Darknight over at AVS forum appears to be be a dev who is dancing around the NDAs a bit in response to the B3D article:
-aldo
Being that the scaler issue has been an obvious thorn in Sony's side which Sony should have been able to avoid given their technical knowhow, I'm inclined to believe Darknight is correct, that there may be a very logical, necessary reason for Sony putting restrictions on the scaler. I'll leave it to others here who are obviously more knowledgeable than myself to ascertain Sony's intentions. :smile:
-aldo
And where, anywhere, has this been confirmed?
If anything all evidence seems to point to the opposite.
I did not intend for it to be taken as confirmed. It was meant as a case where what aldo said (or Darknight) was true. Being as it seems he knew, and knows what he is talking about. That, and Fafalada seems to be dancing around the issue.
Now, its my turn to ask you. Can you present "all evidence" and explain how it seems to point to "the opposite"? Because the way I see it, there is already evidence pointing towards the other way of the pessimism that was being passed around this issue of scaling on PS3 by certain exaggerating people, some from this very forum.
I think it's rather straightforward that Sony wants all content (video and games) to be natively rendered at 1080p to be able to say that they render in a higher resolution than their competitors. They also want to sell 1080p Sony television sets and push 1080p as the standard. If they scale to any old resolution, television resolution becomes less of an issue and their agenda won't be realized (no incentive to upgrade).
Personally, I think it's pretty shitty of them to hide the fact that there's a hardware scaler in there. I think they thought that no one would complain about resolution scaling and put it in there "just in case." They probably planned on eventually just removing it from the machine altogether as a cost saving measure for reducing production costs of the console. But now they are pissed because they realize that they have to leave it in.
That's my take on it.
Well, it's like HDMI capability in 360 hardware as currently constituted. If it's there, why dont they just turn it on? If they dont after some reasonable time, you can probably conclude it's not there, even though they dont come out and say it.
The poster that I'm refering to in this thread is phat, who has basically stated horizontal scaling can be done without a scalar. So it seems rather suspiscious Sony apparantly only turned on horizontal scaling.
That and, while people keep hiniting around about some reason the scaler isn't used. What could that be since 360 has had it functional from day one?
I'm certainly not knowledgable enough to say there's no working scaler in PS3..but there is certainly a lot of signs that there isn't. Otherwise, just turn it on already..
Which doesn't work on digital signals that output a fixed-sized framebuffer. Thus a 960x1080 rendering would have huge borders down the side when output over HDMI. To be able to output a 1920x1080 frame, you'd need to scale to a 1920x1080 buffer.
inefficient
Veteran
No, scaling to an entire buffer is wasteful and unnecessary.
You can do horizontal scaling entirely as an inline process. You just interpolate between the pixels as they come in and insert new ones into the output stream. For a (reasonably good quality) cubic filter you need just four pixels as inputs. Chump change.
Vertical inline scaling would need much more storage, because it requires you to keep multiple lines of pixels available as inputs.
Now that's still something I'd most definitely call a hardware scaler. It's not just an accidental capability of a bog-standard RAMDAC, you need to include those transistors into the design somewhere. NVIDIA's PC chips could do it for a while though.
I did think of that when posted, but I had to leave for work so I decided to leave it for someone else to correct
