PS3 and Automatic Scaling.

[London Geezer]

the other thing I read on Gaf was a 1080p TV owner playing Resistance said that the game auto defaults to 720p on his set (even with XMB set to 1080p default) since that is the game's default resolution.

does this meant then that the 720p and 1080i games will not be upscaled in the PS3 to 1080p? Wouldn't the TV upscale it in that case?

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=4858836&postcount=101

Yes. If your TV is 1080p and you feed it 720p material, the TV's scaler will do the job of scaling the signal to the native resolution, so really there is no real need for PS3 (or X360) to have to upscale 720p games to 1080p, except for obvious marketing reasons.

 

[kyleb]

Sure, but there is plenty of good reason to have the 360 scale 1080p down to 720p, or scale rendering resolutions like 1280x1024, 1040x624 or anything else a developer might find cause to use to whatever resolution the end user's display might accept.

 

[Brimstone]

And once again, amazingly and quite ironically, Europe will never be affected by this issue, as all HDTVs sold as such (HD-Ready) must accept 720p AND 1080i minimum - among other things.

The image quality bottleneck will come from a poorly implemented scaler. This is where the fallout has a chance to really become widespread. People that purchased a display with a lower price point will be more likely to have a poor quality scaler.

 

[GregLee]

It's was the first Toshiba 42 inch widescreen HD CRT projector model, I'd have to look at the set to get a model number, but I've fed it 720p signals from several sources over component with the same result.

And the same here, also. My TV is a Panasonic PT47X54 rpcrt, 2004 model year. Fine TV, good reputation, not that old, but shows a blank screen for 720p. My cable box upscales ABC HD, so that's not a problem for me. I'd hope a console would handle this as well as the SA8300HD cable box, which lets you register what resolutions your display handles, then lets you control what sort of upconversion to do. If you've told it you don't have 720p but do have 1080i, then ask for "pass-through", the only conversion it does is 720p -> 1080i. If you select "fixed", 480i, 480p, and 720p are all converted to 1080i. If you select "upconvert1", you get 480i -> 480p and 720p -> 1080i.

Looking at the IGN reference given above, it just says what the PS3 does "automatically" when your display doesn't support a certain resolution, right? Are we on the same page? There is no implication that the PS3 will not convert 720p to 1080i if asked to. So far as I can tell.

Greg

 

[ERP]

Looking at the IGN reference given above, it just says what the PS3 does "automatically" when your display doesn't support a certain resolution, right? Are we on the same page? There is no implication that the PS3 will not convert 720p to 1080i if asked to. So far as I can tell.

No what's being said here is that if a gfame only supports 720p, you can only get a 720p or 480p signal out of it, the PS3 will not automatically upscale to 1080i.

 

[heliosphere]

Yes. If your TV is 1080p and you feed it 720p material, the TV's scaler will do the job of scaling the signal to the native resolution, so really there is no real need for PS3 (or X360) to have to upscale 720p games to 1080p, except for obvious marketing reasons.

Using the scaler in the TV is more likely to introduce extra latency / lag.

 

[Kb-Smoker]

You gusy feel this might push devs to support 1080p in more games? Seeing that it could then output needed res for the end users tv. Or will a simple firmware update be able to fix this?

I really don't understand why sony didn't have some plan for people with older HDTVs.

 

[Brimstone]

Using the scaler in the TV is more likely to introduce extra latency / lag.

I don't know about lag, but one thing is for sure. HDTV scalers are going to come under great scrutiny by consumers. Everything could go fine, but on the other hand we could end up hearing about some helacous stories of terrible scalers.

 

[AntShaw]

relativly speaking , you guys think how much % of people (ps3 owners)are affected by this? only usa 1080i CRT owners are affected as far as i can tell. hm yeah probably japan also then.

My guestimation, here in the states, is that more people will be affected by this, then people that actually have 1080p sets.

We have had a relatively low full range HDTV adoption rate compared to other countries. I think the last note I saw 6 months ago was that we were at about 14% of televisions sold/purchased had 720p/1080i support let alone 1080p. While of course this number is going to increase over the next few years, it spells trouble for a lot of TV's already out in the population.

This could be a big concern for a lot of US users.

Just like some of the other users in this thread have stated, their scaler on the TV is inadequate.

This still seems odd to me though. It's all well and good to leave it up to the Game Designers to select what resolution their game runs natively in, it seems odd that the PS3 would be limited to what it can truly output in?

 

[AntShaw]

You gusy feel this might push devs to support 1080p in more games? Seeing that it could then output needed res for the end users tv. Or will a simple firmware update be able to fix this?

I really don't understand why sony didn't have some plan for people with older HDTVs.

The question the becomes is it worth pushing for this, if we have to take away other features from the game?? (i.e. FPS, AA, HDR, etc...)

 

[Kb-Smoker]

The question the becomes is it worth pushing for this, if we have to take away other features from the game?? (i.e. FPS, AA, HDR, etc...)

Yeah but what happen when some people can't play your game in HD[R:fom] because the PS3 can't output the game in 1080i.

 

[AntShaw]

Yeah but what happen when some people can't play your game in HD[R:fom] because the PS3 can't output the game in 1080i.

It looks like people will be playing the game in a lower resolution other then 1080i like most of the users that will be playing the game anyhow? More people will initially have this device plugged into SDTV's then HDTV's.

 

[EricVonZipper]

Wow. Just wow.

I have a WS-55807, it's 5 years old and only accepts 480p/i and 1080i.......no 720p!

This REALLY sucks! Guess I'll be using my computer monitor................if I can? Please tell me there is a DVI/VGA adapter?

Any cheap scalers out there?

 

[Bagel seed]

So to clarify, if I plug this into an SD set, it'll have to render the game natively at 480p (jaggy fest)? Damn.

 

[Kb-Smoker]

Ign.com is now reporting on this.

As it turns out, gamers who own older HD sets that feature only 480i, 480p, and 1080i resolution capabilities will have to settle for the display quality being downsized as the game boots in its 480p mode rather than upscaling from the more desirable 720p mode to 1080i. We tested this development on older HDTV sets with games designed for 720p but not 1080i -- Resistance: Fall of Man, NHL 2K7, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07, and Need for Speed Carbon. Sure enough, the system downshifted all four titles to 480p rather than moving up to 1080i.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/746/746282p1.html

 

[PARANOiA]

I'm impacted by this too - and I'm in Australia.

HD-TV's can support a certain resolution, but only over certain inputs. Mine accepts 1080i, 720p and 480p over VGA. Over component it only accepts 1080i or 480p. Sony also don't support VGA, too, funnily enough, so no PS3 for me - at least until I upgrade my TV.

Bleh.

 

[expletive]

Short answer: No. I don't think it will affect BR playback. The fortunate thing is BR movies are encoded at 1080p. It will be up to the playback software to downscale that (if necessary) to the appropriate resolution. This is non issue, and should not be compared to the situation above (which would be caused by a game not being rendered at a specific resolution)....

They are encoded at 1080pSF24 which is not something many display devices support natively. I would imagine theyd have to do something with it, as only outputting BR in this format would cause many problems for just about everyone with an HD display - but that doesnt mean it will be without issues.

 

[22psi]

Ign.com is now reporting on this.



http://ps3.ign.com/articles/746/746282p1.html

I surely hope there is an update to fix this.

 

[Tap In]

as suspected in OP of this page so evidently it's all up to the TV.

The maximum resolution of the PlayStation 3 (and currently the maximum for HDTV standards) is 1080p, but few games support this resolution, and the PS3 doesn't currently upscale to that resolution from 480p, 720p or 1080i either.

 

[Fafalada]

It's a bit harder to do that for games without a scaling chip. Sony would need at least an additional 1920x1080 buffer, and it would add at least 1 frame of latency. As long as they control the swap and they have the CPU/Memory bandwidth resources available it might be doable.

Erm, why?
If Sony controls the swap, they would control the frontbuffer, hence there should be no additional memory(aside for slightly larger FB), and no additional latency needed.
Hacking around the game processing would give the penalties you mention - but again I don't see why you'd need more then one buffer, nor would it necessarily introduce extra latency (of course the time taken out could slow the game itself down).
Granted - the latter is an incredibly ugly(and potentially unstable) way to do it - I'd sooner see them release game specific patches instead.

That's 500 MB/s on top of normal operation; some 10% of PS3's BW.

That would be 1% - if a buffer read meant 10% of PS3 BW, I assure you noone would be worried about outputting anything to HDTV.