So I got my 23 inch widescreen LCD panel as I mentioned earlier, and absolutely love it. However, gaming on an HDTV set (720p native here) was sooooo not what I expected.
First off:
480p gaming is FULL of jaggies EVERYWHERE, even Rallisport Challenge 2 looks like a PS2 launch game, it's really quite bad. The nicely modeled Ryu in Ninja Gaiden suddenly became a jagfest, it was really messed up. My previous set was a 20 inch piece of shit Panasonic with only one RCA input, and the interlaced pseudo-AA really covered up all the jaggies, i mean I honestly was impressed and though RSC2 and NG had some sort of AA going on.
Next observation is that to me, the PS2 on component 480i but deinterlaced with the Faroudja DCDi chip looks FAR BETTER than native 480p Xbox titles. Even games like Space Channel 5 Part 2 had a much much more 'cleaner' IQ to jag-fest Xbox titles. I'm seriously considering disabling 480p in the control panel and letting the Faroudja chip do its deinterlacing, because I have been seriously disappointed in the 480p from this gen.. but what should I expect? It's really just PC gaming @ 640x480 with no AA...
The other thing I found interesting was how good games looked stretched from 4:3 to 16:9 (perhaps just because of my set? not sure, the nonlinear scaling mode looks REALLY good). At first I was frantically trying to find evidice (warped text, bitmaps) that games like Space Channel 5 Pt 2 didn't have a letterbox mode, because it looked so authentic. One of the only games that looked squashed was Silent Hill 3.. Zone of the Enders 2 and Rez were REALLY something to behold @ 480p and 16:9.
BTW my set is the Del W2300 LCD TV/PC monitor (PERFECT for a small apartment), 23inches but really is MUCH bigger than it sounds, 1280x768 native res.
First off:
480p gaming is FULL of jaggies EVERYWHERE, even Rallisport Challenge 2 looks like a PS2 launch game, it's really quite bad. The nicely modeled Ryu in Ninja Gaiden suddenly became a jagfest, it was really messed up. My previous set was a 20 inch piece of shit Panasonic with only one RCA input, and the interlaced pseudo-AA really covered up all the jaggies, i mean I honestly was impressed and though RSC2 and NG had some sort of AA going on.
Next observation is that to me, the PS2 on component 480i but deinterlaced with the Faroudja DCDi chip looks FAR BETTER than native 480p Xbox titles. Even games like Space Channel 5 Part 2 had a much much more 'cleaner' IQ to jag-fest Xbox titles. I'm seriously considering disabling 480p in the control panel and letting the Faroudja chip do its deinterlacing, because I have been seriously disappointed in the 480p from this gen.. but what should I expect? It's really just PC gaming @ 640x480 with no AA...
The other thing I found interesting was how good games looked stretched from 4:3 to 16:9 (perhaps just because of my set? not sure, the nonlinear scaling mode looks REALLY good). At first I was frantically trying to find evidice (warped text, bitmaps) that games like Space Channel 5 Pt 2 didn't have a letterbox mode, because it looked so authentic. One of the only games that looked squashed was Silent Hill 3.. Zone of the Enders 2 and Rez were REALLY something to behold @ 480p and 16:9.
BTW my set is the Del W2300 LCD TV/PC monitor (PERFECT for a small apartment), 23inches but really is MUCH bigger than it sounds, 1280x768 native res.