The Neverending Upscale Discussion Thread * Summary=#457

Would selfshadowing, polycount, drawdistance, normal mapping, AA or other technical stuff be relevant?

I remember someone (Tap In?) complaining about lack of Halo 3 love on this forum. Well this thread certainly proves otherwise.

I am really surprised about all those personal attacks on One, including the ones from the official and unofficial trolls. Whatever his motives were, he came up with a reasonable evidence regarding SP engine, and people try to dispute it by MP engine, silliness, video encoding, pixel counting, or even upscaled MP shots. Holly crap I say.

I also don't understand why some people here feel the need to state "they don't care about resolution of the game" over and over again. I care, and certainly don't have any agenda, nor any feelings towards MS or Bungie. I care for most other games as well, including the ones I have no intention of playing. It is called intellectual curiosity.

Carl mentioned that technically interesting discussion should be moved to somewhere else as this thread should be hospitable to fans of the game. That would be understandable if it didn't mean among all the games in Console Games forum, only Halo is immune to technical discussion.

Sorry for this off topic post as it has nothing to do with Halo 3, technically or otherwise, it is about the attitudes of the participants here. I felt someone had to say it.

 

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=7302470&postcount=2990

holy crap ML, you (via ONE) managed to piss off Frankie.

I guess that settles that indeed.

 

Wouldn't it be just rad if Frankie mentioned it in the next podcast? Maybe if he's angry enough he'll actually confirm the resolution.

 

No, it wasn't me he was replying to. It was someone else who asked over and over again. I only apologized since he seemed a little irritated.

 

Is that a comment by a Microsoft rep? If so this is no more offtopic and it's a quite interesting comment, at first glance it appears the guy resents that his game got scrutinized and almost becomes a cheerleader of Halo fanguys, however he never mentions 720p or anything like that. What does it mean? If you flip it over it can be paraphrased like this:

If he deliberately crafted his post to be interpreted like that I'd be very impressed, I'd love to hire him for my PR guy

As for those who attack pixel counting, I interpret it as they fear what they may see. Halo 3 has no apparent post-processing on poly edges except for AA. The simplest way to refute my claim is, after all, to find a disproof in the same material I used by doing the same thing as I did. OTOH, one of the ways to reinforce my claim is also finding more pieces of evidence from completely unrelated scenes, based on probability theory. It can mitigate the bad WMV (not quicktime, why does that MS rep badmouth his company's tech?) encoding criticism to some degree, but I don't do it for now because I'm trying to be polite

 

The Halo 3 beta was a lot sharper than PGR3.

 

I agree, but contrast often has as much if not more to do with sharpness than resolution does. Regardless, it doesn't change what the captures prove.

 

Personally, I don't think Frankie's post settles anything... It's just more side-stepping for whatever reason he has.

My guess is that they haven't finished optimizing and are trying to decide AA level and would rather wait until things are absolutely final before confirming resolution and AA at the same time for the public.

Then again, you could take that single player screenshot and Frankie's mention of how it was taken in that Weekly Update (I previously posted in this thread) as evidence enough of what Halo 3 will be rendering in-game.

I can't recall if I mentioned it before (one of those posts that I start writing and then abandon), but did you try recreating the line edge in say, MS Paint, just with a simple line tool and then count (you can use "show grid" when you zoom in)? I'd do it, but I'm not sure what you mean by 39 steps for 45 pixels. What was the size of the grid you used to count?

Instead you may want to check out the smallest resolvable stair step or edge aliasing... Which is a problem anyway because the image isn't very clear. Even the lower resolution offerings of the video exhibit poor image quality...

 

Here's a thought.

Why would Bungie directly respond to what some fanboy came up with in some forum. I know B3D likes to be above this stuff, but frankly this isn't. Frankie's post basically says 700k+ people played it months ago, and this 'guy' is revealing it wasn't really HD based off of a cherry picked frame in a movie. It's pretty hard to believe no one, including the fanboys didn't see this months ago. The burden of proof at this point is on one, not Bungie.

I'm all for technical discussion, but the cherry picked frame and the constant trolling barbs are not really technical, and show a large amount of bias.

Proelite does have a point too, cutscenes have always been done 2.35:1 so there is some evidence that some of the video had to be resized, which completely invalidates anything one is doing.

We will see when the game comes out, I played the beta many times on my 60" SXRD and the fact I could find people across Valhalla without the scope doesn't imply a reduced resolution to me. Now if Halo is not rendering in 720p, but manages to look like the Beta or better. Well I say that technically proves that rendering in a lower resolution can be done without hurting visuals. If you need photoshop to zoom in to see it, what is the point?

 

Cherry picked? Gimme a break. Using Photoshop was to show it to those who can't feel the coarse granularity with their own weak eyes.

You say it's a 2.35:1 cut scene upscaled and then say it's not upscaled, WTF? If I could see your imaginary upscaling for a 2.35:1 cut scene, how do I miss upscaling in Beta? Just make up your mind before posting a schizophrenic "thought".

 

The upscale discussion has been moved here. Since this is the technology forum I expect only the best behaviour from everyone.

 

Thanks Stefan.

Always You mean the one and only E3 2006 trailer? Besides that, none of the material Bungie has released has been in that aspect ratio.

 

Wait guys..I lost the beginning of this discussion, what's going on here?? where and when did this discussion start!?

 

For those that don't understand what One is talking about with counting pixels to prove the difference between upscaled an native, here are some example shots:

Halo rendered at 1088x612 and then upscaled to 720p

Halo rendered at 720p

Note how the angled edges in the upscaled shot show jaggies thicker than one pixel, while shot rendered at 720p shows jaggies which are all exactly one pixel thick. This difference is because the first image is upscaled while the latter image is presented at it's native resolution.

 

Same picture in ur links

 

Your links both go to the same image.

 

As i recall, Halo and Halo 2 cutscenes were letter boxed. Now that you mention it though, Halo wasn't widescreen, so it may have been 1.77 there.

 

Does the MP beta prove anything about the SP game? Wasn't the video that started all of this from a E3 SP video?

 

Beaten twice over.

Does anyone know if we have access to some beta screenshots that are low on the compression (those gamersyde pics?)? The beta ran without any AA whatsoever, and we now know that both the beta and the final game are/will run at the same res, so we'd immediately know whether the final resolution will be 720p or significantly less (barring last-month changes, which are extremely unlikely).

Edit: and assuming Frankie isn't completely ignorant of what res the beta internally rendered at.