Xbox 360 have 4x AA enable at all times?

[London Geezer]

This just doesn't sound right. I've played games that ran at around 40fps on my computer monitor and there is no screen tearing...

During horizontal movements it would be more evident.
It really depends on the game you're playing, but according to the laws of physics, if the signal is not the same or a multiple of the screen's refresh rate, there should be tearing.

Of course i stand to be corrected, but 40fps would tear on a 60Hz monitor. As soon as the whole image moves, you should see tearing.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Screen tearing will happen if your updating the screen between refreshes. If you lock to the screen refresh you'll get stuttered frames instead, where every third frame would be shown for two refreshes on a 60Hz screen.

On NWN without locking to the vertical blank/vertical syncing, the frame rate was quick but there were several 'fractures' across the display, especially visible when rotating the camera. If I synced to the vertical refresh, there was no such tearing but the frame-rate dropped as frames taking longer than 1/60 of a second to render took meant displaying the same frame for 2 refreshes.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Developers will obviously balance their games to either use 2x FSAA and 60/30 fps, or 4x FSAA, a little less effects/details, and once again 60/30 fps...

 

[Karma Police]

Apparently ATi has confirmed that every single Xbox 360 game will be required to run at a minimum of 720p resolution with 4x Anti-Aliasing.

source:

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/05/25/ati_xbox_360_london/

 

[Jawed]

:

Whilst the architecture of the 360 is not comparable to a PC design, Rene said that the raw performance would be roughly equivalent to a 32-pipeline PC graphics card.

Jawed

 

[Nite_Hawk]

:

Whilst the architecture of the 360 is not comparable to a PC design, Rene said that the raw performance would be roughly equivalent to a 32-pipeline PC graphics card.

Jawed

Maybe it has extreme pipelines!

Nite_Hawk

 

[Jawed]

Quite the opposite, it seems, it has no shader pipelines as far as I can tell.

Uh-oh, another round of fisticuffs looms...

Jawed

 

[Karma Police]

BTW, that was the difference between MSAA & other types of AA? MSAA is the most taxing, isn't it?

 

[Nite_Hawk]

BTW, that was the difference between MSAA & other types of AA? MSAA is the most taxing, isn't it?

Actually, MSAA is probably somewhere in the middle. It's cheaper than supersampling, but it's probably not as cheap as something like Matrox's method.

MSAA is great in most cases, but in certain situations (like with alpha textures) it won't apply. It does however seem to be the best FSAA we've had so far in terms of how good it looks for the performance hit.

Edit: I should probably clarify, MSAA should specifically save you fillrate over SS.

Nite_Hawk

 

[Karma Police]

Cool beans. Thanks for that. I mixed up MSAA & the Supersampling AA.

 

[wco81]

HDTV has been catching on in the US lately, but I don't see that happening over here just yet. It'll take dramtic changes in prices and public awareness for that to happen...

Whatever happened to HD-Mac? I remember seeing the '92 Barcelona games, specifically some swimming events.

NBC meanwhile screwed up the Games from Athens last year by using too low bitrates. Whenever a high diver hit the water, there was a lot of blocking around the splash.

Europe adopted 16:9 TVs but are slow to get on HDTV. They tend to get higher-performance cars (even Japanese cars which are better than the ones sold in the US) and some nicer consumer electronics. They obviously adopted mobile technology a lot faster than the US too.

So why has digital TV, specifically HDTV, been so slowly adopted over there? PAL can't be that good could it?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

PAL's great! Seriously though, PAL gives a very good quality, especially considering it's age. A fair bit of digital TV looks worse than analogue PAL broadcasts that I've seen. I'd rather have a degree of random noise than the blocking of digital compression. The major downside is resolution on big screens, especially with true widescreen broadcasts that stretch the already-limited 720x576 display. 'Enterprise' is one such program that chops top and bottom off to produce a 720x405 image or there abouts, and then scaled up to >28".

I think the main reason the EU hasn't got HDTV is it's made up of umpteen countries who can't agree on anything, unlike Japan or the US that are single states. Finding one format that everyone signs up to seems to be a major bottleneck, like the rest of the EU's common policies!

 

[London Geezer]

I think the main reason the EU hasn't got HDTV is it's made up of umpteen countries who can't agree on anything, unlike Japan or the US that are single states. Finding one format that everyone signs up to seems to be a major bottleneck, like the rest of the EU's common policies!

Well, when you actually stop to think about it, it's quite stupid. I mean, why would, say, Germany (to pick one) play hard to get over HD standards? It's just... i can't compute it, but then again, it's Europe so i'm not surprised.

There really was no real reason to bitch about HD standards all these years (japan have had HD channels since the 90's). The only real reason was the bandwidth usage, which i can understand, but what's there to decide over bloody HD standards that even the US and Japan - 2 countries separated by an ocean 10 times bigger than Europe itself - agreed upon almost a decade ago?

Sometimes you really wonder where human intelligence will take us.

 

[wco81]

Well MUSE and HD-MAC were analog weren't they?

So the US went directly to digital and gave spectrum (or lent it) freely to broadcasters.

Maybe the problem is paying for spectrum? After all, Western Europe raped the mobile companies with 3G spectrum licenses.

Of course the costs of the new hardware (both for consumers and broadcasters) discourages adoption but we've at least had broadcasts here for about 5 years.

 

[nelg]

As a side note, I mentioned before that 1080p is not a function of the display logic. What I didn't realise until now is that ATI aren't responsible for the display - this doesn't exist in C1/Xenos, but something that Microsoft has done themselves.

Someone should tell Todd Holmdahl.

TH: Quality always takes precedent in what we do. We have a great experience in both high definition and in standard definition. It's a very high quality signal, we meet all the specifications that are out there worldwide. Many of the people on the team we had working on the product came from the WebTV space where they spent a lot of time developing TV encoders and they understand that space very well. We also spent a lot of time working with ATI, and ATI is a leader in developing technology for high definition TV sets. You take that group of people, the expertise that they have. A lot of that is our internal technology. You take our people and the ATI people and you put them together, and you develop a very efficient, effective, high-quality TV encoder.