PAL and NTSC quality difference. Why on earth is there?

[Shifty Geezer]

A reason why earlier games ran slowly and newer games ran faster, despite the difference in framerates

If you create a game that's locked to the vertical refresh (which you should be doing if creating a real console gamse), you can't update faster than the screen refresh. In origianl Tekken I expect this is what they were doing. Every game loop was exectued and then waited for the vertical blank before executing the next iteration of the loop. That meant a 60 fps game in NTSC and 50 fps in PAL.

If you decouple the game engine from the refresh, you can run the engine at a speed independent of the refresh. You can have a loop every 60th of a frame to read player input and execute moves, and you can have a loop every 50th of a second for drawing the screen. You can also just speed up the amount that happens in a given frame. eg. If in NTSC Tekken a character move 5 units forwards in a frame when you press left, in the PAL version you can move them 6 units forward. The framerate is lower, but the gameplay moves at the same amount as the NTSC version.

 

[Simon F]

Yes. NTSC is 480 lines while PAL is 576 lines. If you want to maintain the same framerate, you're probably going over the edge on a tightly optimized game.

Since, IIRC, both have the same number of pixels in a line, we can surely just consider lines.

NTSC requires 480*60Hz = 28.8K lines/sec
PAL requires 576*50Hz = 28.8k lines/sec

which, seems to imply equal fill rate costs.

Assuming the framebuffer is large enough for PAL, my bet is that either

• the developers couldn't be bothered changing some constants in the projection matrices or
• the [edit]2D[/edit] artwork was set up for a set 1:1 pixel mapping and they didn't do another set with a different scale.

 

[Colourless]

But that only applies to 2D elements. In the old days of sprite based games, sure it wasn't feasible to change everything, but with 3D games, only a small portion of the screen is usually constructed with 2D elements. PC game have been able to change resoultions for a very long time with the 2D elements still being handled relatively well. Usually just stick the bottom elements to the bottom of the screen, and top elements to the top of the screen and don't try to do any scaling.

In the end, comes down to laziness.

 

[Bohdy]

Probably one of the reasons was that Pal60 didn't exist yet, which is practically the same mode as NTSC but with PAL colour.

 

[hey69]

I remember several games from the Atari ST/Amiga era offering this option, including a favorite I just mentioned in another thread, Blood Money from Psychnosis. I ).

totaly off topic, but that game had beatifull music.

 

[Teasy]

Nope, as zeck said, it's because PAL is and will always be 50Hz instead on NTSC's 60Hz

For several years now the PAL standard has supported both 50hz and 60hz. Every TV I've ever tried has supported PAL60, appart from one 14 inch portable TV I tried when I was on holiday on the ilse of mull

 

[Arctic Permafrost]

As far as I know, PAL games are 15% slower (aprox.), but I think sometimes it might seem like they are 80% slower.

MS has found an intelligent solution, allowing users to select 50Hz or 60Hz frequency on the Dashboard. It works fine on most TVs.

What I don't understand is why Xbox 1 in PAL regions doesn't permit users to select 480p. 480i is the untouchable standard here.

Games' speed differences (notoriously japanese games liked to be "different" as far as *discrimination* goes) are a thing of the past.

 

[Rolf N]

Since, IIRC, both have the same number of pixels in a line, we can surely just consider lines.

NTSC requires 480*60Hz = 28.8K lines/sec
PAL requires 576*50Hz = 28.8k lines/sec

which, seems to imply equal fill rate costs.

Oh, come on, I wrote "if you want to maintain the same framerate" didn't I?
It's pretty arbitrary anyway because with an analog signal you can't really tell how many pixels per line are standard. I'm sure developers could heavily mess around with the horizontal resolution on the PS2 for instance.

I'm just glad this mess is starting to go away now.

Good point on the framebuffer (memory) size.

 

[Black Dragon37]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL#PAL_vs_NTSC

 

[ERP]

For several years now the PAL standard has supported both 50hz and 60hz. Every TV I've ever tried has supported PAL60, appart from one 14 inch portable TV I tried when I was on holiday on the ilse of mull

Historically a lot of older euro sets don't. It was actually rare to support PAL-60 when I lived there.
Last Gen every one of the console manufacturers required devs support PAL-50.
MS at least talked about allowing you to ship PAL-60 only this time, apparently there market research seemed to imply that there were now very few sets still in use that do not support PAL-60.