Ever higher-res is "cheap", gaming has lost its way?

[Onlooker1]

I keep thinking about a developer comment that standard TV and DVDs at 480p resolution looks so much better than any games do, and I'm wondering what has gone wrong with technology/consoles. Perhaps they are infected with "Peeceeitis" where resolution was the obsession?

Why aren't the silicon and tools shooting for life-like scenery at 480p, instead of constantly obsessing over increased frame buffer sizes? This means much MUCH more emphasis on geometry and lighting and physics and not as much emphasis on huge textures (to cover for lack of geometry) and raw pixel-pushing bandwidth (to fill all those large areas of similar colored-pixels) ..(and also, no need to upgrade your TV just for gaming).

There were a few past-gen games that had the right idea, at least in some scenes for a few magic seconds, but we seem to be off down the wrong track now with 720, 1080 etc... the consoles (and PCs) seem to me to be unbalanced now, like dragsters, very fast in a straight line but incapable of navigating the most simple road course. We need rally cars, not dragsters.. and I include the Wii in this. eg: it does a very poor version of far cry, which even its best uber PC state does a very poor imitation of jungle/island scenes.

All the benchmarks don't help as well. The benchmark obsessions are how fast a graphics card can do increasing resolutions, rather than increasingly persuasive scenes at the same TV resolution.. it seems our metrics are as wrong as the direction...

 

[ector]

The main reason that TV is "OK" despite the low resolution is that every single camera angle is chosen to show and focus on the people and scenery optimally. No such thing can be done in games generally, since the player chooses the camera angle, so you need more resolution to really "see clearly".

 

[kyleb]

I'd say that the main reason is that reality is 'rendered' at a fair higher resolution than anything used for any games, and the images on a standard DVD and such effectively downsampled from that.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

the consoles (and PCs) seem to me to be unbalanced now, like dragsters, very fast in a straight line but incapable of navigating the most simple road course.

Based on what?
Your overall argument is pretty old and has been discussed. I personally don't agree with you at all. 720p and higher is very pleasing to my eye, especially on a large screen.

 

[Crayon]

Think of it this way:

The resolution hike from 480 to 1080 has been a long time in the making. There's no stopping this train!

I was talking to some friends about this a few weeks ago. We agreed that we were both bummed out about how the drastic resolution increases have soaked so much of our generationaly leap. But we also agreed that there is hope: Gears of War. It's the "can do" game. You can take it home and play it, and it looks head and shoulders far beyond anything you played on the previous round of systems- at any resolution.

So the resolution hike is more of a one-time hit. Next round, games will remain at 1080, and all the graphical silicon will start going into stuff other than resolution.

And remember- ten years ago, Quake 2 was some pretty hot shit. And ten years before that, Shadow of the Beast was the bleeding edge of graphics. With graphics technology rushing forward so quickly, we'll see photorealism soon enough. And before long we'll even take it for granted. So enjoy the ride!

 

[DuckThor Evil]

So the resolution hike is more of a one-time hit. Next round, games will remain at 1080, and all the graphical silicon will start going into stuff other than resolution.

Good post overall, but I wouldn't call 1080 norm for this generation. The norm is going to be 720p. 1080 will probably stay in the minority, I mean Xbox had quite a many 720p games already during last gen, and I expect PS3 to get similar treatment, but 720p is the norm. so if the norm will jump to 1080 in the PS4 gen, we will still get a performance hit from resolution upgrade.

 

[liolio]

I would be sad that next gen try to push 1080p no matter what.
it's twice the memory footprint, it's twice the number of pixels=>twice number of shaders op needed.
I don't know for bandwith requirements.
this swift in resolution will cut alone by 2 graphic performance improvement.
say a X10 increase will turn in a x5 improvement.
In fact, even this gen I think dev should have been allowed to do whatever they want in regard to the tv installed market.
Marketting point.... PR war, huge improvements for only 15% of the owners worldwide...

Sometime, I'm wandering if MS really wanted to go 720p 4xAA, tiling appear to be a pain in the ass, and 10MB is just fine for 480p 4xAA with one tile, and react to sony move the hardware being flexible and powerfull enought to push 720P, tiling seems more and more like a software thing not something present in hardware by design.

 

[kyetech]

yep, and without getting my calculator out, going from 720p to 1080p is around a 2 fold increase in onscreen pixels. Thus, that will make a difference. But think of this though...

By the time we have PS4 et al, we will be dealing with the 32nm process affording a graphics chip around the 3 billion transistor mark (2010 - 2011)

We can expect at least 8x or more the power of a G80 !!!!

So I hardly think 1080p will be a problem at that time.

 

[ninzel]

I agree that HD gaming was completely uneeded at this point. Having played many games now in HD on 360 ,I can say I would much rather have all that power devoted to making that best looking games at 480p.
The move to HD in gaming is all about the move to HD in general. MS looked at Sony's probable future plans as a hardware maker and saw that they were going to push HD for the sake of selling their TV's and HD players. So MS simply wanted to be perceived as keeping up.

 

[22psi]

Sorry guys, after playing Gears of War, I am not going back to 480p

 

[liolio]

I agree that HD gaming was completely uneeded at this point. Having played many games now in HD on 360 ,I can say I would much rather have all that power devoted to making that best looking games at 480p.
The move to HD in gaming is all about the move to HD in general. MS looked at Sony's probable future plans as a hardware maker and saw that they were going to push HD for the sake of selling their TV's and HD players. So MS simply wanted to be perceived as keeping up.

+1000... just felt like a kid...lol

But I'm sure some people here could make the calculation for us:
AF level on 360 and ps3 is still far from being skyrocket/
Lots of people said that 720p is nice as tectures look great => but AF lake severly cut the IQ gain bigger tectures are suposed to bring US.

Say with two tiles (almost no performance hit 5%) at 480p how much the 360 is able to push in regard to bandwith and processing power?
8xAA, 16xAF?

 

[Clockwork]

Here is a simple enough answer:

Play 480p content on a large tv and you will quickly realize how horrid things look. The other weekend I played a bit of the new Zelda game on Wii and also rented Bully (played on my PS3) and although the games were fun, the jaggies and low quality really made my eyes bleed.


Even a simple resolution increase would have helped quite a bit.

 

[liolio]

Ok but zelda push no kind of AA or AF it very likely that things get blurry and turn in a jaggies fest.
I don't know how lot of AA and AF would compare with highter resolution, but most consumers don't have a hdtv, even in US.

 

[infinity4]

for somewhat reason i cannot find diff between 1080p and 720p with same 1080p source. i really wish ms and sony stay on with 720p next gen. maybe i need to get glasses

 

[liolio]

Sorry guys, after playing Gears of War, I am not going back to 480p

May be your right, but as i'm still a sdtv owners I'll fell somewhat ripped, personnal biais

 

[DuckThor Evil]

most consumers don't have a hdtv, even in US.

Most consumers don't even have a game console... So that's a moot point. I would be willing to bet that HD consoles and HDTVs are VERY often found in the same household. There is enough HDTVs and the number is skyrocketing as we speak, besides only the HD-display coverage of the target audience is what matters, who cares if your granny doesn't have one.

 

[Capeta]

The problem is current realtime graphics cannot reach CGI level at 480p in-game. Since this is not possible the only other improvement you could do is higher resolutions. If a game like GOW were to have been developed to run at 480p, it wouldn't look any closer to CGI. Make sense?

If the technology was there to produce realtime in-game CGI level graphics at 480p from a console you would see it. That's the reason why you don't see it, it's not possible, it's not because everybody wants HD graphics.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You know, people say at 480p we'd have much better looking graphics, but I have to question that. I'd like to see someone take a 7900 and target it for 480p rendering, to see what can really be achieved. As I see it, you'll have more shader power per pixel, and that's probably about it. If you're using that power for IQ, textures resolution, polygon resolution, and everything else, wants to stay high-res just like an HD target. What's really needed is realtime GI class lighting and excellent IQ, which I don't think taking this hardware and targetting 480p would allow. Every other trick you'd use at 480p, you can generally use at 720p I think, except trading AA for higher image fidelity. Personally I don't know what people expect a drop in resolution to get them. Those on SDTVs are probably most feeling the rub of 720p targets because they're not being catered for with proper support for their displays. If the 720p renderings were being downsampled effectively, the IQ would likely be enough to silence complaints.

 

[Rangers]

If 480p movies are so great, why are movies moving to high resolution as well with Blu-Ray and HDDVD?

Simply put, higher resolution looks better.

A RTS using "real life" film quality graphics on 480p, you would still have trouble resolving small units, text etc.

It's sort of how, surfing the web is ugly on SDTV.

But there's nothing stopping Devs from doing what you suggest on PC, I suppose. Carmack sort of did with Doom3, which was actually almost targeted at 800X600 initially. It was meant to look great but at lower resolutions. Of course the hardware quickly caught up, but at release it was targeted at pretty low res to be playable.

 

[kyetech]

You know, people say at 480p we'd have much better looking graphics, but I have to question that. I'd like to see someone take a 7900 and target it for 480p rendering, to see what can really be achieved. As I see it, you'll have more shader power per pixel, and that's probably about it. If you're using that power for IQ, textures resolution, polygon resolution, and everything else, wants to stay high-res just like an HD target. What's really needed is realtime GI class lighting and excellent IQ, which I don't think taking this hardware and targetting 480p would allow. Every other trick you'd use at 480p, you can generally use at 720p I think, except trading AA for higher image fidelity. Personally I don't know what people expect a drop in resolution to get them. Those on SDTVs are probably most feeling the rub of 720p targets because they're not being catered for with proper support for their displays. If the 720p renderings were being downsampled effectively, the IQ would likely be enough to silence complaints.

Agreed, That is right on the money. you cant just scale down to 480p and expect CGI graphics. since you are still limited to the same graphics feature set. We cant do GI 480p and we cant do it 1080p. What we need is DX11 hardware and substantially more power. Maybe then ! And by then Im sure wether its 480P or 1080P wont make *that* much differrence (Apart from 1080p will look much better).