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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.
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
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.
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.