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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?
With a really high-res video game, especially a game like basketball, I think you'd notice the lack of realism after a certain point. For example, you'd see clearly that the edges are being rendered by a computer, versus if they're a bit fuzzy, and that fuzzy effect is used to its advantage, then it might look a bit more like a regular tv broadcast of a basketball game.
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Long answer is no.
Seriously tough, while a fun game is a fun game, a fun game with great graphics is even better.
HD is finally starting to pick up some popularity largely in part to the cost of mid-sized HDTVs plummeting. There are decent 720p LCD monitors out there for $500 online now. It won't be too long before that price is reflected in places like Wal-Mart, Costco, etc. That will only further fuel people's desire to jump to HD, not because of the quality as much as the price. It no longer makes much sense to buy an standard def TV when the HD isn't that much more. An LCD or plasma set is starting to become necessary to keep up with the Jonses. NONE of the decently priced LCD, Plasma, whatever support 1080p right now and right now is the beginning of any semblance of mass adoption. By the time 1080p sets catch up in price, most folks will have their HDTVs and those HDTVs will mostly be 720p/1080i sets. If you thought it was hard to get the Average Joe to upgrade his SDTV for 720p, just try to convince them to upgrade their 720p/1080i for a 1080p.
Yes. There is significantly less dot crawl.
I think it is great that they support 1080p for the few that might be able to take advantage of it, but the issue for both the PS3 and Xbox360 in this arena is that most people just can't take advantage of it. In fact, pretty much all HDTV owners can't. The vast majority of HDTV's on the market right now are 32" and smaller. Most of these sets are 720p sets.
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You're leaving out the critical 2-5% of the population with friends/roomates capable of 1080p. Not to mention the 20-30% who watch those screens with slack-jawed delight at the Best Buy. Supply side resolution. With all the recent talk of 120hz, I've become convinced that there's no such thing as hi-def, only higher than what you have.
One of the main reasons you hear so many developers bitching about working on the 360. And why so many 360 games end up using fake marketing shots to hide the AA/jaggy problems that plagued actual in game 360 graphics.
Hi, welcome to Slashdot!
I see you managed to make your first post okay, despite the posting interface being different from the PS3Fanboy forums you're used to.
I think you're going to settle in very well here. Many posters on Slashdot are also teenage virgins obsessed with other people's choice of game system.
But I know how you feel! It really makes my blood boil when I see someone recommending a different system to the one my mummy bought me for Christmas. One day I'm going to steal the pistol out of my dad's underwear draw and teach them all a lesson!
Best of all is just to turn off the TV altogether. Then it's just pure gameplay! That's what the Wii is all about.
I have a 61" 1080p television, and yes, I will look more closely at games and consoles that have the ability to use 1080p technology.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
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.
Actually, all Xbox 360 games can currently be scaled to 1080p by the hardware scaler. That's the beauty of a hardware scaler -- you tell it you want 1080p (or 720p, or 1080i, or whatever), and that's what you get every time. While scaling is not the same as natively rendering in 1080p with high resolution textures, it's still better than trusting your TV to upscale properly. The 360's hardware scaler works upon the digital image prior to sending it to the TV. Your TV has to work with an analog signal (because the 360 doesn't do HDMI/DVI). Your TV's scaler in general won't do as well as the 360's scaler, and some TVs can introduce lag when scaling images that's not present when given a signal in their native resolution.
After being spoiled by the 360's scaler for over a year, I was somewhat disappointed with my Wii. With the 360, I've set it to 720p and I don't have to worry about anything else, whether a game supports that resolution or is widescreen or not (the 360 will appropriately side-box original Xbox 480i/p 4:3 games so I don't have adjust my set). The Wii acts more like the original Xbox, where I have to visually determine if a game is 16:9 or 4:3 and shrink or stretch the set's mode appropriately. From what I hear, the PS3 is the same way. Ugh. Hopefully the next generation of consoles (5 years from now) will all have hardware scalers.