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How Xbox Games Look On The 360

Posted by Zonk on from the better-hair dept.

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."

5 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Updates? by LordNimon · · Score: 3, Insightful
    We tested Jade Empire on November 29 and found it nonfunctional. A scant day later, the game worked just fine.

    Was a software update downloaded between those two dates? If the answer is no, then it looks like the testers just did something wrong on the 29th.

    --
    And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
    To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
  2. There's a patch involved by Jim+Hall · · Score: 3, Insightful

    TFA mentions that in order to play these XBox "Classic" games on the XBox 360, "you need to have Xbox Live and the Xbox 360 hard drive accessory. When you first insert an Xbox game that is compatible with the Xbox 360, the system will download an update from Xbox Live and store it on the hard drive; it's functionally equivalent to a patch for a PC game."

    And in fact, it is a patch. So it's no surprise that the game looks better on the 360 - it's been intentionally patched (probably with a few up-res textures) to look good.

    1. Re:There's a patch involved by Babbster · · Score: 4, Insightful
      The games don't look better because they've been "patched" (the word "patch" in this context is about the emulator, like going from MAME 0.5 to MAME 0.6). They look better because they're running on more powerful hardware, just like on PC if you went from an Nvidia Geforce 5200FX to an ATI x800 - nothing changes in the game yet it can still look better.

      How would Microsoft manage such a feat of "patching" all these games with new textures and the like anyway? They would have to replace executables (to access textures from the hard drive instead of the DVD - at the minimum), test them and then have the space on the hard drive to hold them. Even more important, it would take more than a few seconds to make it happen over Xbox Live (textures are already big and would be bigger if they were higher resolution).

      If nothing else, this gives Sony something to shoot for. Whatever graphical improvements were applied to PS1 games on the PS2 were so tiny that no one cared (I never saw them myself). If Sony can do for PS2 games on the PS3 what Microsoft has done for Xbox games on the 360, it'll be pretty damned cool.

  3. I don't see much difference by DigitalBubblebath · · Score: 4, Insightful


    "The 360 gives the game a huge increase in clarity; the easiest place to spot the difference is in the red wooden window frames."

    So...not a "huge" enough increase for it to be immediately apparent.

    Honestly, with the exception of the Halo screenshot, the before/after shots look identical. It looks more like some kind of analogue conversion/interference with the original Xbox shots rather than the result of lower resolution textures.

  4. They DO NOT look better by imunfair · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah sure, they're clearer, but with the exception of the first one - with the woman in the white suit - they all look *worse* with more clarity. I bet even the first one would look worse if they weren't so close to the figure.

    Think of the images as a picture - which look more realistic? In the 360 shots they took a step back as far as realism. The reason is that the slight blurring brings all the objects together into a cohesive image - if you clarify everything its obvious that the objects just aren't quite lifelike, and the main character tends to stand out as obviously not 'part of the picture'.

    Personally I don't think either one will make a difference while actually playing the games, it's just something for fanboys that gloat over numbers - but if you really want photorealism then a little blurring will usually help cover up your mistakes, because it's very unlikely we'll see photorealism with clarity any time soon in games.