/me pours some gasoline on the fire to douse the flames. 
Ethics of resolutions displayed on back of box
- Thread starter Diamond.G
- Start date
I apologize then. I was under the impression from your prior posts that resolution did not matter only image quality mattered. Where I was approaching the subject from the vantage point that image resolution is an aspect of image quality.
The reason a higher priority is placed on resolution is it is an important buying aspect to the buying public currently. Things such as texture resolution can be covered up by smart design as well as low poly counts. Whatever your poly count or texture res or shader quality, the final rendered image resolution is a determining factor for how a game will look on screen. If resolution did not matter why not render at 320x240? Higher resolution allows higher fidelity.
Suppose the pgr4 team is able to tweak their engine to the point where they can now render pgr3 at 1920x1080 with every effect intact. Would this not deserve kudos given that their past effort was 1024x600? The thing that I don't understand is why the truth about rendered resolution is somehow shameful or that it should be covered up and swept under a rug.
The problem lyes when a player buys a game and the back says a specific resolution. The player sets the machine/game to output at that resolution to their TV only to find out that the whole time a lower resolution is what the game was designed with and would have looked best on their TV.
Game says 1080P - Player selects 1080P - Game upscales to 1080p from 720P - Player gets less quality then selecting 720P to begin with.
Wouldn't you be upset? The whole time your playing the game at the resolution you "believed" its being rendered at only to find out if you chose the "actual" resolution it was rendered at you would have had a better image.
I would also like to argue about the majority of HDTV's having bad scalers, I hope your not basing it on the assumption that SD looks like crap on HDTV's. Since just about every LCD TV is 720P and it scales every signal 480i - 1080i to 720P think they do a damn good job when given a good source. The chance that a $300 console has a better scaler then a $2000 tv is absurd, just like the people buying upscaling DVD players because they think they will get a better picture..a very good chance they wont.
Dregun
Agreed and the TV makers are just as bad but their situation is even worse for two reasons:
1) their more expensive 2) in some cases it is impossible to find the actual resolution of the set even on their websites.
Scaling when necessary for certain displays is not in question and it is nice that xb360 can scale the image for you to whatever resolution you want but it would be nice to have the native resolution on the box somewhere.
How about just an option in the dashboard for:
"If native resolution is " + insert desired resolution +" then don't scale. Else, scale."
inefficient
Veteran
If the 1080p mode really 960x1080 mode, then letting the game scale is more pixels being rendered than 720p native.
Some people might say they can see a difference. But on my 1080p screen there is no perceptible difference in VF5 between letting the game scale from 720p to 1080p or letting the TV take care of the scaling - even looking very closely for it.
That's interesting. Thanks Faf!:smile:
Do you know if Sony will be using a similar tactic with their scaler now being "open" to developers?
I meant on the game box, not the xbox.:smile:
The scalers will vary from tv to tv. This is really beside the point though as the quality of the scaler isn't in question. However when upscaling it is infering detail but even the best scaler cannot create detail that isn't there in the first place. It is for this reason that I feel it is disingenuous to not state the native resolution on the back of the box.
The ability to scale to any resolution exists for all games so in that sense as has already been stated in this thread, one could do away with the need to have the existing checkbox resolutions on the back of the box as it's about the same as saying "dolby digital 7.1, 5.1, 2.1, 2.0" listing them individually as if one cannot do the same on another media. All DVD's can scale to only 2 speakers if that is all you have and can scale up from 2 channels to 8 channels. However one does not expect to find Dolby 7.1 on a vhs tape. If you do it raises question marks just like one should not find 1080p on a game that renders 25% of that resolution.
I did come across something interesting over the weekend. on a Playstation3 basketball game I noticed it had a bolded splash on the front of the game box displaing "FULL HD 1080P!". Perhaps this is all that is needed as if a game is not "Full 1080p!" or "Full 720p!" it doesn't really matter anyway as to those that do care will want the game to match their specific resolution on their monitor.
So I would be ok with a "Full720p" or "Full1080p" to be stamped on games that match these resolutions in full and all else assume they are at an oddball res if they don't have one of these "stamps".
Or
A model of:
1024x600--->480p
1024x600--->720p
1024x600--->1080p
960x1080--->480p
960x1080--->720p
960x1080--->1080p
Diamond.G: see above post
I saw your post, and wanted to type something else. So I'll go ahead and ask what I wanted to:
So are we all willing/prepared to see games that have different quality levels at different resolutions (someone mentioned NBA Homecourt in another thread)? Make it more and more like the PC gaming landscape.
Of course this is assuming that there is no other way to offer the resolution.
I think that is a developer issue/choice. I would be for two options which affect resolution and or framerate.
The developer/publisher would have to decide if it is worth it to invest the time/money necesary to do so. If the market gets quickly saturated with 1080p displays and shuns games which are not 1080p then they may decide it's worth it to include a 1080p native mode. Same for the 60fps croud in racing games.
The problem I have isn't the content, it's the misrepresentation of the content.
