Rendering in HD resolutions - worth it?

[pipo]

First of all: I'm not looking for flamewars, so there should be no {[PS3/Rev/X360] [can/can't] do it} type of stuff in here. Please.

It's my first poll, and Engrish is not my native language, so bear with me...

The fuzz about PGR3's supposedly lower than 720p internal rendering made me wonder. Do we really care about this?

If a lower internal resolution means more post effects, the result could be even better than rendering native HD IMHO.

So my question is: should developers be forced to render at a minimum internal HD resolution of 1280x720?

 

[BlueTsunami]

Forcing developers to do anything is bad, not just with High Definition. There should be standards but sometimes it isn't good.

 

[StefanS]

I am only concerned about how good a game looks. How those visuals are actually achieved is secondary to me.

 

[PiNkY]

I pretty much agree with the above two posters, take ico far a this gen example. They sacrificed horizontal resolution for better lightning and the results were well worth it. The problem will only be exaggerated with pixel shader heavy next gen titles...

 

[Squeak]

I pretty much agree with the above two posters, take ico far a this gen example. They sacrificed horizontal resolution for better lightning and the results were well worth it. The problem will only be exaggerated with pixel shader heavy next gen titles...

Lighting was vertexbased and with bilinear bloom. None of those effects has impact on the framebuffer size.

 

[PiNkY]

Frame Buffer size is not the only thing affected when increasing resolution. You simply have to do more work per frame (e.g. ICO's post-processing Bloom effect incurs a per-pixel cost). As much of the visual fidelity in next-gen games will be from fragment shaders, reducing rendering resolution will allow for more complexety there.

 

[drpepper]

I picked no as I don't have an HDTV nor would I care to have one at the moment. Special effects trump resolution in my books.

 

[dopefishzzz]

Anything lower than 1280 X 720 looks absolutely UGLY on my LCD HDTV.

So YES, they HAVE to render in 720P. It was the main selling part of the XBOX360 6 months ago and the reason I have bought an HDTV.

If MS screw up with HD, they'll lose.

 

[MrWibble]

I pretty much agree with the above two posters, take ico far a this gen example. They sacrificed horizontal resolution for better lightning and the results were well worth it.

Did it? Looks like the same res as everything else to me except that they went for non-interlaced output. That halves the vertical res but seems to be downscaled from a highres back-buffer (it's slightly AA'd) and so wouldn't save any fillrate.

Where are the details of this tradeoff?

 

[MrWibble]

I voted "yes", taking a long-term view on it. Right now the market is a bit of a mess but if we're going to sort it out, we should take a hard line on supporting only the best standards even if that means making compromises in the short term.

 

[Phil]

Personally I think it's a mixed bag. There are developers and there are developers. Some are pretty spot on with what they want to achieve with the hardware while others do things at the expence of the end-user that may or may not notice certain things. I would love to see certain guidelines in resolution as framerate, but these can greatly vary between games even within the same genre. For example: a slower paced racer might run fine at 30 fps (perhaps even thanks to motion blur) while another would be at the expence of those that would appreciate a higher framerate. Same goes for resolutions I suppose and I would really hate to see a jump in reslolution at the expence of framerate.

 

[see colon]

The fuzz about PGR3's supposedly lower than 720p internal rendering made me wonder. Do we really care about this?

is there a link to this fuzz? i'd realy like to read it.

 

[Apoc]

I voted no.

I think you should make it work on mor pixels when you have near perfect pixels at a lower resolution.

 

[ERP]

I voted no, but I think most games would have been HD anyway, if not immediately shortly afterwards.
However I really think that this should be the dev's call.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I voted no, but it's kinda a tough call to make really. On the one hand devs should be free to choose and they can get away with SD res to get some fancydoodle effect they want they shouldn't be restricted otherwise. On the other hand we need to push new techs and if HD res is supported it enforced AA on SD which would be wanted anyway. The idea os SD without AA I can't go along with, so if you're going to enforce AA at SD res, you may as well enforce HD res and supersample it for SD res.

For me I think if HD isn't forced devs will develop for it anyway. There's lots of tricks developers do to get better games without being told they have to. Some devs actually want to release quality products they can be proud of. That's why some games this gen are HD or progressive scan, even though there's no requirement to do this. And those devs that don't support it will either have lower quality products with the associated hit in sales, or be using the rendering power saved to do other magic things.

 

[Bobbler]

I voted No; I'm a very big believer in developer freedom, if they don't want HD resolution for their game it shouldn't be forced upon them. If the people don't buy it because of that, thats another story, but let the developer decide what they want to do with their vision.

Not a big deal though it seems, as X360 and PS3 should have plenty of power to do 720p without sacrificing things. And likewise Rev should have plenty of power for its targetted res as well.

 

[Powderkeg]

is there a link to this fuzz? i'd realy like to read it.

Since I seem to have started this "fuzz" I guess I'll give a short explaination.

Some reviewers have received the final build reviewers copy of PGR3. When they took screenshots using a dev kits they noticed that all menues are in 1280X720 (720p) but actually gameplay only generates 1024X600 screenshots, indicating that the game itself runs in 1024X600 internally and is upsampled to 720p.

The posts I made about it are in the Console Games forum here, and there is another thread at Bizarres own forums about it. (Actually it's a 30 vs 60 FPS thread, but this came up too)

PGR3's gameplay runs internally at 1024X600 with 2X AA (Not sure of type) and at 30 FPS.

 

[_phil_]

voted yes because i can display 720p at home.I Don't see any other reason to buy nextgen hardware (yet.still happy with this one).

 

[pc999]

No. Dev should have the choise, althought I belive that for many (at least at the begining) will not have really a big improvment in using no HD rez I dont want the risk of losing a killer fx or a bizarre that can give gamplay improvments, oreven using GPGPU abilitys (like physics) that really may change the gameplay.

Give freddom and she will suprisse you.

 

[wco81]

PGR3's gameplay runs internally at 1024X600 with 2X AA (Not sure of type) and at 30 FPS.

If that's true, then the premise of this poll is moot, no?

I said no, even though I want to only see HDTV games.