Halo 3 IQ discussion * - Stay civil and polite folks!
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See the audio example. If 2 games sounds fine in stereo, but on my 5.1 setup 1 sounds poorly and the other good, that is completely valid. If your screen diminishes the quality -- be it resolution (SDTV), contrast, response time, etc -- that is a valid point to consider. It doesn't trump everything, but this is a technical forum.
It is an IQ discussion. This is Beyond3D.
If an aspect of a game is enhanced/diminished by a user setup it is a relevant point of discussion, thank you very much.
I am not apologizing Jack Shit. And your posting history is a pretty telling tale of psychology so cut the crap.
So go on and tell me how the 6bit nature, low contrast, and poor blacks on most consumer LCDs are irrelevant when discussing IQ and leave your bias snides at home.
At the end of the day, people should keep their concerns to how a game looks on their display vs. someone else's, to themselves. If it looks good on your plasma/lcd/crt but looks bad on someone else plasma/lcd/crt, your words are not going to change their opinion and vice versa.
Having said that, your display is one of THE most important factors in PQ. All said and done, it's what you see. Certain displays (and display technologies) will exaggerate certain strenghts and weaknesses.
For shits and giggles, I'll take off the screens from my plasma and LCD. Then, we can hopefully extend this thread another 10+ pages.
Having said that, your display is one of THE most important factors in PQ. All said and done, it's what you see. Certain displays (and display technologies) will exaggerate certain strenghts and weaknesses.
For shits and giggles, I'll take off the screens from my plasma and LCD. Then, we can hopefully extend this thread another 10+ pages.
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If the "tune" sounds well (rythmically) then it is percepted as a good music or theme by most people, regardless if it's on a home theatre 7.1 channel stereo or grandmother's mono kitchen radio (the 7.1 just makes it sound even better).
Same goes for TV sets - plus LCDs (by far) don't vary so much in quality as some pretend here. A good looking game won't look much worse when watched on a "bad" TV set (and vice versa).
What you are saying, to general consumers technicals don't matter and the tune -- or in graphics, art -- is what carries the day.
And I would agree with this (although I am not sure you would draw the same correlation). Which explains why artistry and the "cool factor" is usually what defines what games look good to the general population.
Which goes a long way to explain why many games cut corners on filtering and anti-aliasing... even resolution... and putting that part of their budget into other elements of the game. Ditto 30fps and 60fps, some game types aren't as framerate sensative (ditto most consumers), so the extra resources at a lower framerate is seen as a general plus.
As a PC gamer I don't tend to agree in every case (I can pick high-AF, high-features, low resolution if I like that combo), but I am not a general consumer. Seeing Xbox owners argue which 360 game looks best, and Halo 3 in the discussion, indicates consumers at large look at more than just "pure" Image IQ.
Ps- Actually, a lot of LCDs are as bad as I am saying. Most were (are?) 6bit which shows a lot of banding in low-contrast situations, and many have low response times. Darks are poor on most, and contrast isn't exceptional.
Maybe it is because I have a 21" Sony Trinitron CRT next to my LCDs (8ms, good contrast for an LCD) and used to do web design work for a living, but I wouldn't argue that most LCDs have "great" image quality. I use them, they aren't horrible... but for IQ I would take a nice Plasma or CRT over them for the above reasons.
Maybe some users aren't noticng the banding in low contrast gradients and other artifacts and color-misrepresentations that LCDs are prone too... but then again, a lot of people cannot identify or notice aliasing either.
Everyone is sensative to different things.
And you shouldn't. You should only trust the images coming off YOUR display. Thus the arguments for the past few pages have been beyond useless.
In the end, why do I care what your captures look like if they not representative of the image being displayed by my TV?
Onkl Bjorni
Newcomer
I think you are missing the point! You don't actualy view the frame buffer! you view the frame buffer image displayed on your screen ;-)
On a more serious note I downloaded your frame buffer grabs, and viewed them from the 360, they looked just as good as the game...
EDIT: Ok i did a search and i found some png's . I ll check them to my xbox to see the difference because the jpegs look like crap.
EDIT2: Still nothing changed, either i watch the JPEGs from my 360 or the PNGs they look horrible ( too much pixelization , not clear limits among the colors and all the sings of an extremely/badly compressed image) :/
EDIT2: Still nothing changed, either i watch the JPEGs from my 360 or the PNGs they look horrible ( too much pixelization , not clear limits among the colors and all the sings of an extremely/badly compressed image) :/
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There's nothing we can do about it. Every tv looks different, there's no way to set a target. The best we can do is make it look good on a decently calibrated tv, then hope that everyones 'approximation' of what we see will be good enough for them. As is obvious with threads like this though, we are all clearly seeing something different alas
In any case, I don't think typical lcd tv buyers care that much about quality. That whole market came to be because a family wants a new tv and it needs to hang on a wall (or not look monstrously huge). The only options for that are lcd and plasma for the time being, of which plasma was very expensive for a long time, still not available in small sizes, and has the potential for burn in which with kids can be an issue. So, lcd it is. Stuff like poor black level, poor contrast, poor dark detail, motion blur, etc, are all mostly irrelevant. Does it look cool on the wall? Does it display an image? Then it's good enough. I still to this day encounter tv's hung on a wall that are connected via composite video cable or even rf cable. The people in question just don't care. It displays an image and the tv looks cool, that's all that matters.
Sure it's a generalization, but entire businesses have been successfully built off that generalization, most notably the uber cheap lcd tv's being sold all over the place nowadays.
Can we get quotes and discussion instead of generalizations?
Do you have a specific issue with someone's visual reception of the game? Do you want further comments on what they like?
Well, bungie did include a fairly comprehensive calibration suite on the limited edition bonus disk, so they're clearly not ignoring TV output quality issues
Speaking of calibration, they've finally got those blue filter things that you can get through their store. I think they're free, but the shipping isn't...
I don't get it though, isn't it just some blue cellophane?
http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=news&cid=12830
Yikes
I thought the appearance and disappearance of the hud would actually be a good thing. I guess not. So after the initial phase, the panel should be good to go for pretty long periods? Alone, I like to play for maybe three hours on a hard setting. With friends, it could be longer potentially - at most, the entire campaign of Gears of Halo in one sitting.
hm... Screensaver eh? What about the Xbox 360's psychedelic music player
(John Williams all night )
I don't get it though, isn't it just some blue cellophane?
http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=news&cid=12830
Yikes
I thought the appearance and disappearance of the hud would actually be a good thing. I guess not. So after the initial phase, the panel should be good to go for pretty long periods? Alone, I like to play for maybe three hours on a hard setting. With friends, it could be longer potentially - at most, the entire campaign of Gears of Halo in one sitting.hm... Screensaver eh? What about the Xbox 360's psychedelic music player
(John Williams all night )It is better than not having it disappear, but the high contrast nature of it isn't any good at all. As for how long it would take for image retention to set in, that varies quite a bit between different panel manufactures. On my Pannasonic it took a nearly a week playing 4-6 hours a day before Gear's hud showed just slightly on the bight white 360 startup screen, and again that was gone in a night of washing it with a screensaver, never again to be seen even after playing far more Gears.Yikes
It is really nothing to worry about though, just normal use will make image retention fade, and you can always accelerate that by leaving the TV looping fullscreen content or even quicker by running a negative image of whatever caused the uneven wear. And the 360's visualizer would be good if your TV overscans enough, if you run with little to no overscan it's no good for that as it has a but it has a black boarder all the way around it.
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Hmm... Despite all the resolution and AF problems, I haven't really noticed any glaring low-resolution textures... I guess some of the marine faces count, but I actually never bothered to go look at them in the first couple levels when they were around. The ones with the helmets and sunshades look pretty darn good to me combined with the lighting and shading, especially in the cut-scene with the Elites and Marines gearing up
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I'm really just glad they went back to loading the immediate parts of the level first instead of aggressively streaming things. Actually, did anyone notice their DVD drives stop spinning after awhile of playing through a level? It seems it caches the rest of the level, but I only really noticed the drive stopping after I reverted to a save point or something. Like... the drive stopped immediately after I did that. I didn't notice it while playing though (probably because of the volume).
to go through the portal
I'm really just glad they went back to loading the immediate parts of the level first instead of aggressively streaming things. Actually, did anyone notice their DVD drives stop spinning after awhile of playing through a level? It seems it caches the rest of the level, but I only really noticed the drive stopping after I reverted to a save point or something. Like... the drive stopped immediately after I did that. I didn't notice it while playing though (probably because of the volume).
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