Slashdot Mirror
Is HD Important To The Future of Gaming?
Gamasutra's weekly question to the industry taps the pulse of designers and developers on the importance of HD in gaming. From the article: " Absolutely. After seeing a game like Oblivion in HD, I think most gamers will never look back. That's going to affect the amount of time and money that gets put into top-shelf games. It's certainly going to increase the market for texture designers. -Morgan LaVigne, Classroom, Inc "
Given that computer users have been getting near HD-quality & better for a while, it is really only important for the console systems, and as such is naturally a selling point. HD in of itself is not important as is the overall fact that game engines & hardware are improving very quickly, now approaching cinematic quality in certain instances. High resolution art will become more common in-game, not just in prerendered sequences and thus greater time & energy will need to be spend on creating those assets, but this was going to happen without HD, just look at where the Unreal3 engine is heading.
My argument is mainly that this is not a result of HD; HD has just appeared at a time when this is now possible. If we had HD 10 years ago, we would have high resolution displays with low resolution games & art. If we still didnt have HD today, we'd still have pretty nice computer monitors which would take advantage of the high resolution artwork that UE3 and the like is offering. HD just ensures it will be spread into the mainstream even faster through consoles as opposed to computers. Hopefully it will also raise the expectations of game art & assets in general for all games & systems.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Likewise.
It's going to be a long long time before I go out to replace any of the 10 tv's in this house. I've been playing games at near "HD" quality on my PC for ages now. Sure HL2 looks brilliant at high resolution, but (unfortunately) it doesn't play any better than it does at 640x480.
I'm seriously disinterested with this next line of consoles. The PS3 and the Xbox360 promise high-definition gaming, but what else? I just get the feeling I'm going to be playing this generation's games on the next generation's platform, since developers couldn't be bothered to come up with new ideas.
The only console I'm excited for this round is the Revolution, which is odd because a gimmicky little controller really shouldn't be such an integral selling point for me.
Hey, it's my OPINION that dogs have eight legs and make a sound like a car horn every time they take a piss.
The thing is, the only people I know that want HD content are those that bought HDTV's. Everyone else is going "uh, yeah, whatever..". It sounds more plausable that all the yea sayers are those same people that bought an expensive toy and are disappointed with the slimpickins of HD content.
The only way I'll buy an HD television is when three criteria are met:
- The majority of broadcasts are in HD
- The price is the same as SDTV's
- My perfectly working, picture quality looks good as new, 32" Trinitron dies and becomes economically unfeasable to repair.
Until then, those of us that don't see the preceived value will stick with what we've already got.
wait what?
Consumer demand for HDTVs is still very very low, and the majority of people that own HDTVs do not use them for HD content, Including myself. There is not a single HD device connected to my HDTV.
I certainly dont regret the purchase. It makes the dvds and games I already have look FANTASTIC.
some estimates say that as many as 50% of HD TV owners are not using them for HD...
I'm pretty sure that 50% of HD TV owners report they're not using them for HD. I would be a small fortune that another 30% aren't using them for HD, but report that they are.
For example, in the last Slashdot article about this very subject a disturbingly large number of Slashdot posters reported that they receive and HD signal only when they watched DVDs. In other words, a large number of Slashdotters would report that they're using their television for HD, but would be wrong.
Amen!
I've always said this:
Put Lord of the Rings (or some other visually impressive movie) into a progressive scan DVD player and play it on your HD television. THAT's the graphics ceiling for 480p on an HD-capable television set. Do you see many jaggies? How about that framerate?
480p in gaming is nowhere near its ceiling, and is more than adequate for this next generation.
The original PC had 640x200 graphics, with some unusual modes that provided for more colors at yet lower resolutions. The jump to EGA(640x350) and even 640x480 were minor because initially these resolutions didn't add more color depth. It took until SVGA to give us a taste of the good quality graphics we have today on the PC.
Now, on the PC it's fairly common to have people running in 1280x1024 mode. 1600x1200 resolution is possible for most people, but due to screen size and limited UI scaling in applications, it's difficult for those who use the UI to run at 1600x1200 on a 19 inch screen because the on-screen controls become too small in many cases.
In comparison to normal TV, 1024x768 is high definition. It may not be the same thing as "HD" since HD in this case refers to a television display, but it's up there. 1600x1200 of course would seem like ultra high definition in comparison then.
So, for consoles, the big thing is that they now are pushing into higher resolutions than they had access to before. PC games have had this level for ages now. It's just that consoles are finally starting to show up. If we compare Oblivion for the PC and for the Xbox 360, I'm sure the PC version will still look quite a bit better, even if there may be some bugs on some machines due to hardware differences between machines that you don't see on a console.
But, think about this, a game with poor gameplay won't be improved just by the move to higher resolutions. A boring game wil still be boring. A game may have amazing cinematic effects and scenery, and cut scenes, but just moving to a higher resolution won't make a bad game good.