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First 1080p Xbox 360 Games Announced
rwven writes "In the October firmware update to the Xbox 360, Microsoft added the capability for their new console to reach the coveted 1080 resolution. EA and Sega have both announced new titles that will reach that resolution, the first for the system. They're not the most visually intense games (NBA Street Homecourt, and Virtua Tennis 3), but this is another symptom of the tight race between all three consoles. Does this change the playing field at all between Sony and Microsoft?" Moreover, does the resolution of a title matter all that much to you yet? Do you have an HDTV that can even reach 1080p? If you do, does reaching 1080p make you more likely to buy a game?
Yes. There is significantly less dot crawl.
You're a total idiot. Most of what you said is entirely false. First off, many of the PS3's titles are NOT 1080p. This includes their flagship title Resistance Fall of Man. Second, it's true that none of the current 360 games run natively in 1080p, but most of them can currently be scaled to 1080p by the hardware scaler... which is something the PS3 can't do for its games that run lower than 1080p. Third, WTF are you talking about with jaggies and texture filtering? Slamming GoW shows you have no clue what you are saying. STFU and GTFO, fanboy.
antp: I've always wondered... is there actually a visible difference between 480p and plain S-Video/RGB input?
ivan256: Yes. There is significantly less dot crawl.
Although they are different formats, neither RGB, nor S-Video should exhibit dot crawl.
Dot crawl happens when separate colour and luminance signals are multiplexed (with colour modulated onto a high-frequency subcarrier). The sudden colour transition is (in effect) a high frequency signal which exceeds the safe bandwidth of the colour subcarrier and causes it to spill into the luminance signal, creating bogus detail.
RGB shouldn't exhibit dot-crawl at all, because it carries separate R, G and B signals on separate wires. At any rate, I've never, ever seen dot crawl with an RGB connection (via SCART).
Although S-Video *is* different, however, it still carries colour and luminance on separate wires, so it shouldn't show dot-crawl either(!); the Wikipedia article confirms this.
Perhaps you meant composite video?
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1) AA is a 360 cert requirement. Yes, a title or two may be able to get that waived by having something else special/that does the same thing. In general though, MS won't let 360 titles with jaggies ship. I am not sure what you are talking about here.
2) Yes, the EDRAM takes extra effort to work with. Sure, it would be nice if there was an infinite amount. In the end though, the tiling work generally impacts the rendering programmer for a short period and no one else. There is plenty of info for 360 devs on how to use it. If this is a devs main 360 complaint, MS is making devs lives easy - providing a good system, tools and documentation.
3) Marketing will always use renders. Their job is to get people excited about the title in a cost/time effective way - staged screenshots and renders are the fastest way to do that. This generation, difference in quality is much more visible in movies. A few marketing departments will use rendered movies here, but the cost is basically quite high relative to a rendered model.
The main 1080p challenge is the performance hit you get for drawing that many more pixels. For games that are GPU bound, going from 720p to 1080p hits the pixel shaders hard. The other issue is memory (same on both platforms) as many games have multiple full screen render targets. A 1080p render target is much larger than a 720p target.
Just FYI, you can set the XBox 360 to output 720p games at 1080i, so this shouldn't be an issue for you should you be interested in picking one up.
Indeed as the AC mentioned, the xbox 360 will scale the output of everything to whatever resolutions your TV can handle. In the settings you can say yes or no to each resolution. Most old CRT HDTVs couldn't take 720p, and they kept that in mind during the design.
AFAIK this is better than the way the PS3 does it, which I believe is to fall back to the next lower supported resolution.