Slashdot Mirror
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.
No, Halo isn't upsampling, you're just expecting too much from a meager 1.5x change in resolution. The actual resolutio n difference between 480p and 720p is only 50% extra. It's really not that much. The jaggies on the pistol are obviously due to polygon clipping or some other phenomena, since they happen in exactly the same place no matter the resolution.
If you look more carefully at the chunky wires, you can clearly see that the xbox 360 ones are higher resolution. It looks about consistant with what I'd expect from half again the resolution.
There is no doubt in my mind that Halo 2 is shown at 720p, the problem is that Bungie admitted they used an imperfect analog capture card to take the 360 screenshots, while they had a digital feed of the original xbox. The analog capture card obviously degraded the quality a bit, making the already slim advantage all the more slim.
I think another contributing factor to the wires is that they aren't being antialiased in the 360 screenshot. Obviously they're not polygonal. Makes sense, considering how many polygons they'd use up, and the original xbox's limited capacities. It is possible that all the wires are really a semitransparent texture, or perhaps they're done similar to how cables are done in HL2.
Kinda off topic, but yup: The List
More info here.
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.
"The actual resolutio n difference between 480p and 720p is only 50% extra"
852x480: 408,960
1280x720: 921,600
That's about a 125% increase in the number of pixels.
Widescreen DVD is content is typically 720x480, but your point still applies, it's more than 50% more pixels..
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
I could be wrong, it is late.
Because for whatever reason, perceptually, it seems to be the number of vertical scanlines that matters most. That's why anamorphically encoded widescreen DVDs are actually stored with full vertical resolution, while the horizontal is squished and then scaled during playback. That way you get a whole bunch of perceived extra resolution for the entire picture, even though you don't have any extra horizontal resolution.
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...