Neverending Upscaling/Resolutions/AA etc Thread #3 (Rules Post #1!)

holy-moly and to think just mere months ago you were languishing on a 27" SDTV with rabbut ears and an old PS1.

 

T.B., if you end up not supporting 1080p natively, then would it be likely for at least upscaled 1080p output to be supported? What's Sony's stance/recommendation when it comes to PS3 developers implementing 1080p upscaled output? I notice that only some PS3 games support the feature, whereas the XB360 has that feature in every game.

Do you think Sony will ever (wisely) mandate the implementation of some form or another of 1080p scaling for every game as part of the TRC (technical requirements checklist), because the general lack of this feature in games is really, really bugging me.

 

http://www.gamersyde.com/news_6710.html

Naruto Ninja Storm. Screens from the upcoming Qore demo apparently.

Quaz??

 

sorry if this is a repost, but one brand new killzone 2 screen shot.

it looks a bit different than the rest of the screenshots release so far. there's more obvious amounts of jaggies. but just curious if this could finally be a real untouched screenshot

http://images.eurogamer.net/assets/articles//a/1/3/8/1/0/5/28_06_2008.jpg.jpg

 

That's actually an old shot. We discussed the lower resolution blur on the nuzzle flashes on this shot some time ago.

 

That sure is a untouched screenshot. The blurred effects look are due to them being rendered at one quarter of the resolution (640*360).

 

Hopefully we see a native 1080p rendering option on Sacred 2 on the PS3. I've gone from being completely oblivious to it's existence, to being quite excited.

It's nice to see competent developers.

 

There is no correlation at all between getting a game to render in 1080p native and a developer's competency.

It's much more complicated than that.

I actually appreciate the texture work more than anything else. It seems to be reserved for the smaller paths but the ground textures don't looked naffed which is still all too common. Anyhow this genre is nigh completely unrepresented as Shifty says so best of luck.

 

Like hell there's not. Good programmers will make the game run well. There's probably a hundred examples of it.. lazy developers that make low-res games that run poorly, and good developers that can get the same type of graphical fidelity at a higher resolution and smoother framerate.

I'll agree that there's more to it than skill alone. Time and money are the big factors, but time and money alone can't make a AAA title if the programmers don't know what they're doing to optimize the game for the hardware. But to say that programmer skill has no impact on game performance is a bit naive.

 

There is no problem in making a game which only goal is to render at 60fps @ 1080p. Any professional dev team on the face of the earth can do that.

The challenge is getting to that resolution\framerate and have good graphics or whatnot at the same time.

Actually i think your wrong. Most "good" devs this generation has made low-resolution games (sub 720p and whatnot). The devs that most people look as lazy, seem to be hitting 720p native or better, but the graphics looks like crap.

 

Uhm....well now...

Is Kojima Productions incompetent because MGS4 doesn't run at 1080p native?

How about Team Ninja with respect to NG2?

How about Epic and their lack of AA in Gears 1?

You appear to be taking an incredibly simplistic view of things.

Developers have the freedom to target what they wish to accomplish in accordance to what is best for the game they're trying to make.

Defining incompetency is a subjective matter which I really have no taste for given I like to play games over being judgmental over large groups of people who may or may not have been given the opportunity, resources, or direction to produce what they wanted ultimately.

Still I accept that incompetent developers are out there. I wouldn't say otherwise, but it's much more often the case that hard working people get slapped in the face for their efforts which were hindered by forces beyond their control.

Saying a developer is incompetent because they did not "achieve" 1080p under normally attainable circumstances in accordance with REASONABLE expectations ( which could still be challenged as to whether it's incompetent or not ) is nothing close to saying the same thing about a developer who doesn't "target" 1080p because they are struggling mightily to do more impressive things on other fronts.

It's a damning determination on something rather superficial to call a developer lax or incompetent for not having 1080 native with their game. That is where my objection stems from.

To be honest I'm not sure where you're coming from. I never claimed programmer skill or the skill of any member of a development house had no affect on what a game ultimately turns out to be.

This discussion is fairly off topic though. I'll withdraw from continuing on with it here.

Feel free to PM me if you don't get what I'm saying and you still want to talk about it.

 

Hello all. Not the freshest batch of screens for SH Homecoming:

http://www.gamersyde.com/news_6525_en.html

I'm guessing 720p with no AA?

 

When i "Demo" my Gaming/HT setup usually one of my standard things is the Wipeout trailer. Watching that on my 135 inch wide screen is spectacular, anything 1080p is more than welcome here

 

That's because I wasn't trying to make one all-encompassing statement about the industry, I was simply countering your statement, which I took to mean that programming doesn't have anything to do with quality. I don't recall saying that 720p was a bad thing, especially when it runs well.

 

It's a misunderstanding then. All is well that ends well.

 

You're going to buy a *few*? Dude what other genres do you like?

Pretty likely. If we render in 720p, there's a good chunk of VRAM freeing up, so having two 1080p scanout-targets wouldn't hurt so much. The only argument against doing that would be a) if your TV's upscaler is better than ours, or b) if you set your TV to downsample 1080p to whatever, probably causing a bad case of pixel vomit.

If we ship 1080p@30Hz, chances are you'll get the same amount of pixel-work independently from your output resolution. We'll just downsample then.

Apart from that probably being confidential, I have no idea what the guidelines are. Would have to ask QA, they're supposed to read the TRCs/TCRs. For the rest of your question I'll just have to wave the NDA flag. Sorry.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't implementing downscaling from 1920x1080 in 720p mode require extra VRAM as well as extra processing work for the GPU, as a result of the software scaling? I would think the more prudent approach would be just to run in 1280x720 for 720p mode, perhaps enable 2xQ or 4xAA for a clean, jaggy-free image, and also possibly achieve some speed/framerate gains in the process.

 

Well, you don't really need more VRAM, as you can reuse memory you used earlier. There is of course an additional GPU overhead but it's not that much. In general, if we don't have that amount of headroom, we're probably in danger of dropping more frames than we'd like to, anyway. An advantage of doing supersampling is that you get to smooth the entire image, including alpha-tested surfaces like foliage.

But well, nothing is final. Things need testing.

 

http://www.gamershell.com/static/screenshots/12987/317014_full.jpg

Bullshot or not?
Just curious. There's a thread over on GameTrailers having a debate over if those crazy dimensions it has can be realtime.