SDTV owners and next-gen systems - beware?

[Shifty Geezer]

Those display grabs are diabolical. Look at the difference in shirt quality between 720p and 480p. There's no supersampling going on there at all. Which I guess is why there's talk XB360 doesn't look much better than XB on SD sets, because XB360 isn't putting in the same amount of rendering effort. Runing on SDTV, the console is doing less work, rendering less pixels. Why render to a smaller display? Where's the lovely SSAA we're supposed to get? What happened to the 'all games are rendered at 720p and then scales'? If this crippled SD display thing is true I hope it comes back to bite MS hard

As for the kiosks being HD, I've thought that too. Show people lovely HD screens and when they get the console home they see weaker graphics...not going to make for happy bunnies if the customer don't feel they were suitably well informed. Especialy if the image isn't being downsampled so the quality of SD res suffers. There ought to be XB360's on display with SD sets to show what most people will be getting.

 

[London Geezer]

This suggests that running on SDTV, the console is doing less work. Why render to a smaller display? Whereas the lovely SS-AA we're supposed to get? If this is the case I hope it comes back to bite MS hard

As for the kiosks, I've thought that too. Show people lovely HD screens and when they get the console home they see weaker graphics...not going to make for happy bunnies if the customer don't feel they were suitably well informed. Especialy if the image isn't being downsampled so the quality of SD res suffers. There ought to be XB360's on display with SD sets to show what most people will be getting.

I guess a small videogames shop could just have a X360 on display plugged to a small CRT TV... Unless MS block them and only let people show X360's through their Samsung HD pods that but i'm not sure how they could enforce such a rule.

 

[Serenity Painted Death]

I hate to interrupt the doom and gloom, but all we have to judge by now are a bunch of rushed launch games. If you read reviews, it seems fairly obvious a lot of devs thought they could just get by with (or only had the time to consider) bumping up the resolution without worry about much else.

Needless to say, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I hate to interrupt the doom and gloom, but all we have to judge by now are a bunch of rushed launch games. If you read reviews, it seems fairly obvious a lot of devs thought they could just get by with (or only had the time to consider) bumping up the resolution without worry about much else.

The launch period should have no bearing on this matter though. I've thus far been led to believe that there's a scaling chip in the XB360 that takes the 720p framebuffer and scales it to fit the output display resolution. It scales up for larger resolutions, and down for smaller. This is supposed to be a hardware feature of the architecture, and should be present whenever the output is set to 480p, scaling down the display to provide a degree of smoothing.

Indeed, including routines to select and render to a lower resolution for 480p display is more work of the devs than they in theory need. In theory, they only need to code for 720p and leave the rest to the hardware. Having the framebuffer resolution change according to the output resolution shouldn't really be an option for any developers. Enabling or disabling hardware scaling shouldn't be an option.

The original concept seemed simple and efficient. A fixed resolution framebuffer,a tiled renderer when devs get to write it, and hardware to automagically scale the output accordingly, guarenteeing the same amount of visual effort in an SD display as an HD display, just shrunk and averaged to a smaller resolution. That's not what I'm seeing those comparison pics, and I'm left wondering what the actual capabilities and systems of the hardware are, and what the real performance is going to be. Seemingly not supersampled 720p framebuffers on SDTV. An explanation is quite important, especially for people who are intending to get an XB360 for use with their SDTVs who like me are expecting very higher levels of AA for lower resolutions because of the supposed downsampling.

 

[Dr. Nick]

I heard a nasty rumor that both Kameo and PDZ are actually rendering at 640x480 when running in 480i/p. I didn't put much stock into this story at all as that would be simply moronic when the scaler in the 360 can downsample the high resolution render and effectively give "free" SSAA to SD users. However, just now I stumbled across this comparison and that game is obviously rendered at a far lower resolution when set to output 480p. How in the world could MS let something as jacked up as that slide?

Which brings me back to the question I asked before that was ignored. How many of the launch games are downscaled to run on a SDTV and how many natively run on the GPU in 480i/p when they have to? Also do you guys think games like Gears of War/MGS4 will suffer much when running in SD? I mean do you think they will stop looking like next gen games and look like something that could have been done on the Xbox?

I thought downscaling an image would make more sense than having it natively display the game in 480p on the GPU but wasn't quite sure what the results would be. Would you get better or worse IQ by downscaling. I can see why a dev would try to run the game natively. They could have MSAA 4x without tiling at all but wouldn't the IQ actually suffer by doing this? Also did devs do this to avoid having titles letterboxed in 480i.

 

[Phil]

First of all, nice thread. Nice to see it all civilized. :smile:

This is exactly what I thought would happen when I first heard about the focus of next gen consoles on HDTV. I was worried that instead of using the advanced hardware for more polygons, better pixel shading ect developers would use most of it just for higher resolutions. Leaving SDTV owners basically paying for hardware they cannot see the effect of, a total waste of money for the massive majority of gamers. People assured me that the effect of downsampling the image to a SDTV would create large levels of anti aliasing making the game also look great on a SDTV, looks like that isn't happening. Nintendo's aproach is starting to look like a far better one for me. Revolution could have half the pixel pipelines/pixel shaders/TU's/embedded memory and still put out better graphics at 640x480 then the HDTV focused PS3 and XBox 360. Its all fine and well to say that MS and Sony are helping to push HDTV adoption. But it really doesn't matter what anyone does to convince me to buy a HDTV when I simply cannot afford one.

Personally, I think we'll distinguish mainly from two different types of next generation games: The very visual "screenshot" orientated ones and the ones that go for immersion. Unfortunately, there are countless examples of the former I can think of while few of the latter. Metal Gear Solid (or generally the teams of Konami) seem to capture the immersion bit very well: their games don't necesserally impress in screenshots but when you see them in motion, you really feel that they are on another level. I had this feeling when I saw Metal Gear Solid 2 for the first time - and not because of the graphics, but simply because of the fluid animation, the coordinated-AI, the rain, even the air and wind that made it feel real. This was also underlined in the MGS4 preesentation, as in other games that dedicated their efforts into animation, framerate and cinematics. IMO, this will distinguish games from this generation with the ones from next. Resolution won't make it "next generation" - even on a HDTV, it's going to be the players/characters movement that will raise the bar.

Even if you don't see all detailed pixels on small SDTV - movement and animation play a fundemental role as to how realistic and authentic it is perceived by the player.

 

[Ty]

How can 480p games ever happen on these HDTV consoles though? Its one thing rendering slightly below HDTV resolutions and upscaling the image slightly. Its quite another to bring out games actually rendered only at 640x480, surely MS cannot allow that given what they have said. Same goes for Sony really.

It wouldn't be the first time. "Toy Story Graphics" ring a bell?

 

[London Geezer]

It wouldn't be the first time. "Toy Story Graphics" ring a bell?

Now that you mentioned Toy Story, a company can reach Toy Story graphics even if they keep their output at 480p - like the DVD really.
Obviously HDTV owners will bitch about it but as long as the IQ is good, it shouldn't be a huge problem. Progressive scan DVD players look awesome even on HDTVs, even though they're running at 480p only.

 

[Comfortably Lomb]

First of all, nice thread. Nice to see it all civilized. :smile:



Personally, I think we'll distinguish mainly from two different types of next generation games: The very visual "screenshot" orientated ones and the ones that go for immersion. Unfortunately, there are countless examples of the former I can think of while few of the latter. Metal Gear Solid (or generally the teams of Konami) seem to capture the immersion bit very well: their games don't necesserally impress in screenshots but when you see them in motion, you really feel that they are on another level. I had this feeling when I saw Metal Gear Solid 2 for the first time - and not because of the graphics, but simply because of the fluid animation, the coordinated-AI, the rain, even the air and wind that made it feel real. This was also underlined in the MGS4 preesentation, as in other games that dedicated their efforts into animation, framerate and cinematics. IMO, this will distinguish games from this generation with the ones from next. Resolution won't make it "next generation" - even on a HDTV, it's going to be the players/characters movement that will raise the bar.

Even if you don't see all detailed pixels on small SDTV - movement and animation play a fundemental role as to how realistic and authentic it is perceived by the player.

First of all I have a question, I have a 25" Sony Wega, so how do you people think games will look on it considering that it's only a SDTV but is also a little better than most other SDTVs.

Second. The jump in terms of graphical quality shouldn't just be resolution. Phil's right, animations and models should be better, but also shouldn't lighting, framerate, and the ability to get more characters on screen at one time. Having played CoD2 in one of the kiosks I don't think an Xbox1 could produce anything like that with all the effects and characters around you at all times.

 

[drpepper]

After seeing that before/after comparison, I'm thoroughly disapointed. The aliasing is so bad on the 480p that i can't imagine what it would look like on my 480i SDTV. That picture makes baby Jesus cry.

 

[kyleb]

Which brings me back to the question I asked before that was ignored. How many of the launch games are downscaled to run on a SDTV and how many natively run on the GPU in 480i/p when they have to? Also do you guys think games like Gears of War/MGS4 will suffer much when running in SD? I mean do you think they will stop looking like next gen games and look like something that could have been done on the Xbox?

I thought downscaling an image would make more sense than having it natively display the game in 480p on the GPU but wasn't quite sure what the results would be. Would you get better or worse IQ by downscaling. I can see why a dev would try to run the game natively. They could have MSAA 4x without tiling at all but wouldn't the IQ actually suffer by doing this? Also did devs do this to avoid having titles letterboxed in 480i.

Avoiding letterboxing in 4:3 modes isn't any excuse to render at a lower resolution, if they want a 4:3 mode they could just lower the horizontal FOV aproprately while still rendering at 1280x720 or whatever the game uses and resample the image from there. It truly doesn't make sense as to why MS would even be giving the game any information about what resolution the 360 is outputting at all. Giving a 4:3 flag for games that are made to support the optional 4:3 is smart, but detecting a lower output resolution and rendering at that instead of letting the scaler downsample the image is huge waste of the power of the console and makes for a giant reduction in image quality.

As for how many games are doing this; aside from the pictures which obviously puts NBA 2K6 on the list, I only know of the two rumored to do so which I mentioned above. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed and hope the rumor I heard is false as those are two very big games to bugger up like this, but given the shot of NBA 2K6 I'm not going to hold my breath either. Granted, I've always planed to be running 720p anyway so this really doesn't change anything for me, but if lots of games are rendering at low resolutions when outputting SD it could really hut market acceptance. Yes games like Gears of War are bound to still look like a step up even when output at 480i/p; but if they render it at low resolution for SD output then it won't be nearly sharp and smooth enough to look like the leap in graphics we have come to expect with a generation shift in consoles.

 

[London Geezer]

Ideally, the 480i/p should have lots of "free" SSAA applied to them. Not sure why that's not the case but i'm quite sure things will get better.
A 480i/p image with lots of AA would look VERY nice on SDTVs.
Obviously on a HDTV, HD resolutions are preferred.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

[conspiracy]When MS made their agreement with Samsung, it was decided to cripple SD output to promote the uptake of HDTVs, especially XB360 certified Samsung sets[/conspiracy]

 

[London Geezer]

[conspiracy]When MS made their agreement with Samsung, it was decided to cripple SD output to promote the uptake of HDTVs, especially XB360 certified Samsung sets[/conspiracy]

It's not really that hard to see how things could very well gone that way. In the end someone has to drive HDTV sales, and this helps a lot.
Obviously it wasn't a Dr Evil scenario with the big bosses conspiring to cripple X360 SD output and things like that - i think - but well i'm sure SD is not their priority, which is more or less the same thing really.

 

[Teasy]

Which is a mistake IMO. Driving HDTV sales isn't MS's job afterall, there aim is to sell as many consoles as they can. Limiting there userbase to people who own a HDTV only hurts that aim.

 

[Bill]

Titanio wasn't kidding. Apparantly Gun and other titles literally look virtually the same on SDTV on Xbox and 360.

I'm afraid this makes one question the 360's power. There's no way around it. Right or wrong.

One thing's for sure, the Xbox turned out extremely impressive. Half Life 2 Xbox is near exact to the PC and said to be the best graphics on Xbox yet.

Which I also find interesting because a lot of people questioned the Xbox's "legs". The theory being it was easy to develop, so tapped out quickly compared to say, PS2.

Hogwash. Unsurprisingly, the most powerful console also has the most headroom.

 

[scooby_dooby]

WHat examples to pick though! GUN? Come on now, are we really going to pretend we ever though 'GUN' was going to showcase the power of the X360?

Games like Kameo and PGR3 blow anything on the XBOX out of the water. I guess it's all a matter of which games you chose to look at.

 

[Powderkeg]

GUN is almost a straight port of the Xbox version.

 

[kyleb]

As long as it actually renders at 720p with some AA and AF, that is good with me. Otherwise I'll probably wait for someone to hack widescreen support into the PC version.

 

[Helstar]

Think of the best CG you have ever seen in your 480i TV set.
Think of FF:TSW in your 480i TV
Was it bad ???

Just give the pixels the right treatment, and the job is done. NO NEED TO HDTV TO ANCHIEVE PHOTO-LIKE GAMES.

And I'll not tell you the VHS resolution, you'd faint... (ok, 240i... and it still looks fantastic... think of Toy Story 2 in VHS at 240i.... so pleeeease, 480p is really enough... 720p, 1080i and 1080p are just marketing, WHEN comparing displays of the same size. I thing 480p is enough for a 29" screen. 42"should get 720p and 60" 1080i or p

Stay 7 feet away from a 29" TV, playing at 480p and then at 720p. There would be NO DIFERENCE AT ALL. If you get closer, like 3 feet, you start seeing the res diference.