How Xbox Games Look On The 360

Gamespot has a piece looking at how original Xbox titles look on the 360. From the article: "When the game you want actually makes it onto the supported games list, get ready for a little HD treat. The Xbox 360 will run Xbox games in 720p or 1080i. The games will also get a good dose of antialiasing to get rid of "jaggies" or stairstepping effects found on the edges of characters and scenery. This is nothing new for those of you familiar with a PC. Turning up the resolution and enabling antialiasing are the first things you do to improve image quality in PC games. We went ahead and took screen captures of a few Xbox games on both the Xbox and the Xbox 360 to compare how they looked on both systems. Unsurprisingly, the Xbox 360 screen captures look much better. Higher resolutions combined with antialiasing tend to make just about everything prettier."

Comments

Re:so here's the summary

[Mithrandir86]

Look closer. What you are looking for is the absence of jagged lines. Take, for example, the woman's ear in the Halo 2 screenshot. It is not something that you would be explicitly aware of, but it would enhance the overall visual experience.

Re:Updates?

[MorgyTheMole]

No. X-Box backwards compatibility requires X-Box Live and a Hard drive for more than one reason: there is compatibility information that needs to be downloaded when you actually pop the game in for the first time. Compare it to how Bleem!cast worked. There was no set emulator, but configured data WITH software to enable emulation. Should that data change, the 360 updates it.

Re:My question

[oGMo]

Is Sony going to follow suit this time with the PlayStation 3? Will PSOne games at least look better?

Sony had the option of doing something similar with the PlayStation 2 (think Bleemcast), but then they were faced with the prospect of PSX games looking just as good as first-generation PS2 games.

Huh? "Follow suit?" The PS2 did texture smoothing for the PS1 (and also faster disc speed), which you can turn on from the PSX menu option on bootup. (Although, annoyingly, you have to set it every time.) Setting these options break compatibility with a few games (and are thus optional), but on the whole it's a major improvement. Dragon Warrior 7 looks like utter crap if played normally; with texture smoothing on it looks quite nice (as PSX games go).

As for "looking as good as first-generation PS2 games", this is a joke. Even today's PSX emulators (which work quite well) that can do resolution boosting and antialiasing don't look as good as PS2 games... simply because the polygon count and texture resolution is low. They do look a hell of a lot better though.

In any case, hopefully the PS3 will offer further load time improvements for PS2 games (though this is not really a problem with modern games), and possibly antialiasing in various forms (texture AA would be the most welcome). I'm not sure how high-level this data is processed, though, or whether this would be possible.