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.

Comments

Lazy

[Eightyford]

We're lazy man!

^ 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. ;-) 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...

Re:Oooer

[Guspaz]

50% more pixels along the axis, not in total.

Re:What's the point if the graphics suck?

[EGSonikku]

Perhaps you should have looked at any of the following:

Project Gotham Racing 3
NBA2k6
Gears of War
Call of Duty 2

I'm getting sick of an obvious troll being modded up by MS bashing. But i'm sure it's pure coincidence you picked the one that was a rush job port from the XBox 1 instead of a native game, right?

Re:Oooer

[king-manic]

50% more pixels along the axis, not in total.

50% more along each axis makes the rendering ~twice as much power intensive.