Does any ps3 game exist that does a high quality upscale on spu? It's a genuine question because I don't know of any. Upscaling dvd's to blu-ray res takes a hefty amount of processing time and they are just doing 720x480 to 1920x1080. I imagine that a good quality upscale of 1280x720 to 1920x1080 isn't cheap. You can do a software 1280x720 to 1280x1080, and then a hardware 1280x1080 to 1920x1080, but two independant upscale steps isn't ideal when image quality is concerned.
PS3 vs XBOX 360 1080p ?
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Does any ps3 game exist that does a high quality upscale on spu? It's a genuine question because I don't know of any. Upscaling dvd's to blu-ray res takes a hefty amount of processing time and they are just doing 720x480 to 1920x1080. I imagine that a good quality upscale of 1280x720 to 1920x1080 isn't cheap. You can do a software 1280x720 to 1280x1080, and then a hardware 1280x1080 to 1920x1080, but two independant upscale steps isn't ideal when image quality is concerned.
I have not heard of a single PS3 game yet that uses SPUs to do scaling - even though it should be possible in theory, otherwise MLAA wouldn't be possible either. I bet you could even find a way to combine MLAA and upscaling, again, in theory.
However, if you know any specific examples of games that use SPUs to do scaling (remember that even just using the RSX to do simple horizontal scaling took long enough to be common), I'd be very interested if you could let me know which ones ...
corduroygt
Banned
All the Sub-HD games use SPU scaling on PS3, since HDMI only accepts certain resolutions. For example MW2 upscales from 600p to 1080p (or 720p if you don't have 1080i/p checked in the settings) on the PS3, while Black Ops upscales to 720p only on the PS3, another nod to IW's superior understanding of the PS3 hardware compared to Treyarch. RSX does not provide such scaling functionality, so it's obviously done on the Cell.
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corduroygt
Banned
1. Upscaling a lower resolution to 1080p is more compute intensive than upscaling 720p to 1080p, since you're computing the same number of pixels from less available information.
2. Quality DVD upscaling is a lot more complex than a simple image resize. The real nice ones look at the previous/next frames/motion vectors, etc. to determine the color of a pixel, since you don't get full frame information in a MPEG-2 stream for each frame, but the order of frames is well defined. You cannot do that with 3D rendering when you don't know how the next frame is going to be because it hasn't been created yet
3. Upscaling with bicubic, lanczos filters is a little compute intensive, but that's the exact kind of compute that works well on the SPU's. Of course you may still not have the SPU time depending on your rendering pipeline.
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Digital Foundry did a comparison between framebuffer capture and HDMI output capture. Upshot was that none of the three RGB range settings produce an image identical to the framebuffer. Mind you, the PS3 Slim was shown to introduce a tiny bit of noise in its HDMI output. Although pretty much unseeable other than by computer comparison, it's not a perfect match either. But it is true, the 360s HDMI output always enhances the contrast and crushes some color information. I'll find the link.
( I suggested as much ages ago comparing color graphs between PS3 and 360 screenshots here years ago by the way.
Here:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-hdmi?page=3
It also comes with an update to the article that I hadn't seen yet:
Check out the full article for comparison screenshots.
Oh yeah that was the one
That takes effort, which probably accounts for increased tearing and the like in 1080p upscales of games. So all in all nothing changes the experiences we are actually getting, that there are cases where selecting 720p and overriding the PS3's default choices is a desired feature, which is what Masac was asking about. I don't know how much impact 360's upscaling has but by all accounts nothing people notice such that it's recommended you use 360's upscaling over your TV's as its often better, whereas on PS3 it varies title to title and comes with a cost in addition to the normal rendering of the game.
I don't believe that is true. You are working with more source material at 1280x720, around ~2.7x more, which means means more bandwidth and cpu cycles spent to do the same thing since all those source pixels need to be processed.
2. Quality DVD upscaling is a lot more complex than a simple image resize. The real nice ones look at the previous/next frames/motion vectors, etc. to determine the color of a pixel, since you don't get full frame information in a MPEG-2 stream for each frame, but the order of frames is well defined. You cannot do that with 3D rendering when you don't know how the next frame is going to be because it hasn't been created yet
Actually you do have 'future frames' because usually at least two frames are kept around (sometimes three), and the one you are looking at is not the current one. Not that I'm claiming that's how the video game upscalers work (they probably don't) but they could do that if there was enough cpu time lying around. But point taken, quality dvd upscaling is way more involved than typical video game upscaling.
I agree the spu's are totally up to the task, but they are pretty busy already doing other tasks. Hence why I'm not really surprised that I haven't seen any game do a high quality spu upscale yet. They all do some form of upscaling but so far it's just been quick & dirty upscales to get the job done. As noted though even these quick software upscales often take a hit on game performance.
Digital Foundry did a comparison between framebuffer capture and HDMI output capture. Upshot was that none of the three RGB range settings produce an image identical to the framebuffer. Mind you, the PS3 Slim was shown to introduce a tiny bit of noise in its HDMI output. Although pretty much unseeable other than by computer comparison, it's not a perfect match either. But it is true, the 360s HDMI output always enhances the contrast and crushes some color information. I'll find the link.
( I suggested as much ages ago comparing color graphs between PS3 and 360 screenshots here years ago by the way.
Here:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-hdmi?page=3
It also comes with an update to the article that I hadn't seen yet:
Check out the full article for comparison screenshots.
cheers for that mate
I had thought Little Big Planet 1 or Uncharted 1 would do the 1080p (960x1080) as the default if you had it enabled, instead of 720p. I may be completely wrong, because I can't even remember which of the two it was. The whole situation may be wrong in my mind, but I know I disabled 1080p on my PS3 for some reason.
Found my first post on the subject:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1233012&postcount=1410
And as I said in that post, turning up the contrast 9 notches in Gimp renders the PS3 version close in values to the 360s (25,8 / 47,7 / 8,0).
EDIT: No, you remember correctly Scott, pretty sure that the US version of Uncharted did support 1080p that way and had a worse framerate / more tearing when doing so, and you were a little better off with 720p.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1233012&postcount=1410
And as I said in that post, turning up the contrast 9 notches in Gimp renders the PS3 version close in values to the 360s (25,8 / 47,7 / 8,0).
EDIT: No, you remember correctly Scott, pretty sure that the US version of Uncharted did support 1080p that way and had a worse framerate / more tearing when doing so, and you were a little better off with 720p.
corduroygt
Banned
I have both games, and by default they will output 720p. You have to disable 720p to get the horizontal upscaled output. The games that do horizontal scaling even when you have 720p enabled are not Sony first-party titles, they're low-budget multiplat stuff like the Lego games.
GTA4 defaulted to 1080 if you had both 720 and 1080 enabled. GT5 likewise does the same and gives you worse visuals and framerate. There's others as well.
corduroygt
Banned
GTA4 on the PS3 is 640p, so it upscales to 1080p using the SPU method. GT5 at 1080p actually has 50% more resolution, thus sharper, crisper visuals compared to GT5 at 720p so it's not an apples to apples comparison. Big budget games do not use the RSX horizontal scaler unless 720p is disabled and/or they're rendering at a higher resolution than 720p in the first place.
It's doing a quick and dirty upscale though not a high quality one, so you are better off as var as visuals go for GTA4 if you had 1080p mode disabled. Your frame rate would be better as well in 720p mode. The dev that made the choice to render in 1080 mode when it's enabled had posted about it on the ps3devnet forum at the time, and his reasoning was that he may as well make use of 1080 if it's there. But he seemed to be questioning if that was the right course of action. Anyone know what they do with Red Dead Redemption?
It doesn't actually give you better visuals because GT5 makes many sacrifices in 1080 mode. It uses qaa for one so the image is actually blurrier than 720 mode believe it or not, and it struggles to keep 60fps in 1080 mode as well (screen tearing is very common). It's questionable if it's even rendering everything in 1080 mode because you can see how few pixels certain things have in the distance like fences, powerlines, etc, so I'm guessing that in 1080 mode they render some stuff at lower resolution. Basically as with GTA4, with GT5 you will get better visuals and frame rate in 720p mode.
corduroygt
Banned
How do you know it's doing a quick and dirty upscale? I played GTA4 in 1080p mode and finished the campaign, and besides the blockiness from 640p rendering, I did not notice any upscaling issues.
Well, that's your opinion. I hate tearing, but I still find it worthwhile to have the extra resolution, don't really notice the frame-rate drops as well. QAA doesn't matter much in GT5 because there aren't many detail textures to blur, it's all about the shaders in that game. Not to mention I like QAA since I find aliasing more of a bother compared to slightly blurred textures. So it's a matter of preference.
I keep my PS3 set for 720 because the visuals and performance are much better... Both my receiver and my TV upscales better than the PS3, and results in a better image when GT5 is set to 720p... although the lag is annoying, but can be adjusted for. I tend to turn off upscaling for the games that require better response. Since it's easier to turn off the upscaling from the TV (fewer button presses), I generally use the TV's upscaler vs. the receiver. When I switch to 360 (a different HDMI input selection on the receiver) I have to remember to turn off TV upscaling as well. As you can tell, it's a pain. Because of this, I tend to game more on the 360 vs. the PS3, as I have less fiddling to do.
Because that's what the programmer had said on ps3devnet sometime ago. There was a whole thread about it. The frame rate hit is hard to miss as well. Did you play GTA4 at launch or much later? Maybe they patched it out later on so what you were seeing was your tv's upscaing.
That's fine if you are ok with blur, tears, etc, but you claimed that 1080 mode in GT5 gave crisper visuals which it doesn't. 720p + external scaler will give crisper visuals than 1080p mode in GT5.
corduroygt
Banned
I played it much later. I didn't check to see if it was running at 720p or 1080p though, I just leave all output options checked.
Higher resolution makes everything crisper, pixels are smaller, thus jaggies are less irritating or noticable, and I am very sensitive to resolution. The display is finer at 1080p mode since there are more pixels to represent the road and cars in the distance. That's something you cannot get with a lower resolution.
corduroygt said:
I'd like to point out that the PAL version of Uncharted one only supported 720p, but the US version added support for 1080p at the last minute, as the devs realised there were a comparatively large number of tvs in the US that only supported 480 / 1080i. Uncharted 2 later would default to 720p when available even if you have 1080p enabled in XMB if I remember correctly, for all versions.
