Question about PS3 and 1080 P to 720P

btdvox

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Hey guys heres a question that idont really know the answer to- obv PS3 has a selling point at 1080P which doesnt really hype anything for me or rather i dont really care about it much- but my question is i have a new 42 inch samsung plasma- Ive been told that 1080p doesnt really matter on 42 inch plasmas unless ur sitting 5 feet away (im sitting the normal 10 feet in my room) Anyways point being that I will be using 720P for the games that are native in 1080P when i use 720P and there downscaled i guess will they look just as good? as in will they make them for 720P also? sorry its prob a dumb question but i dont really know the answer- I know games on my 360 that are set in 1080i look just as good in 720p to me, Anyways thanks
 
I think people under estimate the difference between 720p and 1080p on something like a video game or PC usage (things that aren't film). It isn't hard to tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, even from several feet away, on things that don't have a rather large amount of downsampling/AA already.

And to answer your question... It'll look fine. You can just choose 720p as the output res on the PS3 and it should take care of the rest (and whatever it doesn't, you're TV will). Majority of stuff will be in 720p anyways.
 
It depends on the internal scaler. A quick example. The Toshiba HD DVD player had sub par 720p performance until a firmware update fixed it. Wait and see deal.
 
I'd be very surprised to see anything render at 1080p and scale down to 720p for output rather than just render to 720p in the first place.
 
It just depends on how long you intend to hold on to that TV. I personally think that we'll eventually end up with 1080p as a standard that will last for a decent while, as it so well matches the source materials for movies, demand for pushing larger screens is ever on the increase, a lot of games will be able to make use of it as time goes on (if so many games are 1080p already now, then it'll be interesting to see where that goes later), lots of downloadable games support 1080p, you can browse much nicer in 1080p, and so on.

So, either buy a tv that's really cheap and you can settle on for 1-2 years, and then buy another one, or hold out until a 1080p TV is within your proper buying range.
 
I'd be very surprised to see anything render at 1080p and scale down to 720p for output rather than just render to 720p in the first place.

I dunno I'm not sure I'd bother with a different 720p code path/test path if I was targetting 1080p/i. In fact I know I'd rather not have to deal with it.
 
well for me i dont notice much of a change from 720 to 1080i and it is known that for tv's smaller than 50 inch the difference wont be much- its been stated on over 5 sites.

Gerry block from IGN quoted

"A number of questions today ask whether 1080p is worth the premium it carries in terms of cost. While there's some room for debate, in practical application 1080p is not suited for displays smaller than 50-inches, unless you sit extremely close to the TV (like within 4 feet). At the usual 8-10 foot home theater viewing distance, 1080p doesn't look any different than 720p on a 40-inch display. "

heres the full article http://gear.ign.com/articles/738/738065p1.html

that being said that doesnt mean that there is no difference of course there is. Every TV has a certain recomended space to sit at- 42 inch is suppose to be 6-10 feet and 50 is 8-12 etc etc. I sit at 9 Feet from my 42 inch plasma.

Someone also had said how long you want to keep the TV- the fact that hitachi is making the first 1080p native plasma and it hasnt come out yet means something. And also that there isnt a single 42 inch plasma other than westinghouse that even has 1080p. i think 2007 will be the start of the high def for mainstream consumers. And 1080p wont be a thing for another year or so at most. Though I would rather have a Plasma than a DLP anyday. And i heard the difference on 720P and 1080P on a 56 inch DLP is big- I think different applications will have difference scenarios.
 
I dunno I'm not sure I'd bother with a different 720p code path/test path if I was targetting 1080p/i. In fact I know I'd rather not have to deal with it.

If you're going to take the "support only the bare minimum" approach to development, you're probably going to target 720p over 1080p in the first place.

You have to have multiple resolution support anyway (to support SD resolutions) so it's not like you're really saving that much effort.
 
If you're going to take the "support only the bare minimum" approach to development, you're probably going to target 720p over 1080p in the first place.

You have to have multiple resolution support anyway (to support SD resolutions) so it's not like you're really saving that much effort.

Actually that's not really my issue, assuming it was mandated that I support 1080 which does actually happen to me occasionally or I was doing something where 1080 was a no brainer (say fighting game). I would target 1080, I would look at it in 720 mode and unless there was a significant win using native 720, I wouldn't build a 720 version.

Not because of the engineering cost which is minimal, because of the additional test path, and possible additional UI asset work (depending on the complexity of the UI).

Things would be a little different if I was targetting 720 and had to put a 1080 version in for "marketting".
 
I know this is a bit off topic but is it required for X360 to tile in order to render at 1080p natively?
 
I was just reading in some other thread in this forum about how X360 would not be able to render 1080p games natively because of the tiling required. Something about how you can't fit two frames in the eDRAM because one 1080p image = 8MB. I looked everywhere and couldn't find it.
 
What you're refering to is Phil Harrison's statement that 360 can't render a 1080p scene 'normally' due to the 8+8 MBs required for both front and back buffering (and that doesn't even cover all the data costs).

But then again, 360 isn't about 'normal' rendering to begin with! ;)

That said though, for a 4xMSAA 1080p frame we're talking about 7 tiles (and a lot of main memory footprint).

Personally I'd like to know how the mastery of Xenos' tiling techniques is progressing with devs; I feel as if we haven't really talked about it in nearly a year, since the initial tiling vs non-tiling designed engines debate took place.
 
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I was just reading in some other thread in this forum about how X360 would not be able to render 1080p games natively because of the tiling required. Something about how you can't fit two frames in the eDRAM because one 1080p image = 8MB. I looked everywhere and couldn't find it.

Something, somewhere, by somebody, was horribly misinterpreted. One, a 1080p image is larger than 8MiB. It's 1920pixels * 1080pixels * (32b color + 32b Z/stencil), which gives you ~15.82MiB. Two, 720p with no AA requires ~7MiB, which means that with either 2xAA or 4xAA, you need either two or three tiles (14MiB, 28MiB). There are numerous games that use that resolution with either of those AA values, and they require tiling. Other games support other odd resolutions, with or without AA, and some of them will require tiling. All of these work, and tiling doesn't break the output. That would be crazy, inane, and ultimately completely broken.

So, Tiling incurrs no problems regarding 1080p that it doesn't already regarding any framebuffer that exceeds 10MiB.

What you may have heard is that 1080p w/ 4xAA is out of the question, since it would require 7 tiles, and might have a pretty significant performance hit, or something along those lines.

Edit: Bleh, couldn't you have waited 7 more minutes to post that?

Also, I don't know how much mystery is still involved here, that can be applied generally to every case. Redundant transforms will cost so much , and other methods will require so much memory, bandwidth, etc. And all of that is definitely limited to a case-by-case analysis (frame-by-frame even...). Most of the stuff from Microsoft has been in the way of making things easier (for example, they've added certain additions to the compiler so that Z pre-pass can remove unnecessary instructions and the output between the Pre and normal passes match such that there's no Z fighting issues.

Edit 2: To hell with editing. :LOL:
 
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That said though, for a 4xMSAA 1080p frame we're talking about 7 tiles. I honestly *do* think that there will be some issues with 360 putting out 1080p on a consistently high IQ basis, at least early on. Tiling is supposed to make things cheap cheap cheap, but there's something up right now with it and I have the feeling we're not getting a clear story on where performance expectations presently lie.

Are there any console games, on any platform, that have high IQ with 1080p + 4xMSAA in the 2006 timeframe?
 
Are there any console games, on any platform, that have high IQ with 1080p + 4xMSAA in the 2006 timeframe?

I edited my post actually (twice!) :)

But the *first* edit actually went to say that a 4xMSAA image probably wouldn't be necessary to remain competetive with Sony's own 1080p titles, since I doubt many of them will be oozing AA either.

So don't worry, we're on the same page. :cool:

Though I do wonder what the deal is with the last question I ask in my 'new' edit.
 
I would target 1080, I would look at it in 720 mode and unless there was a significant win using native 720, I wouldn't build a 720 version.
There would be a big loss in building a 720p version as you'd loose all that fidelity that would otherwise be gained from oversampling. They only benefit in rendering at a lower resolution could be framerate, and if your framerate isn't good when running 1080p then surely it would be better to resolve that instead simply getting lower resolution outputs running better.
 
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