I think it's pretty simple. If you have the fillrate and bandwidth for the AA and AF necessary for a stupendous-looking 480p image, you've probably got the fillrate to the same image in 720p without as much enhancement, which would probably look better anyway.
Ever higher-res is "cheap", gaming has lost its way?
- Thread starter Onlooker1
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If it's not possible at 480p it won't be possible at 720p. No I'm sorry you are making no sense. There are still lot's of improvements left to make in graphics in general,whether it be in 480p or 720p or 1080p. It's just the lower the resolution the more resources you have left to make those improvements because they aren't being used to keep a playable framerate.
A lower res would for example allow for more AA or AF to be applied. Or allow for more detail in general.
I think your missing the point. Movies are real,so they already look real at 480p. The only place to go with movies is higher resolution. Video games are far from looking real at 480p or 720p or 1080p. Staying at 480p simply affords you more of an opportunity to achieve the look or realistic sooner than if you moved to a higher resolution. A higher resolution doesn't add better lighting and shadows to a scene. A higher resolution doesn't add for more fluid animations,or better lip synching. A higher resolution doesn't add more detail to a sparse game world.
It's probably a point of value.
It doesn't take that much arguably to raise res to 720p.
If you can increase your resources spent 10% and get the same image in 720p as 640, that probably makes more sense than making it look 10% more real at 640.
It's a case of tradeoffs. The move to 720p was good because it was worth it. Personally I doubt if 1080p is however.
It doesn't take that much arguably to raise res to 720p.
If you can increase your resources spent 10% and get the same image in 720p as 640, that probably makes more sense than making it look 10% more real at 640.
It's a case of tradeoffs. The move to 720p was good because it was worth it. Personally I doubt if 1080p is however.
inefficient
Veteran
If you think a 480p movie looks good, wait till you see it at 1080p!
Anyway to render a 3D game's 480p frame so that it does not look like crap, your going to want to use at least 8x or 16x AA. And at those AA levels, your memory usage due to AA buffers and bandwidth required etc are all going to be higher than a native HD resolution. 720p w/ 4xAA will be cheaper than 480p w/ 16xAA.
Good looking 480p is actually not cheaper.
Anyway to render a 3D game's 480p frame so that it does not look like crap, your going to want to use at least 8x or 16x AA. And at those AA levels, your memory usage due to AA buffers and bandwidth required etc are all going to be higher than a native HD resolution. 720p w/ 4xAA will be cheaper than 480p w/ 16xAA.
Good looking 480p is actually not cheaper.
1280x720 / 3 = 640x480.
So you get 3x the pixel count at 1280x720.
So you could in theory throw ~3x the pixel processing at the screen, although it would probably be significantly less than this number, as you have to bump up the filtering quality, and your bandwidth read hit won't decrease by 3x, as the same textures will be being used.. Top it off the AA hit would be bigger if you are using AA, as edge pixels will be 3x as common... Etc.
so we could assume 2x performance difference. Well, thats not really so big anymore. You could make your lights ~30% bigger, which would boost their on screen size significantly enough... It wouldn't really be that obvious though.
I'm currently mucking about with a deferred renderer, which has stupidly large light numbers.. Think 100+, ~15 full screen at most times. I started work on it at 800x600, now with a lot of work I've got that at 1280x720 at a similar framerate. My next trick I'll try is render the lighting at half resolution, except on the edges. So chances are I'm going to see 640x480 speed at 1280x720, just with more detail where it counts, and equivalent detail elsewhere.
The point I guess I'm trying to make, is that if you are smart, you can get away with very high resolutions with similar amount of work, you just need to be careful where the resolution differences are obvious. Lots of games already do this.. For example almost all games that do bloom filters (usually badly) process them at significantly lower resolutions, even gears.
I will say though, I am dissapointed that gears doesn't supersample very much in SD... unlike R6:Vegas, you can still get horrific jaggies in gears sometimes
So you get 3x the pixel count at 1280x720.
So you could in theory throw ~3x the pixel processing at the screen, although it would probably be significantly less than this number, as you have to bump up the filtering quality, and your bandwidth read hit won't decrease by 3x, as the same textures will be being used.. Top it off the AA hit would be bigger if you are using AA, as edge pixels will be 3x as common... Etc.
so we could assume 2x performance difference. Well, thats not really so big anymore. You could make your lights ~30% bigger, which would boost their on screen size significantly enough... It wouldn't really be that obvious though.
I'm currently mucking about with a deferred renderer, which has stupidly large light numbers.. Think 100+, ~15 full screen at most times. I started work on it at 800x600, now with a lot of work I've got that at 1280x720 at a similar framerate. My next trick I'll try is render the lighting at half resolution, except on the edges. So chances are I'm going to see 640x480 speed at 1280x720, just with more detail where it counts, and equivalent detail elsewhere.
The point I guess I'm trying to make, is that if you are smart, you can get away with very high resolutions with similar amount of work, you just need to be careful where the resolution differences are obvious. Lots of games already do this.. For example almost all games that do bloom filters (usually badly) process them at significantly lower resolutions, even gears.
I will say though, I am dissapointed that gears doesn't supersample very much in SD... unlike R6:Vegas, you can still get horrific jaggies in gears sometimes
That seems arbitrary. The top spec is 1080. It's available. Next time I buy a TV, I'm sure as hell not going to go for 720 when 1080 is available.
That's assuming, of course, that there are 1080p sources available. So why should games stop at 720p? Why is it not worth it? I know I still see jaggies in a 720 game.
It varies. The centre of view is at a much higher resolution that the periphery but, of course, you can move your eyes
And to answer the original poster's question, I would say that the answer has a lot to do with lighting and animation.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/GDCE_2003_Presentations.html
see The Elegance of Brute Force
though a few things are a bit bogus ie lots of figures are underestimated heaps
see The Elegance of Brute Force
though a few things are a bit bogus ie lots of figures are underestimated heaps
Um...you are actually agreeing with what I posted. Moving to a lower resolution doesn't magically allow you to do better graphics because the feature set is still the same. Also your post about reality and movies don't make any sense because CG movies look a whole lot better than realtime stuff. Like I said the GPUs aren't powerful enough to render CG movies in realtime even at 480p so targeting that resolution for a game isn't going to give you better graphics.
Until we can experience games the same way we experience the real world the arguement over graphics and resolution is basically irrelevant ,it is still just various degrees of fake.
I think we're already at a point where higher resolution doesn't add much to the overall realism of graphics. I want to see a realtime in-game Dinosaur like what you see in Juraissic Park or Kink Kong at 720p. I don't want something that looks worse realistically speaking at 1080p.
There are only about 100000 rods in the macula lutea of our eyes - that is the zone that gets the focused image. The rest is lateral/periferic vision, not focused. Actually, in order to see the full HD image from a HDTV you need to move your eyes from one point of the screen to the other.
I agree. You could extend that arguement down to 480p vs 720p as well,this is the point I've been making.
I've been playing Rayman:RR on the Wii vs. Rainbow Six on the 360 and I see no difference . Neither one fools me more,they both just look like video games. I guess in terms of perceiving realism my mind works with an all or nothing way.
I'm not sure how that translates into something comparable to a TV resolution,if it even does.
It doesnt translate. You cannot see the whole image of a TV as a focused image. The closer you sit in front of a TV (or any image), the more you loose focus on the picture as a whole. That's why people usually tend to sit a few meters away from the TV (or in the back seats of the movie theatre).
There is a certain limitation of our eyes, which could make SD sound like good enough resolution, but HD it's still good to have, since it allows us to get better images of those areas of the screen that we focus on - for instance, the next turn on a racing game.
HD is fine to have but it's not some magic bullet as some marketers would have us believe that will make games more real or even more attractive to look at when you consider how far gaming has to go in other areas. I can go from Wii to 360 to DS all in one day and still enjoy the games depending on what the developers have done,not some arbitrary setting of the hardware.
I'm an avid DS gamer - so I fully agree with that. (Off topic - 215 is DA S**T)
I think that technology could have been built so that we get extremely acomplished games in terms of modeling and animation (and other areas) in SD resolution from our consoles. But Sony (and other TV manufacturers and broadcasters etc) needed a new format, a HD one, to boost their sales of ever larger screens.
And that's ok - ad least with me - if one has to spend some money, it might ad least be on a new TV rather than other things...
This kind of discussion always goes one way: the camp without HDTVs, saying HD is not needed. And the camp with HDTVs who can see everyday that on their large screens, 480p looks dreadful compared to HD material.
Sure DVD movies look great, but that's not indicative of how good 480i/p looks, it's more indicative of how reality looks better.
There is no PC or console made now that could give good enough graphics at 480p simply because the technology is not there, not because "the power is being used for higher resolutions instead of making the game look pretty".
In the end, 720p is very cheap compared to what is needed to make a 480p game look like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
Sure DVD movies look great, but that's not indicative of how good 480i/p looks, it's more indicative of how reality looks better.
There is no PC or console made now that could give good enough graphics at 480p simply because the technology is not there, not because "the power is being used for higher resolutions instead of making the game look pretty".
In the end, 720p is very cheap compared to what is needed to make a 480p game look like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.