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Videogames, HDTV and Widescreen 16:9?
Swerbo writes "I've been thinking about buying a widescreen HDTV-ready television for quite some time now, but being the geek that I am, I'm more interested in playing video games on it than on watching DVDs or HDTV. I couldn't find much on Slashdot about this (except some material on the new GTA3/VC box set), and most of the info on the Net is superficial or fact-based such as which games are available in 480p, 720p, 1080i, and/or 16:9. So, I couldn't think of a better place to ask: Has anyone been playing video games on HDTV and/or in 16:9 widescreen format? If so, what have your experiences been? Is it awesome? Does it suck? Does it justify the additional cost of an HDTV just to play 4:3 using 480p (since not much else is supported yet like 720p or 1080i with/without 16:9?) Or does your framerate drop and the games get choppy? What's the availability of HD games on the various console platforms, and why don't more games handle native 16:9 widescreen format (with extras like side-by-side split screen rather than vertical split-screen)?"
Check out http://hdgames.net. There is some good info there.
I have a game cube and if a game supports 480p, it makes all the differance in the world. Metroid and Mario Sunshine are stunning. The only thing not supported much is 16:9, but for the few games that do support it (Eternal Darkness, F-Zero) it looks great. That's why I got a 36" 4:3 TV. Video games and normal TV are more common, and my tv does 16:9 well. There is no slow down at all with any of the progressive scan options in any of the games.
If you have to ask whether the additional expense is worth it, don't bother. There are few games that support the added resolution or the widescreen features, and many of the few that do suffer from slowdown issues.
.1% of console owners who have one.
The problem is that consoles are pushed as far as they can go during a development process... They just don't have an extra few thousand pixels lying around. Programmers can either spend additional time downtuning the graphics when a HDTV is detected, which makes a nasty mess of the simplicity that a console offers, or they can just ignore the
Most companies choose to ignore the HDTV crowd, and for good reason. The same reasons apply to widescreen... You can either redo all of your interface work, clipping planes, timing, surprises, etc, or you can give up on that very small portion of the market and invest those resources in making the game better for everyone.
If you are thinking of spending the 2k for a high-res gaming setup, why not spend that money on a really good gaming computer? True, you will have to re-buy everything in 5 years, but by that time the cost of an HDTV will have gone down enough to warrant developing games compatible with the display.
The ______ Agenda
Plasma monitors also burn in. In fact, it's a really stupid thing to do, to watch 4x3 content on a 16x9 plasma screen, or vice versa, since the black bars on the edges lead to burn in just as easily as any other static pictures.
My brother owns a plasma TV. Apparently the little logos TV stations put in the corner of the screen can do it, too.
LCDs burn in, too, sort of, but the LCD version of it goes away if you leave your display off for a week or so. The timeframe for LCD burn in is more like that for a CRT (several days/weeks). Plasma and projection CRTs both burn in VERY quickly (I've heard as little as 20 minutes).
While I'm at it, allow me to say something heretical, as someone who owns a 32" widescreen CRT: For everyday viewing, 4x3 is better.
Why?
I would've paid the same price for a 4x3 presentation monitor with the same horizontal measurement as my widescreen, and I would've gotten something like four more inches of viewable area in the vertical dimension. Since the horizontal area is the same, the total size of a 16x9 image is the same, but 4x3 content is A LOT bigger. And not distorted or surrounded by black bars.
I tested this out with my 4x3 projector and a tape measure.
Hope that Helps.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
This topic should be on the front page, so it can get more than 20 comments. I'm looking into a Plasma screen TV too, and would like to know which games will be high-def or 16*9 aspect ratio. I've got a PS2 right now, but looking into an XBox next.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The greatness and fanboyism that surrounds the other systems on /. aside, if you want a to play games on a big screen with good visuals and relative ease, then you need an Xbox. Limited only by the source material (in this case, the games themselves), the Xbox hardware supports 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i resolutions. The latter two resolutions (720p, 1080i) are inherently widescreen (16:9). 480p is a good resolution for 4:3. In the dashboard on the Xbox, you can access video settings to determine what output type you want: widescreen, letterbox, etc. and if you've got the HD pack or Monster HD cables for the 'Box, you can select which resolutions to output in (dependent, again, upon what the game supports). For the record, I've heard that all Xbox games support at least 480p, and I've not yet encountered one that doesn't. So, if you've got an Xbox and you are wondering whether it's worth it to buy an HDTV, the answering is a resounding 'yes.'
Note that in the UK at least pretty much all new televisions are widescreen (bar crappy 14" portables). As such people would start to get a bit annoyed if games didn't take advantage of this. Certainly games like GTA/VC and FIFA make good use of the extra width to show peripheral vision and more pitch respectively.
Everytime a thread about anything home theater related the answer is the same -- go check out AVS Forum, it's answered there.
In this case go read the Home Theater Gaming/Console area and perhaps look into the Home Theater PC area. It's not clear if you were wanting to play PC games on your big screen TV (quite do able; for HD you'd want a TV with DVI input and a video card with DVI output) or console games (support varies widely, with the PS2 having the least support and the Xbox having the most).
As for why consoles don't support HD more -- it's simple. They don't have the power, and it's a great deal of additional development and QA time for a small segment of the market.
Consoles have really miserable resolution -- essentially 640x240 at 60 fps (NTSC; PAL is a bit more resolution at 50 fps). Yes, NTSC is roughly 640x480 resolution, but it's interlaced -- you don't have to draw half the screen every frame and you're foolish if you think the console games are doing so when they don't need to. If you change to a progressive scan picture then you're immediately at twice the work that needs to be done. Bump it up to a 720p 4:3 and you're nearly quadrupling the effort from there (or nearly 8x as much as a SD screen). Widescreen requires even more work. And remember, a 720p 4:3 image still has less resolution than a 1024x768 (XGA) monitor and only needs to run at a paltry 60 fps.
As for splitscreen -- if you split a 16:9 screen you don't get two 4:3 images. Supporting split screen 16:9 means you have to support at least 3 different aspect ratios... most likely you're already going to support horizontally split 4:3, so now it's 4 different aspect ratios. That's a whole lot of development and QA time, and probably not worth the effort (yet).
A few caveats -- gun games do not work with virtually any HDTV. The gun watches for the interlaced signal and most HDTVs (all digital systems, almost all RPs, and most FPs) will never display interlaced -- they upscale to progressive internally. If you want to play gun games then you'll need to move the system to an older CRT based TV.
If you use an Xbox, be aware that the Live console is still in 480i only. This can be an issue if you have a TV that has separate inputs for 480i/p and 480p/720p/1080i (all Samsung DLP RP's currently). There are ways around this (cable splitting, using a VGA adapter), but it's something to be aware of and consider when purchasing a TV.
If you do not get a DLP/LCD/LCoS based TV then you will have to be careful of burn-in. Proper calibration of the set can eliminate this danger, but most people don't calibrate. Plasma does have a burn-in issue as well, but it's not as severe as CRT.
I currently have my PS2 connected to my 46" Samsung DLP. No issues. Not many games support widescreen or 480p, but it really doesn't bug me. It's nice to play on a really big screen with a full surround system. I'm hoping to make my next PC portable enough to use as an occasional HTPC and play some games (HL2, D3) on it as well... should be a blast.
I have a PS2 and 65" Toshiba, and I'm as much a game-geek as anyone, but unless you have muchos dinero sitting around, I wouldn't advise purchasing an HD set primarily for gaming. PS2 and gamecube only seem to have limited support in the hardware for 16:9 HD. And although, X-box has the hardware, very few of the games support it. Unless you're into progressive scan widescreen DVD and HDTV (check on availability in your area too), I'd suggest something like a Sony Wega CRT until the next generation of consoles come out.
Sounds like we're talking about consoles here.
Some PS2 games support 480p. Some XBox games support 720p. I believe some GameCube games support 480p. And not all games that support an HD display mode also support an explicit 16x9 mode. In fact, I've found little correlation between options for widescreen and options for progressive scan; many games support widescreen but *not* progressive scan. I'm betting that the newer the game is, the more likely it is to have HDTV support, however.
As another poster mentioned, check out hdgames.net. I don't know how comprehensive their list is, but it hasn't lied to me yet. Looking at their database for the PS2, they've got about 60 games listed that support 16x9, about 20 that support 480p, and about half of those that support 480p also support 16x9.
I just went from a standard def 32" tube to a 50" widescreen HDTV a couple months ago. The downside to this is you can see all the flaws in analog programming, simply because the display is so clear and so BIG. True HDTV programming is amazing, however. Videogames, however, have no signal noise to worry about, so all you get is a crystal clear picture. The downside here is that aliasing is much more obvious at the normal console resolution, simply because the pixels are so well defined. This is where progressive scan really helps, and for games that support it, it does look great.
16x9 support actually isn't as big a deal as you'd think. The reason is not that you'd rather play them in 4x3, but that HDTVs typically have nonlinear scaling modes that fit a 4x3 image to a 16x9 screen with little perceptible distortion. (In essence, they scale the picture more at the edges where less of the action is happening. It's only noticeable with some camera movements, or when watching the crawls on news stations.)
I should point out that in my experience, video games don't have the same aspect ratio problems as live TV, simply because they are not realistic enough. I'll play any videogame using one of these 4x3 to 16x9 scaling modes and feel perfectly comfortable with it. And then I get any game in full widescreen glory.
Also, I should point out that any time I put my PS2 in progressive scan mode, the picture does fill up the 16x9 screen on its own, whether or not there is an option to enable widescreen. I'm betting most games that support 480p, when they don't have an explicit option, will usually rescale things for widescreen automatically. Because of what I said above, however, it's sometimes hard to tell.
And yes, it rocks. No, I haven't noticed any framerate issues in 480p.
Now, I justified the cost of an HDTV without needing my video game addiction. I just used my normal DVD viewing addiction. And my TiVo addiction, but that was really about the size more than the hi-def. Could I justify it just for video games? Probably, yes, but the increased size is not an insignificant part of that.
I can't really recommend 16:9 televisions, even though I love mine. You'll find with a 16:9, you can't just "watch" television anymore. Everything has it's own format, and the screen must be adjusted to fit that format.
For DVD's, it's typically standard mode, but if they aren't anamorphic (and many movies aren't), you'll have to use expand mode. If the DVD is 4:3 (many old movies, much animae, television shows, Pan and Scan), you'll either have to watch it in 'narrow', which leaves large bars on the side, or you'll have to use one of several stretch modes, any one of which can look fine or utterly horrible depending on what you watch.
You run into the same problem with games. X-Box is the best about this, as it has the preferences for 16:9 and various display modes in the box. Set all the resolutions your television supports, and the XBox will automatically pick the best one supported by the game. However, there's still a lot of games that don't support high resolution or 16:9. Here's the HDTV list for X-Box, GameCube, and PS2. If you want to search for specific games, including non-HDTV games in 16:9, go here.
As you can see, there aren't many high-def games, and not many widescreen games either. My biggest problem is that although I watch a lot of movies, I watch a lot of 4:3 content because I play a lot of videogames and my wife watches a lot of television. This means my 16:9 set spends a lot of time in narrow mode, which is bad for the television. So, I end up compromising and finding one of the stretch modes that looks 'good enough' for what I'm doing to help offset the damage I"m doing.
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You must buy the HD A/V kit for the xbox to even get 480p. You have to order the component cables for the gamecube directly from nintendo to get 480p but the ps2 component cables are available everywhere.
I wouldn't say its quite worth it yet to get an HDTV just for gaming. Although a lot of games are starting to support 16:9 mode which is nice. Tony Hawk Underground, SSX3, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando and Rogue Squadron III are all recent games that support 480p and 16:9 mode. I'm sure the next generation of consoles will have much more HDTV support. Most games look just fine stretched to 16:9 if they are native 4:3 though. I play all the games stretched and on most you can't really tell except during cut scenes.
4:3 programming doesn't have to have black bars on the side if you are worried about burn in. The sony/zenith directv HD receivers have a very good panorama mode that stretches the edges of the screen and you can barely tell its 4:3 stretched to 16:9. My sony HDTV also has wide zoom and zoom modes but it distorts the picture much more than panorama mode. I have been gaming on my big screen rear projection Sony HDTV for nearly 3 years and I have had nothing burn in.
Most game review sites do not list if a game supports HDTV or 16:9. I wish they would have a side bar on reviews listing which features it supports. However there are some websites that track which games support 480p and higher along with which have a 16:9 mode:
HdtvArcade
HdtvPub
HDGames (the best one in IMO)
Greg
"When the going gets Weird, the Weird turns Pro" - Hunter S. Thompson
Supporting HDTV on the Xbox is "free" in that the entire buffer renders at 480p, except for games that explicitly don't support it (Kung Fu Chaos) due to the way they use the buffer. It's just like the Dreamcast a few years ago -- not every game says it supports 480p, but in a collection of 50 games, you'll only find 1 or 2 games which actually won't work on a 480p setup.
While not as many games support 720p or 16:9, they are out there. Panzer Dragoon, Quantum Redshift, and other games I have at 16:9 are beautiful. There's no slowdown, but I have so much more to see. It's well worth getting it, since 16:9 TVs aren't that much more, and it also allows you to watch DVDs in a native aspect ratio.
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