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Wii Confirmed at 480p
Eurogamer is reconfirming that the Wii only outputs at 480p, after the official Nintendo magazine mistakenly said otherwise. From the article: "Nintendo UK also recently said that it had every intention of releasing peripherals like the component cable — used to achieve the 480p resolution — at retail, despite suggestions that you'd have to buy the cables through online shops in the US. The interest in Wii's high-resolution options is of course spurred on by Microsoft and Sony's battling over the higher end. Both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generally offer games in 720p, with 1080p now possible for developers who want to go the extra mile (well, the extra 1,152,000 pixels, anyway)."
02/11/06 in Europe is 11/02/06 in the U.S.
It would be interesting to know how much of the video game market consists of people with HDTVs that actually do 720p/1080whatever. This also leads me to ask: "Does resolution really matter?" For some games, I'm sure it makes a difference, but I'd be willing to bet that high resolution won't make any difference to a large majority of gamers in a large number of titles.
Keeping to 480p seems like a good move by Nintendo. Many (I'd even go so far as to say most) of their games will be just as fun, you don't need a fancy TV just to enjoy it, and (perhaps most importantly) it keeps part cost, size, and power requirements down.
I was watching my teenage brother-in-law play Zelda (I don't recall which) on his gamecube the other day. The graphical style of the game was very effective, and I think it would actually lose appeal going to higher resolution.
Now all you experts can respond and tell me why I'm totally wrong.
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I was busting for one!!! ;)
It's a fact that the 360 works with a regular TV and it can be assumed (quite confidently) that the PS3 will, too.
Although, one problem that the 360 has is that many of the games are designed with HDTVs in mind. That leads to developers creating HUDs with text that is unreadably small on regular TVs. So far, I've noticed that problem in FEAR (the only unreadable text so far has been the name of the talking person in the upper left corner, which doesn't really matter), Dead Rising (the name of the weapon and some other misc. text, but it's not a HUGE deal... but that one gets annoying), and Madden. I primarily stick to playing Lumines, Geometry Wars and Fight Night, so I haven't seen every game in depth, but my roommate has complained about small type in other games.
There is an advantage with nintendo only supporting 480p which is basically that all developers are targeting the same resolution and things will be consistent.
although, I think the Wii will be far more fun on those huge TVs which are high-def and it would look beautiful if they supported the 1080 resolution.
anyway, I seriously doubt Nintendo would release the wii if it looked terrible. they do have some sense.
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That doesn't even make sense to me. When you're talking movies, they are shot on film at 24fps progressive. So say 720p24 for film. Then on DVD it is encoded as either 720p24 or telecined to 720i60, where 60 refers to fields (1/2 frames). NTSC TV is usually recorded at 720i60, which displays as 60 fields per second, which equals 30 frames per second.
HD movies would be sourced to film still, at 1080p24, and there is no reason to encode or display them at any higher frame rate. The data is not there. Every HDTV broadcast I've seen has been 1080p30, which is equivalent to 1080i60. Same number of pixels once the 60 fields are deinterlaced to 30 frames.
Games could theoretically output 1080p60, which would be twice as many pixels as 1080i60, but from what I've read so far, you need the latest version of HDMI, 1.3, to even support that bandwidth. Does the PS3 use HDMI 1.3? I'm sure the Xbox didn't. The 360 probably doesn't.
If we're talking a full 60 frames of 1080p, it has more pixels. Still not for movies, which are still recorded at 24fps, but possibly for games. Short of that, this whole discussion about pixels is meaningless.
I'm a big geek and I'd love to say "1080P ROXXORZ! ALL!! 4TW!!" but sadly, it isn't the case. Yes, a big-screen high-definition teleivision playing HDTV definately looks better than Channel 2 on your old 13". But that isn't an accurate comparison for most of the market.
I sold TVs for 8 years. I had big banks of them - Standard, ED, HD - even some exotic 1080p stuff that didn't run anything except a special demo disk in a special machine.
One particular corner was a perfect test area. We had a 480P, 720P, and 1080I television of the same make and line (it was an LG set of televisions). Of the hundreds (if not thousands) of customers I showed these sets to, running HD PBS 1080 feed via Satellite (beautiful show, btw) - 8 out of 10 people pointed at the 480P set and said it was superior quality. When pressed for why they made that choice, they usually said "it was a hunch" and that they couldn't really tell between the three.
All three TVs had v-high quality cables, and my "test subjects" were sitting approximately 8 feet away from these 42" sets, which were all hung in equal lighting at eye level.
Then I'd move the test subjects up close - 2 feet away or so - and we could easily count the physical pixels on the 480 screen, wheras you'd have to move your head much closer to count the pixels on the 1080 screen. We could all see that, yes, upon inspection we *know* that 1080 is better...
But then I pointed at the pricetags. $1000 for the 480, $1800 for the 720, and $2500 for the 1080. Guess which one I sold the most of. (most of my data culled from 1-2-3 years ago so pricing/details may vary).
progressive scan is used over interlacing because interlacing leaves artifacts and flickering particularly with fast moving pictures (like sports). Not to mention most HDTV are progressing meaning they'd have to deinterlace the incoming signal which can create breakup and more artifacting along the edges of fast moving objects on screen (again like sports).
In terms of the video game space there is no difference in programing 1080i and 1080p. While 1080i might only have 540 lines actually displayed they have to render the whole frame in 1080 frame to keep it in sync. If you were to specifically program your game to output in an interlaced format (meaning you only had to render 540 lines per frame) you'd be doing what's called "field rendering" which is almost universally avoided because it requires you to ensure a rock solid 60FPS and if you miss a frame you run the risk of loosing sync placing the odd lines where the evens should go and the even lines where the odds should go.
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After researching on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD All DVD video in NTSC is restricted to 480 lines of resolution and there are several horizontal pixel ratings (eg: 720x480, 352x480, etc.) and some DVDs are only 240 lines of resolution. Anyone out there that says "Wii suxx0rz for only being 480 I want my games to look as good as my rented DVDs on my high def TV" are deluding themselves. :)
All video on (professionally mastered) DVDs is presented as a 720x480 picture. If its a widescreen video, the pixels are perfectly square. If its a standard-size video, the pixels are squished so that the 720 pixels per line fit in the screen. When a widescreen video is played on a standard-size screen, the DVD player is responsible for removing lines from the video so that the aspect ratio of the original video is maintained.
And to the GP, the "pillar-boxing" you get when displaying a standard-size picture on a widescreen TV actually only takes up 11% of your screen's real-estate. If the pillar-boxing is taking up more than that, there's a problem with your setup.
The parent post was right. The "480p" on the Wii means 720x480 (or maybe 852x480). Not 480 by something else. That's typical of how TV resolutions are referred to - the vertical resolution, not the horizontal.