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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?
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!
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.