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Xbox 360 Not Hi-Def Enough?
News for nerds writes "One of the features touted for Xbox 360 is its requirement for games to be 720p and 1080i HDTV resolutions, dubbed The HD Era by Microsoft. Today it's revealed and discussed in the official forum of Bizarre Creations, the Project Gotham Racing 3 developer, that in the final review build for PGR3 the in-game races are actually rendered in 1024x600 to get constant 30fps/2xAA. The game is stretched to 720p (1280x720) in the upscaler, which is faking HD at best." As always with late-night forum mutterings, imbibe with a grain of salt.
See my post of earlier today on the HD-supporting updates for the Halo games. Upsampling again? ;-)
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Ask youself what you would do with this game on your PC. Would you run it at full 1080 with 10 frames per second or at the released resolution at 30fps? I think they did the right thing. -rich
As always with Slashdot posts about Microsoft, imbibe with a grain of "Could /. be more predictable?"
Is it just me or is the constant Microsoft criticism (valid or not) just, well... boring?
We're lazy man!
;-) One of them is slightly better, with anti-aliasing on a lot of edges, but what's going on with Sarge's holster? Chunky pixels!
And finally, my favourite. Comparing the 1280x720 image with a version scaled down to 640x360 and back again [hylobatidae.org]. Here I chucked away three-quarters of the information in the screenshot (I did a nearest-neighbour scale down to 640x360 in The GIMP, a cubic scale up to 1280x720 and applied 40% sharpening). First of all, try to tell them apart - there are some slight differences on near-horizontal lines, but otherwise the 1280x720 image might as well have been rendered at 640x360 then scaled up to the larger size.
Either these are extremely bad screenshots (they did mention having to grab the video), or there's something very strange going on. I hope it's the former, but there still isn't much improvement over the original Xbox...
^ his previous post:
But they're not simply upscaling, the game is actually rendered at 720p, so it will have sharp edges, and sharp-to-semifuzzy-textures. It will look just as sharp as a PC playing at 1280x720. It looks a bit odd, though. Take this screenshot [bungie.net] as an example - there are some really lumpy pixels on the cables and archway to the left of the picture. Actually, I've just spent the last ten minutes making some rubbishy animated GIFs comparing differences between screenshots. Here's one comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots [hylobatidae.org] - there's definitely a difference, but there are horrible jagged pixels on the wires to the left on both of them. Here's another comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots again [hylobatidae.org] - go on, tell me which one's which.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
By now you've already heard how Xbox 360 puts you at the center of the most powerful games on the planet--hence the "360," as in 360 degrees (geometry students will recognize that as the number of degrees in a circle).
So that's who this is being marketed to? People who are so stupid and ignorant and uneducated that you have to explain to them what the "360" refers to? What, did we just fall out of the sky? (Meteorological students will recognize that as the big blue thing above our head when we're outside).
Depending on how Sony and MS have designed their systems, this is going to be a challenge for developers. Most gamers will be playing at 480p, while the minority have 720p or 1080i available. The games need to look great and run smooth in both SD and HD. Anyone know how the systems have been designed to accomodate this? Which is more likely; when rendering HD some effects or polygons will be reduced, or will standard def renderings just run at higher framerates?
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Has M$ released a list of Xbox games which will work with the Xbox 360 yet?
I just ran by Best Buy and stopped for five minutes to observe a couple of people playing King Kong on a 360 that was in a glass case. It was on a high-def widescreen setup. It SUCKED. I think I saw these effects already in Metroid Prime. Nintendo is right: We can't really do to much if all we do is up the glitz ante and polygon count. What's the point of the hi-def if it's not getting me better games?
As if the graphics weren't crappy enough, the game didn't look like any fun either. Hellooooooooo...
And now, for a sig that's a complete copout.
Earlier today I was mentioning how it was understandable that Nintendo would avoid High Definition support because of the potential Performance problems; many people (some of which would probably be XBox 360/PS3 fans) claimed that it was a weak excuse because those systems had the power necessary to render anything regardless of the resolution.
By looking at the following benchmarks you can see how resolution effects performance:
FEAR:
1280x960 http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,188389
1600x1200 http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,188389
4xAA 8xAF http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=257
soft shadows http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=257
As you can see, even with the best graphics cards a person can buy a new game has difficulty maintaining a playable framerate at 1280x1024 (and is mostly unplayable at 1600x1200); at 800x600 they have frames to spare.
I'm not trying to say that higher definition is a bad thing; but it needs to be considered in its place. Higher definition is great for PC games because as performance drops you can simply upgrade your system, on a console (which is a static platform) higher resolution is not that important; eventually when we have the performance to spare it will be a good time to produce games at 1080p or what not.
I mean, if the stupid game will barely fit on a DVD... or even worse, require Blu-Ray... where is all the talk about super-high speed memory busses and uber-fast drives with ginormous buffers?
This is engineering, folks, and there's always a tradeoff in engineering. All that HD ain't free. And most people won't even care if it's 480p or 720i.
<sarcasm>Yes, it's a known fact that there is no way to attach a PS2/Xbox controller to a PC with a $12 adapter from Radio Shack.</sarcasm>
But what current commercial PC games take advantage of four such adapters plugged into my PC's USB hub? I want shared-screen multiplayer gaming a la Bomberman, Smash Bros, etc. Which titles should I choose?
That bizarre res happens to be the exact res of most ultra-portable systems; 1024x600. I wonder how it looks on our 8.9 inch widescreens. I dont think its going to play so well with a touchscreen, but thats ok. ;)
My question is, how can I get that much data onto my laptop to try it out. I dont think there'll be anything which fits in my PCMCIA slot which can framegrab a 720p stream, encode & feed my system a mpeg. Do they even have pci solutions for that? I suppose I could stream from a desktop, but it'd be far less fun.
Myren
I guess they think they can get away with "faking" HD because most countries outside of the US and Canada don't use HD much, the UK is serverly laking and has only just started selling HD ready TV's. They must think that if they dont get caught by the majority, no one will notice.
Business Voyeur
This is coming from one of the guys who probably schooled you on ntshadow.net in Quake CTF back in the day mind you.
The keyboard just doesn't offer the same kind of freedom a controler does. Soon, probably the next generation past the PS3 and 360 et al, they'll probably have that sorted out for the FPS. And when you get into complicated interaction with your enviroment and context sensitive stuff where there are degrees of subtlty, the keyboard will really show it's limitations, which are profound. binding crap to keys can only do so much.
Then there's the NASCAR effect. With the Xbox games, you're not getting beat by better gear. Maybe a little bit on the network connection, but really the guy who wins is better. Some of that might be that they're making a little bit better use of the sensitivity settings, but if you get taken to school, well it's because you were in need of a lesson.
Control pads aren't perfect, but they are without a doubt the future and are going to provide a more natural feeling, and thus immersive experience.
Most poeple don't own HDTVs, so why waste performance on HD that only a minority will appreciate, if you can use the power on more performance that everyone can enjoy?
If somebody buys a Blu-Ray player, they're going to be buying it because they want to watch movies in HD.
Most people who will buy a 360 won't be too intersted in HDTV, they want to play the newest games.
30fps?? No thanks, i'll stick to my PC and get higher resolutions at higher frame rates. Sorry Microsoft, i'm not impressed.
While this sounds like a ugly hack to fake the advertised resolution, im not so sure on the reasons, might simply be that they couldn't exactly predict how fast the real XBox360 is going to be and ended up with a few more polygons then it could handle, so instead of cutting the poly count playing around with the resolution is far easier to increase the fps a bit. Thats kind of one of the problems when you have only development kits that aren't the final hardware, wouldn't even be the first time. Many early GBA titles suffered as well, since the devkits back then where quite a bit a bridghter then the final device was.