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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.
What if the XBOX 360 was intended as the main gaming platform for a company for the next five years and they touted it to be incredibly powerful and include high definition support and then they couldn't even manage to make games run on that "high end" hardware today at more than 30fps without toning down the quality?
Oh wait. That's exactly what is happening.
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?
Or you could drop the detail and other graphical effects to hit 30fps. I've never heard of a console deveoper doing this; if it isn't up to speed, they scale back the detail.
Considering that most people will not be playing this game on a true hdtv I think they made the right compromise. They retain all the effects at a good frame rate at a higher quality than most TVs that will be used to play the game. Most people have HD ready TVs or standard TVs. Not many have true HDTVs and those that do have 720p TVs which is just slightly better than this game uses.
What if you considered that it might just have something to do with the quality of the programming?
So you're saying Bizarre are bad coders? Have you ever actually played one of their games? Specifically any of the games in this series, going back to the original Metropolis Street Racer on Dreamcast.
Bizarre have always gotten the most out of the hardware they're working on, even if it's early in the console's lifespan. There are, even today, few racing games on the Xbox that look as good as the first PGR, and that was a first-wave title.
Let's assume you're right, and that Bizarre is not getting much out of the Xbox 360. That would suggest, at best, that the system is incredibly difficult to program for. If some of the best and most experienced racing game coders in the world cannot manage true HD on the system, what hope does anyone else have?
I think it's more likely that the 360 is just underpowered. That's the price you pay being first to market. The max res the 360 even supports is 1080i, and you don't even hear MS talking much about games that'll utilize that - all the talk I've heard has been about 720p, and now we're hearing that even one of those games, from a great developer, won't even really make that res. Something ain't kosher here.
Sadly, all the polygons and horizontal lines in the world won't make up for having a really shitty (for FPS or strategy gaming) interface and controller.
Sit and play Battlefield2 or Counterstrike or Quake at a computer. Now sit at a console with one of those fugly hand controller stick things and play Halo. Notice the difference? That difference is the sucking in control.
Has M$ released a list of Xbox games which will work with the Xbox 360 yet?
"Explanations" like that are usually there to make stupid people feel smart. The really dumb ones all think that they are smarter than every body else, so while that's pretty much all they remember about geometry, they will think that they are some sort of elite literati because they understood it.
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.
"The max res the 360 even supports is 1080i, and you don't even hear MS talking much about games that'll utilize that - all the talk I've heard has been about 720p, and now we're hearing that even one of those games, from a great developer, won't even really make that res. Something ain't kosher here."
With a fast-paced game I'd take progressive scan over interlacing. 1080i is effectively 30 Hz, which is just-about noticably not smooth when you're doing interactive stuff with it (motion blurred video looks fine, of course). I'd take 720p and be able to see stuff more clearly during fast turns, lightning punches in fighters etc. That could explain why MS is talking up 720p versus 1080i.
Of course, if the game is only rendering 30 frames per second and outputting 720p (apparently the case here) then you're quite right that something is wrong.