Totally fact. I mean, how could it be anything else but factual?
(If by "factual" one means "utter insanity.")
(If by "factual" one means "utter insanity.")
Kaz Hirai (SCEA) Interview - 1up/EGM
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Why does a 480p game require less effort than a 720p game? Most artwork is created at high res and downsized for the target platform, in complexity and image size. Shrinking to 480p or 720p in the last step makes no difference to the effort that goes into content creation.scooby_dooby said:
scooby_dooby
Legend
Unless the graphics and effects they want to use are too complex/advanced to run smoothly at 720p.
Wouldn't this then force the decision of reducing resolution at relativley low cost, or spending more money re-writing code to be more efficient? What about with a looming deadline?
Every situation will be different, but they would have to weigh the potential revenue losses from not supporing true HD, against the expenses required as well as time available.
All I'm saying is if it's left up to the Dev's there probably will be quit e afew that don't meet the HD standards, and as an HD owner I wish it was required. That's totally selfish however it is a purchasing consideration for some HD TV owners who want to get the most out of their multi-thousand dollar purchase.
Wouldn't this then force the decision of reducing resolution at relativley low cost, or spending more money re-writing code to be more efficient? What about with a looming deadline?
Every situation will be different, but they would have to weigh the potential revenue losses from not supporing true HD, against the expenses required as well as time available.
All I'm saying is if it's left up to the Dev's there probably will be quit e afew that don't meet the HD standards, and as an HD owner I wish it was required. That's totally selfish however it is a purchasing consideration for some HD TV owners who want to get the most out of their multi-thousand dollar purchase.
Right, my bad. (Of course there are rumors of it being "within 12 weeks"--though I don't put much stock in that.) But DOA4? PGR3? Seriously... 5x?Oda said:
I'd agree with some of them (PDZ is looking like a pile right now, and Kameo is good-looking in character modelling, but not so much otherwise), especially when taking immersiveness and and overall art direction in mind, but you're still overstating things and ignoring some titles altogether.
scooby_dooby said:
Sony and MS have stated this is the HD era. That implies that they want HD resolutions to be standard -- why is this so hard to understand? Mocking me isn't going to change the fact that 720p is just the standard for next gen systems. It would go against the past 12 years of Sony gaming to all of a sudden assume that.
Don't insinuate I just made up this HD era stuff up -- MS and Sony have been touting HD resolutions all over the place. 720p IS the defacto standard of this generation (for PS3/Xbox360 at least) -- Nobody in their right mind would argue against this. TV's don't need to support the resolution for the consoles to (as evidence by MS' decision).
And ... What does the HDD have to do with this?
Oh, so you've played with a PS3 and know that games at 720p with 4X aa run poorly? G70 takes a beating with 22gb/s bandwidth with a 500mhz core, but that is a far cry from an example of the final system which is closed box. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised when you see 720p is just as much a standard on PS3 as it is on Xbox360 (or maybe not, I don't know your motives). Frankly, TV sets support really doesn't matter much when a developer choses a resolution -- they choose it because they have enough power in the system to use it (which both Xbox360 and PS3 have, you'd be silly to argue against this). They want their game to look great in screenshots, they want their games to look great when reviewers get ahold of them, and they want their games to look great when the stupid kids who judge games based solely on graphics get ahold of them -- going with 480p would be going against almost everything that will be selling the games next generation.
You seem to be thinking that a higher resolution doesn't work on a lower resolution TV.
The 720p/1080i/1080p user base will not be dictating the resolutions of this next generation -- why can't you see that? Obviously they won't because MS has already mandated that 720p is the min. Sony and the developers aren't going to be made a fool of by creating a bunch of 480p games when they can just as viably create 720p games. It is similar to buying an A64 FX, a 7800GTX, 2gb of ram, etc etc and then playing games in 640x480 -- the system can handle more, there is no reason to use 480p. Why is this so difficult? If the Xbox360 can do it the PS3 can too -- they are by all accounts very similar in power (maybe even a slight advantage to the PS3, but that is still in the realm of speculation). The "free" AA on the Xbox360 doesn't mean that RSX can't do AA and still play at 720p.
You assume that 480p will be used on the PS3 and that it won't be able to handle 720p with AA when it has been shown otherwise. Even in the little benchmarking Dave did with a crippled G70 (which wasn't as fast and didn't have nearly the bandwidth that RSX will), it still played every game at acceptable framerates. Those were also unoptimized and CPU limited.
Why do you are assuming the worst automatically without any solid reasoning behind it?
Also, IF (big if) the performance at 720p with AA on the PS3 is such a problem, why wouldn't a developer just not use AA? AA isn't a standard/requirement for PS3 either. The conclusions you jump to just don't make sense.
If a developer is really that tied to cost (that they are choosing 480p because it will somehow "reduce" production cost) they probably won't be touching a PS3 dev kit any time soon anyways -- they could just as easily make a game for PS2 (it will still be selling big for the next 5 years). Those same developers won't be touching an Xbox360 dev kit either. You are going to need a hefty chunk of cash to make a game for next gen, that's just the way it is.
Yeah, you're probably right, 5x was a bit of an exaggeration. I still think however that Half-Life 2 looks better than any launch title we've yet seen -- maybe not to the degree of 5x, but still noticeably better. I apologize for that comment.
And while I may not be planning on getting a 360 this year or likely next, that doesn't mean I want to see the machine fail or what have you. It's just I've been amazed at how underwhelming every single thing we've seen so far has been, and I swear, if I hear another quote from MS about how underpowered the Alpha kits are I'm going to hurl (doesn't anyone find it funny that at first the kits were 50% of full power, then only 33%, and now in Bach's latest interview he states 25%... It's all pure BS and blatant damage control).
And while I may not be planning on getting a 360 this year or likely next, that doesn't mean I want to see the machine fail or what have you. It's just I've been amazed at how underwhelming every single thing we've seen so far has been, and I swear, if I hear another quote from MS about how underpowered the Alpha kits are I'm going to hurl (doesn't anyone find it funny that at first the kits were 50% of full power, then only 33%, and now in Bach's latest interview he states 25%... It's all pure BS and blatant damage control).
Oda said:
This is sort of a problem I see with new games as a whole. Shaders and those type of effects really aren't captured well in a single frame -- they benefit from motion. I think a lot of the next gen games will look a lot better when seen in motion compared to the screenshot scraps we're getting today.
For example, the DOA4 screenshots look rather dull but in motion (the 720p video that was released) it looked rather sexy (still looks like the same repetitive game that DOA3 was, though). I don't think there is really any reason to be disappointed currently -- they'll start releasing more impressive things as the release date starts crawling towards us. Don't fret.
scooby_dooby
Legend
On the crippled G70 Splinter cell went from around 120fps to ~56fps with 4xAA + 8x AF, at just over 720p levels(1280x1024).
The games coming out in the next 2, 3 or 4 years will be much more intensive than SPlinter Cell: CT, and CT is already showing huge performance hits with AA at ~720p resolution.
Anywyas, my point is 720p is not as painless as you make it seem, and there will be some games where the dev's simply choose to only support 480p as the performance costs and extra man-hours required to use 720p simply will not be worth it.
As for MS and Sony proclaiming the HD era, that's well and good, but they dopn't make the games, and they don't buy them either, so Developers and Consumers will decided whetehr 720p becomes a "defacto standard" on the PS3 not you.
The games coming out in the next 2, 3 or 4 years will be much more intensive than SPlinter Cell: CT, and CT is already showing huge performance hits with AA at ~720p resolution.
Anywyas, my point is 720p is not as painless as you make it seem, and there will be some games where the dev's simply choose to only support 480p as the performance costs and extra man-hours required to use 720p simply will not be worth it.
As for MS and Sony proclaiming the HD era, that's well and good, but they dopn't make the games, and they don't buy them either, so Developers and Consumers will decided whetehr 720p becomes a "defacto standard" on the PS3 not you.
scooby_dooby said:
So then you concede that those games won't even be possible on Xbox360 (because making a 720p game may be too much for a given company) and therefore won't exist? In the name of HD resolutions, that is a pretty painful loss.
And to be fair, Sony and MS both publish (and in MGS' case, make) quite a few of the top sellers. EA is responsible for most of the others (and EA isn't going to be using 480p since they are all about cross platform). Customers can barely decide what color socks to wear -- they aren't going to be deciding resolutions for the devs (How would they even do that?). Any other big developer knows they have to compete with them so they aren't going to prematurely shoot themselves in the foot by reducing the resolution to 480p (when reviewers/screenshots/heresay will all be judging them compared to HD resolutions). I think it would be market suicide for any game that is by a major developer to use 480p, so it just won't be common at all. The games that have the possibility of being 480p are the small dev houses which struggle to survive as is (these might be the ones more inclined to go revolution this round also?) -- I'd be plenty happy to have more of the smaller dev house games on a system (part of why I will probably end up picking up an N-Rev). Even then, those smaller dev houses are more likely to use less complex shaders and things like that over a lower resolution, it seems.
The Splinter Cell example is semi valid -- but that doesn't take into account it being on a closed system written to the metal, as it were, or the fact that the G70 in the test has less than 2/3 the bandwidth and 50 mhz to go. You don't see games anywhere near as optimized on the PC as you do console. I don't think we'll be seeing problems -- ~60fps on a game with SM3, soft shadows, and all that jazz (I think?) at 720p levels isn't so bad as it seems. With 10-20gb/s extra bandwidth (who knows how much extra will be usuable) the hit will probably be far less severe. Who knows, that same situation of an equally unoptimized game might show 60fps for the Xbox360 also -- we don't really know what we're dealing with so judging based on that is a bit silly (part of why Dave got a bunch of flak for posting that). I have some faith Sony and Nvidia aren't stupid -- Just like MS and ATI aren't stupid.
I think what microsft has done is take the work out of the developers hands with supproting multiple resoloutions. you support one res, the hardware will scale down to smaller res or up to big to the biggest res.
Sony's non standardized approach will lead to many developers supporting lower resoloutions, and/or only supporting certain resoloutions (like the current xbox).
Sony's non standardized approach will lead to many developers supporting lower resoloutions, and/or only supporting certain resoloutions (like the current xbox).
scooby_dooby
Legend
Bobbler said:
Perhaps. That goes back to my original point about X360 being able to do this as they basically provide a way for Dev's to do 4xAA and fp10HDR for free at 720p.
So if a game was struggling on the X360 at 720p they would have the option to revert to using 4xMSAA and fp10hdr which should negate most of the bandwidth related performance costs of 720p.
The RSX doesn't have that leisure, therefore, no minimum 720p standard as that would be too constricting on Dev's.
4xAA is only 'free' to the devs in that the hardware handles it automatically. That's not what the "AA for free" means though. 'AA for free' means running the same polys and shaders etc. as without AA, but with AA and at no (or little) performance hit.
AA is as 'free' for develops to write to on RSX (presumably) as it is for XB360 or PC developers. They create their models and shaders, and switch an AA flag on the hardware to enable or disable it. The hardware achieves the AA without the developer having to worry about how it does it.
The difference between PS3 and Xenos is in PS3 the devs have the option not to switch on AA and use the GPU resources for rendering without that overhead. On XB360 if the dev disables AA they have no advantage on the hardware than if they enable AA, so they may as well have it on all the time.
In terms of which can handle the better visuals at 720p, that's an unknown. We know Xenos' elegant solution and it should prove efficient. We don't know PS3's approach and can only hazard guesses. Might be it has more brute force+ some clever solution to get more into 720p then XB360, or then again it might be limited and not cram as much into 720p. We don't know.
We really don't know a great deal!
AA is as 'free' for develops to write to on RSX (presumably) as it is for XB360 or PC developers. They create their models and shaders, and switch an AA flag on the hardware to enable or disable it. The hardware achieves the AA without the developer having to worry about how it does it.
The difference between PS3 and Xenos is in PS3 the devs have the option not to switch on AA and use the GPU resources for rendering without that overhead. On XB360 if the dev disables AA they have no advantage on the hardware than if they enable AA, so they may as well have it on all the time.
In terms of which can handle the better visuals at 720p, that's an unknown. We know Xenos' elegant solution and it should prove efficient. We don't know PS3's approach and can only hazard guesses. Might be it has more brute force+ some clever solution to get more into 720p then XB360, or then again it might be limited and not cram as much into 720p. We don't know.
We really don't know a great deal!
zidane1strife
Banned
scooby_dooby said:
Doesn't that mean use of longer shaders, iirc, which should ease up b/w for AA and the like...
...because somehow the PS3 wouldn't be able to scale down correctly, despire TV's themselves scaling up and down innately as well?Qroach said:
"Scaling up" is where you start making things look bad regardless--you really have to design towards that max resolution to look good on it. Whether you're going 480p to 720p, or 720p to 1080p, your picture quality will suffer. Scaling DOWN, however...? How often does that end up looking crappy?
It's the "scaling down" part I'm concerned with, as you can correct me if I'm wrong, but if it's hardware-only scaling you're mainly just going to get the a simple scaling. Offhand, I don't know of any hardware that also adds other enhancements automatically, whereas if you permit developers to design at 480p as well, they can use the surplus power to provide extra features (compensatory AA, for instance) for the bulk of people still using 480i/p.
Now it may be that either or both would allow a developer to do what they want if they support at least a 720p mode... can't say for sure right now. But offhand, I also can't imagine games bothering with 480p on the PS3 as well (except in the aforementioned "easy porting" situations. I mean even games with LOW production values, like mah jongg and most puzzle games, could easily support 720p and even 1080p, as they're the ones least likely to use complex shaders or bother with AA or any of that stuff!
) Upscaling will look notably bad, and both the developers and Sony don't want that, and the hardware seems powerful enough, so... I certainly imagine the PS3 and 360 will have 720p as the aimed-toward baseline, just with other considerations depending on their hardware and what MS/Sony allows them to do.Tv's upscaling or down scaling tend to provide an inferior picture. I haven't seen a television that does a good job of it. More specifically fixed pixel displays do a horrible job of scaling.
Scaling down tends to make things blurry, so you liekly don't want to scale down from 1080p to 480p on any sort of fixed picel display. it will just look very blurry. On a regular television I really don't know since they can support multiple resoloutions.
When I bought my HDTV LCD, I found that anything that scaled looked horrible. Scaling up from 480p looked bad as the TV didn't do an even job of scaling the picture. Scaling down form 1080i looked blurry (tried dragons layer and the matrix on xbox. I found that the native resoloution of my tv 1280x720 displayed a better picture quality for the matrix at the same resoloution. The picture looked brighter and more sharp. The same thing with xmen legends, it looked much better running at the native resoloution of the TV.
you can purchase high quality hardware scalers for TV, DVD, and other video signals. They are supe rexpensive but do an awesome job of scaling whatever video feeds you have coming into your TV.
If you permit developers to make games for 480p, then they are going to keep doing that and not bother with better resoloutions. most of the time.
This is the reason MS included some high quality video scaling hardware with 360. The can support one res and smoothly scale to whatever target resoloution your TV supports. Take the hardware scaling out of the hands of your TV, and do teh best job of scaling the image as possible.
I really can't remember, doe PS3 support up & down scaling of resoloutions in hardware?
Qroach said:
That is probably one of the most false statements said today. Most (if not all successful ones) developers want to push the limits of the hardware they work with (that is usually the mentality that keeps them in their jobs). I have never known a programmer/developer that only wanted to match what was availible 5 years ago (especially not ones on million+ dollar projects).
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