So umm..doesn't the transition to high definition shoot the Wii in the foot?
- Thread starter Rangers
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My kids are a 6 year old girl and a 9 year old boy and both of them LOVE playing GameCube on our 42" plasma and think it looks fantastic.
I don't think it looks all that bad to be honest. I have it on a serial input only too, haven't gotten the HD cables yet.
The targeted crowd for the Wii won't be as picky as you or I about eye-candy I think, this won't be much of an issue.
I don't think it looks all that bad to be honest. I have it on a serial input only too, haven't gotten the HD cables yet.
The targeted crowd for the Wii won't be as picky as you or I about eye-candy I think, this won't be much of an issue.
RancidLunchmeat
Veteran
I can't find the link, but I believe it was in a business week interview, where they essentially said that they wanted to make the Wii more powerful, and they also wanted it to be much cheaper, that they failed in both, and their next console would have to compete more closely with their competitors in terms of power.
Digi: If 'the target audience' of the Wii is 6-9 year olds, then the Wii won't have any greater market penetration than the Gamecube did.
Scanlines. An LCD TV doesn't have any. While they may be that apparent when you're sitting far away, an SDTV has small black lines between each row of pixels, that combined with colour bleeding really softens the image.
With an LCD, you're seeing every single pixel. The fact of the matter is, 640*480 is a very low resolution - PC owners have said this for years because we play on monitors that simply don't hide this aspect as well as SDTV's do. I've played my PC at 640*480 on a TV vs. a monitor, it looks far, far better on a TV simply because the inherent weakness of the technology masks all that aliasing. That, and some LCD's have poor scalers as well, adding to the problem.
One more thing: Like some 360 titles, the last generation did their own upscaling as well. AFAIK for example, Jak 2/3 on the PS2 actually had a 512x512 framebuffer and simply upscaled. Perhaps RE4 is one of those titles as well, albeit every single console game I've seen on an LCD TV in stores (last-gen) looked absolutely awful to me.
The thing is that I've played around with NES and SNES emulators that do a fine job of smoothing out a very low res (~320x200 for NES, right?) images to upscale them to 800x600 or 1024x768, and they certainly didn't have all those hideous MPEG-like artificacts. So how is that HDTV's upscalers aren't even as good as these dinky little freeware programs? Why do these games always look like badly compressed MPEGS?
modern Emulators don't just uspscale the finised image, they alter the rendering resolution and tend to apply other enhancements as well. Hence my point about how Nintendo would be wise to be working on a Wii-HD which would make those old NES and SNES games look nice at high resolutions and render GNC and Wii games at high resolution as well.
So, no, not HDTV or even dedicated scaler can do to the finished image what can be done to improve the look of a game as it is being rendered. However, as for "MPEG-like artifacts", that is just really crappy scaling and you won't see that on anything but the bottom of the barrel HDTVs.
So, no, not HDTV or even dedicated scaler can do to the finished image what can be done to improve the look of a game as it is being rendered. However, as for "MPEG-like artifacts", that is just really crappy scaling and you won't see that on anything but the bottom of the barrel HDTVs.
Doesn't the word "render" only apply to 3D graphics? NES games don't have polygons; they just draw predefined sprites and backgrounds. One way or another, the 2xSAL mode is just upscaling them.
Play Metroid Prime at 480p on a nice big HDTV,it looks the exact opposite of crap.
Agreed, I played the GC on a 42" rear projection HDTV at 480p and most games looked fantastic.
Nah, "render" applies to 2d work as well, and the 2xSaI scales the various sprites and backgrounds independently before the emulator composites them.
The majority of next gen console buyers have already concluded or will conclude that the 360/PS3 is way superior in graphics. Why? Most consoles are sold at B&M stores, which typically display all their 360/PS3 demos in HD. This is where most of the comparsions (the second probably being the internet where HD is still a major factor) will happen so the majority of Wii purchase will be made knowing that the Wii has inferior graphics.
I think Wii will do well because of its ability to distract a gamers focus away from graphical fidelty (its most lacking feature) with its gameplay (its most innovative and novel feature). Plus its simplicity appeals to masses, while I think the 360 and PS3 cater to a growing number of more sophisticated gamers.
I can see the total number of console surpassing the 200 million mark this generation.
2xSai and even more insane filters like HQ3x do much more than just scaling. Basically, they use a lookup table on a sliding window of pixels to try and locally vectorize it, and then reinterpret that vectorization at a higher resolution. Look here for some nice visual examples. It doesn't work perfectly for all graphical styles, but for some it's a big improvement.
The wii looks pretty good on my 32 in Toshiba LCD- in 480p widescreen- I think it really matters how big your going if you notice any nintendo videos ull see lcds that arnet bigger than 32 or 36- Because the wii doesnt look good on my 42 inch thats for sure. I think Nintendo really messed up by not releasing components though- you could only buy them thru phone........and they wont be released in stores till late dec. dumb move nintendo. I know some people who havent even touched zelda or didnt buy a wii yet cuz of lack of component- in a competition with 360 and ps3 its pretty dumb not to have them for sale- same with PS3 how they included composite with even the 60 GB beats me- thankfully i already had a good HDMI cable- but for those who didnt thats an extra 100 bucks from most retailers. Even my Samsung upconverting dvd player came with a free hdmi...go figure
Ah, thx, didn't know that. But all that said, just doing a simple bilinear upscaling of a 640x480 image to 720xwhatever can't be all that expensive, can it? We're in an era where GPUs are doing all this insane stuff with textures and framebuffer effects at 60fps or more, and I'm supposed to believe that blending two interlaced half-frames and upscaling is impossible without ugly MPEG-like artifacts everywhere? What is this, 1995?
Certainly not, and I agree that the scaling quality on early and low-cost LCDs was inexcusable. However, it's getting better I believe. I recently bought a cheap (€200) 19" widescreen 1440*960 display for my sister and absolutely expected the rendering of non-native resolutions to be horrendous, but it is in fact quite acceptable. That's a monitor of course and not a TV, but I'd hope that the scaling got better there as well, as it's probably even more important with all the low-res material out there.
Getting back to Wii, I actually believe that it should be powerful enough to do some nice 2xSaI like scaling for the 2D titles. I remeber doing that with ZSNES on my K6-3 500
. The problem is that I just can't see Nintendo bothering to do something non-essential like that.tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
Reggie already said Wii will last 4 to 6 six years (so it probably end up 5 years like GC).
About the gfx, how many people actually care about them? ive never a normal, not tech head, gamer complain about ps2 gfx. If everbody is so keen on gfx then why isnt everybody gaming on pc?
