Fafalada:
I could see it for textures perhaps, but image dithering? :\ any examples?
It's something noticeable in a lot of games exhibiting fairly monotone color schemes, from an early title like Ridge Racer V to later games like MGS2 and Baldur's Gate, to even recent good-lookers like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Generally, looking into dark areas or out towards the horizon can reveal some 16-bit like banding at times - something I've observed noticeably less often in the Xbox games I've played.
Also, it's my fault for not being totally clear when I mentioned "image problems". I didn't mean to strictly imply properties relating to the scene, but actually any on-screen elements detracting from the overall look of the picture. So, yeah, I was blanketing the dithered look exhibited at times by some of the games' textures. The textures in a lot of the games from the early library, especially, seem to have a noticeably dithered look when replicating an image where the detail wasn't especially high, but a lot of subtle color gradients were concentrated together. Those kinds of textures seem to come out looking better in Xbox or GC games with S3TC and even Dreamcast games with VQ. I'm not sure how that could be measured, but even measuring via something like RMS can't account for how our eyes see things or why our brain likes what it likes.
marconelly!:
I really can't think if many games on PS2 that use 16 bit frame buffers at all, much less those that have 'too obvious' dithering or color banding :\
I'd speculate
lots of PS2 games use 16-bit frame buffers. Whether it's obvious or not comes down to visual design.
Personally, I love the sharper look of Rygar, or simillar games. It does use half frame buffer, but it has some kind of filtering, and looks really smooth and sharp.
I as well prefer a look of smoothness and "sharpness" (or rather, clearness/clarity, to describe it more accurately), but that's not what I'm seeing from the image quality you describe. The harsher output that some people characterize as "sharper" looks messier to me, and I don't feel the extra blending step Dreamcast games (for instance) undergo for a TV makes for a softness which is characterized by being blurry. Quite the opposite - it takes away the noisy harshness and makes for a clearer look to me. And as for unfiltered VGA output (which I prefer simply for the VGA element), the shock from its "rawness" doesn't bother me in the least when it's a tradeoff (if you could call it that) for amazing image and color definition.
Of course, half-height rendering, no matter how well implemented, simply doesn't cut it for me; I'm too used to the image solidity provided by progressive scan to do without it when I shouldn't have to.
You can choose your IQ preference with the consoles that have 480p standardized games - output to a TV gives a smoother appearance if jaggies bother you, and output through VGA gives you the sharper look if you prefer that (all with the bonus of pro-scan). All half-height rendering does is limit IQ... there are no IQ advantages.
What I really don't like are the games like VF4 that have obvious interlacing problems. The only game where I don't mind it is Rez, because of it's completely abstract graphics.
Funny, but again we end up seeing this from an opposing perspective. It's precisely
because Rez is so abstract and composed of so many distinctly prominent vectors/lines that an unfiltered look really kills the visual presentation. When your graphics are composed of rather formless pools of color and light, surrounded by
wireframe shapes, jaggy lines from an interlace-plagued display really stand out. You don't often see abstract lines isolated so frequently in games with non-abstract art direction, so their associated jaggy problems will certainly stand out more than ever with a game like Rez.
As a fellow fan, I strongly recommend you take the opportunity sometime to see this game displayed through the richness of VGA (the rawness of this mode doesn't much resemble the interlacing problems of the PS2 version to me.) I'm not lying when I say that you'll notice visual details you never even knew were there.