News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

[3dilettante]

It appears the judge signed a settlement between the parties. The case can be dismissed with prejudice if the parties to the settlement agree that the settlement is final, if the wiki for the term is any indication.
The terms of that settlement are apparently under seal besides the handling of legal costs. It does not seem like either side has anything to say so far (ever?).
This might not be a situation where the court had come to a decision.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Well it was bullshit, just some motherfucker looking for (in his eyes) an easy way to help himself to other peoples' money instead of making some on his own. Too bad the judge didn't award reimbursement of legal costs to Sony from that wanker.

Sony claimed the game was full 1080p but delivered an upscaled 1920x960 title for multiplayer. I think we all agree that the upscaling method is very clever but settlements like this are dangerous as they leave the message that upscaling but labelling it 1080p is acceptable.

 

[Nesh]

Sony claimed the game was full 1080p but delivered an upscaled 1920x960 title for multiplayer. I think we all agree that the upscaling method is very clever but settlements like this are dangerous as they leave the message that upscaling but labelling it 1080p is acceptable.

Someone should have been suing MS for years then. All 360 games list 1080p at the back of the package only because the console upscales the image to 1080p despite that games output a native 720op resolution and sometimes below that (see FF13).
I even had a quarrel once about it with some employees at a store that claimed PS3 games sucked because none were 1080p whereas all 360 games were 1080p, because thats what the box said.
PS3 games tented to show a close approximation of the native resolution at the back because it is up to the TV's upscaler to upscale the image unless forced in the console's settings.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Doesn't this have its own discussion? Just to recap here, the box labellings aren't particularly the issue, but the advertising/PR campaign (posts, interviews, whatever) stated 1080p rendering regardless of what output modes are listed on the case. Those claims were questionable, possibly spurious, but given no IEEE standard exists for game framebuffer modes AFAIK, it wasn't wrong. GG/Sony just took a different view of what 1080p rendering requires to be classifiable as 1080p. And I think the internet blow-back is enough to get developers to be more transparent without anyone needing to gain a fortune in terms of compensation. Lawyers weren't needed given how things were playing out on the internet and how lessons were going to be learnt anyway.

 

[Grall]

I think we all agree that the upscaling method is very clever but settlements like this are dangerous as they leave the message that upscaling but labelling it 1080p is acceptable.

No reasonably complex console game is entirely "full" 1080P, there's always cheating going on somewhere. Shadows or lighting passes, transparencies and so on rendered at lower resolutions than full framebuffer. So what will you do, sue everyone and their grandmas for false advertising, what? It's an arbitrary distinction saying shirking on resolution in these cases is alright, but not in the killzone multiplayer mode; then it's lawsuit material.

This suit was obviously extremely frivolous in nature. Glad to see it got tossed, maybe there is some good in this world after all.

 

[Deleted member 86764]

I think it’s a bit of a frustrating situation since GG have actually implemented a neat interlacing solution that for all intents and purposes is 1080p with minimal impact on the image quality. I would actually really like to see this method used much more often in order to achieve faster framerates in games and improved graphics.

I really hope it’s not dropped because of the uproar.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

As long as it's not described as 1080p, there won't be any issues. Ultimately discussion of resolutions should probably be dropped by developers altogether and just leave people to judge by what's on screen as to whether it's good or not.

 

[BoardBonobo]

As long as it's not described as 1080p, there won't be any issues. Ultimately discussion of resolutions should probably be dropped by developers altogether and just leave people to judge by what's on screen as to whether it's good or not.

But 1080p just means 1080 horizontal lines. And so describing something as 1080p even if it was 1x1080p is still correct. If they'd described it as FullHD or referenced 1920x1080 then it would be incorrect.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

This suit was obviously extremely frivolous in nature. Glad to see it
got tossed, maybe there is some good in this world after all.

The suit was not "tossed", both parties settled under a sealed agreement. Something interesting enough that warranted that sealing happened, otherwise the judgement would have been published as it the norm.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

But 1080p just means 1080 horizontal lines.

That's broadcast standard. Gaming standard, whether officially defined somewhere or not, is 1920x1080. It's lots of semantics and subjective interpretation. There's no point arguing over the right or wrong of it - just everyone move on and recognise a need to be more specific instead of relying on assumed/interpreted connotations of indistinct terms and then fussing when the application of said terms isn't as one expects.

 

[Grall]

The suit was not "tossed", both parties settled under a sealed agreement.

Fine, it wasn't tossed. Whatever. Important part is, the suing part didn't prevail in a high-profile win and carried away a cartload of Sony cash with headlines in all the media trumpeting their victory. That's what I'm saying.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Fine, it wasn't tossed. Whatever. Important part is, the suing part didn't prevail in a high-profile win and carried away a cartload of Sony cash with headlines in all the media trumpeting their victory. That's what I'm saying.

It was a fairly high profile case where Sony settled under secret terms. Is that a win for them? It depends where you're sitting - don't expect to get insightful coverage from the gaming press, they don't understand this stuff. Most of them can just about play games

 

[Grall]

My point is, a straight win in a lawsuit wiht big "damages" award would just encourage more of the same bullshit.

 

[London Geezer]

Who said there was big damages involved? For all we know, he just got a refund for the game, which really is what should have happened from the get go as that's as much 'damages' he suffered. Then again the US legal system is bonkers.

 

[Grall]

Nobody said; I'm just stating my feelings on this.

 

[3dilettante]

Who said there was big damages involved? For all we know, he just got a refund for the game, which really is what should have happened from the get go as that's as much 'damages' he suffered. Then again the US legal system is bonkers.

This was a class-action lawsuit. Some proportion of the damages awarded to one member of the class would be applicable to all other members, which in this case may be anyone who bought the game prior to the PR clarification about the reprojection method.
A refund of 60 per purchaser on a game that Sony only received a fraction of would be a decent chunk.

Whether the settlement that is under seal will lead to any actions besides ending the case is unclear. The settlement of the FTC suit over the Vita had a public announcement, but I do not know what the timeline or handling of the settlement for the specific case was.

 

[McHuj]

So what's the feasibility of Sony using a HBM stack as a replacement for the GDDR in a PS4 slim version. Maybe the economics wouldn't allow it until 2017, but if it's technically feasible the form factor for a 14nm APU plus HBM would be tiny.

 

[DieH@rd]

I'm not sure if the the memory controller in PS4 APU compatible with new type of memory. Also, there are rumors that placing GPU and a lot of HBM on interposer is not a process with high yields.

In any case, Sony already announced that they will move from sixteen 512MB chips to eight 1GB chips, so nothing drastic will change with them soon.

 

[McHuj]

The memory controller would have to change, but that could be done at the same time as the shrink. And as far as the yields, I'm think 2017-ish, post-Pascal/400 series during which I assume HBM will start moving into lower tier cards.

 

[joker454]

It was a fairly high profile case where Sony settled under secret terms. Is that a win for them? It depends where you're sitting - don't expect to get insightful coverage from the gaming press, they don't understand this stuff. Most of them can just about play games

I suspect the majority of ps4 players don't even know the lawsuit ever existed really, so it's all a non issue in the end. In any case, games are never fully 1080p anyways regardless of what they say in ads or on the box as there are always parts of the render pipeline that operate at < 1920 x 1080 resolution.