Slashdot Mirror
Are Console Developers Neglecting Their Standard-Def Players?
The Digital Foundry blog takes a look at how the focus on high-quality graphics in console game development may be lost on more gamers than people realize. According to Mark Rein of Epic Games, more than half of Gears of War 2 users played the game on a standard-definition television. While you might expect that dropping the graphics quality would correspond to a boost in frame rates, that turns out not to be the case, and running at standard definition can actually be a detriment in some cases. Quoting:
"PAL50 is mandatory for SD gameplay on all games on all European PS3s. You can't avoid running at a sub-optimal 50Hz unless you splash out on a high-def screen. The Euro release of Killzone 2 works at SD resolution on any PS3, even if it can only run at PAL50 on a Euro machine. In short, if you're a Euro PS3 owner playing Killzone 2 on a standard-definition display, you're losing around 17 per cent of the frame-rate owing to the lack of PAL60 support in the PS3 hardware. The game itself isn't slower as such (as was often the case in the Mega Drive/SNES era), and you'll note that it's effectively a sustained 25FPS while the 60Hz versions can be somewhat more variable. But Killzone 2 is already somewhat laggy in its control system and this impacts the feel of the game still further. While there is a 17 per cent increase in resolution, this is far less noticeable than the additional numbness in the controls."
But I have a Wii. One of the reasons I don't get a hd console- early reports of games that ran poorly in standard def. The other reasons are the price (less of an issue now), and the lack of any interesting games (no, FPSes aren't and never have been interesting).
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I'm currently playing MGS4 on an SDTV and... good god, everything's tiny. It's nearly impossible to read half the material on the screen!
Understandable, perhaps, by thinking about the mindset of developers in most game companies' labs. Who really wants to be the poor sod with the low-def development gear at his/her desk?
Any self-respecting geek (myself included!) would rather chew glass than suffer the agony and stigma of working on old gear...
You have the right to remain silent. If you don't, anything you say will be misquoted and used against you.
This combined with the fact that a lot of games don't seem to scale up the user interface very well when using standard definition. Combing SD with a small UI is bad enough, once you reduce the TV size below 27" things get even worse. (Even with the PS2 many games had small enough text that with a lot of (especially smaller) TVs the letters were solid blocks even if you were looking at the TV from 2" away.
On some TV/game combinations the fonts are NOT readable. A lot of people don't have HDTVs in every room. So when there are other people in the household who want to use the TV for.... *shocked*... watching TV the person playing games is playing them on an older TV.
Not everyone can afford large TV's, you would think the game companies would rather someone spend the money on their games rather than a new TV. In addition, with a 20" widescreen HD screen, you end up having to sit a foot away to read anything.
a 500$ TV. You can get a 42" LCD 1080p for 499 at Costco last i checked. I mean why would you have a PS3 and NOT have a 1080p TV? Seems pretty silly. Sell the PS3 and buy a TV and then buy a PS3 again when you can afford it. It's well worth it for watching all the sports in beautiful HD.
The issues with 25frames/50fields per second aren't new with the development of HD. Why is someone trying to relate the two?
50 fields is a lot, you can certainly play fast-paced game with those framerates quite well.
And Killzone 2's controls are not "already somewhat laggy". It responds just fine on my HDTV. Who comes up with this stuff? Maybe the author has various laggy upscaling systems turned on on his TV (tweener circuits are near ubiquitous on recent PAL TVs since 50Hz is noticeably flickery to a lot of people).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Don't ask me why that was posted AC. I was logged in and the "post anonymously" box wasn't checked.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Seriously, we're making console gaming and just watching TV much more difficult than it should be. Standards are important for a reason: it's a basic consumer protection, because no one has the time and money to support all these different formats, and most consumers just want things to work at an acceptable quality. That's always been console gaming's strength: simplicity.
This is why, when choosing an HDTV, my roommates and I didn't mess around with 720p or 1080i. I don't care about image quality/money economics as much as I just want something that works with my content.
"They" are still screwing around with frequency, though. What's with this 120hz and 240hz nonsense these days?
However, innovation is the natural predator of standards-compliance. The unfortunate side effect is that lazy support (forward or backward) is the natural scavenger that proceeds to devour the scraps.
My solution to this problem is currently to collect classic games and enjoy them on my two free SDTVs. The roommates use the new HDTV for their fancy high-def consoles, which I enjoy on occasion as well.
Well because thats ANOTHER $500 on top of the price of the console for an increase in resolution. I wouldn't pay $500 to run my PC games at, say, 1600 x 1200 vs 1024 x 768 with AA on.
Also, I think High Def television is one of the biggest rip offs I have ever come across, now that the BBC and Channel 4 are putting things online it's much more convenient just to watch from the PC anyway. Fuck TV, it isn't worth half a grand for an increase in resolution.
Standard def is 640x480 interlaced, vs hi def's 1920x1080 progressive. That's 13.5 times the pixels, or a 1350% increase.
-]Phreak Out[-
Why pay them to rape you? What the hell on tv is worth watching in HD anyway, it's all crap in low def.... It's the same bullshit for games. They expect us to buy the games because they are HD, they still aren't putting anything what-so-ever into the plot or playability(is that a word?). I for one don't buy games for pretty graphics, I want a good immersion experience. It's lacking all across the board.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
Because most people have already spent all their money on the console?
and the difference is more then 1600x1200 vs 1024x768, it's 1920x1080 vs 320x240. so unless you have rocks in your head it's a hell of a big step up.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I got rid of my Wii for the opposite reason. It looks like crap on a HD set.
NTSC (Never Twice the Same Colour) is definitely 1950's era technology.
AFAIK, the main reason for the lower frame rates is the fact that MAINS Electricity in Europe uses 50hz not 60hz like the USA.
No, the selling point of the PS3 is new games and a more powerful console. HD wasn't a selling point to everyone. Your point would only be valid if every game for the PS3 also came out on the PS2.
As for a big step up- eh. I can barely tell a difference on TV shows. Haven't done a test on video games, the difference there may be more pronounced, but I (and many others) quite frankly don't care.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Standard def is 640x480 interlaced
Where I am, standard def is approximately 720x576. Widescreen sets may support 1024x576. But even using your figures, my calculations say that it's only a factor of 6.4 increase. Interlacing reduces the frame rate, not the display resolution.
and the difference is more then 1600x1200 vs 1024x768, it's 1920x1080 vs 320x240
Nothing uses 320x240. Seriously. Standard definition of a PAL TV is (approximately) 720x576.
Why would you expect the PS3 to use some half-assed psuedostandard that not all TVs can actually display? PAL60 is a perversion of the standard that just happens to work on some TVs because the difference between 50Hz and 60Hz is within the tolerance of their hardware. You can't rely on it to work, and even when it does the results might not be what you want.
Example: my last TV could display PAL60 signals, but the picture ended up squashed in the top 3/4 of the height of the display, its aspect ratio completely distorted and practically unwatchable. If I bought a PS3 and it displayed games like this, I'd return it.
>A lot of people don't have HDTVs in every room
This may come as a shock, but some of us don't have any type of TV in every room.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Maybe not everything needs progress. TV is one of those inventions that was good enough. The increased definition doesn't add anything to the experience. I have enough upgrade cycles in my life, I don't need to waste money on new TVs when my existing ones are working perfectly. You see, as an adult I have things like a mortgage and retirement to save for. Or other hobbies that I enjoy more than watching TV. Even then no one is complaining that they support more advanced TV, merely that they do testing so that it displays well on older TVs that still make up far more than 50% of the install base. And Sony/MS wonder why Nintendo is eating them for lunch.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
So, 500 for the TV, then more than the same for Sky HD so you actually have anything to watch on it, then 300 for the PS3. You're looking at well over a grand.
SD widescreen sets are still 720x576. All SD sets will then stretch the image to get the correct aspect ratio. A 4:3 set stretches 720x576 => 768x576; whilst a widescreen set stretches 720x576 => 1024x576.
omg fail. do you know WHY it reduces the frame rate??! because it's refreshing 2x lower res frames INTERLACED to make them look like a larger, higher res image. this is why 1080i is not as smooth to watch as 1080p. the actual number of pixels making up the original image source is almost half as much.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
small problem; it may cost only 500$ in america, but in europe tv's like that cost well over â800. basicallly, america is milking out europe for just about everything.
try delacing that so we are comparing apples and apples. oh look it's pretty close to 320x240.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I work in TV/Film and thought I had worked with every crazy framerate/pulldown/interlacing scheme on earth and I had never even heard of PAL60 before (then again I'm from the US so don't work with anything PAL very often). I had to go look it up on Wikipedia thinking perhaps I had missed some big thing new in Europe. I still don't know what it is or why it exists. So it's PAL color with NTSC fields? Who uses that? Who supports that? Why would Kill zone offer it?
One could argue that by cutting your framerate in half, your TV is only pumping out half the amount of image data that it otherwise would at a given resolution, effectively halving the "usable image."
You've just probably never been exposed to it. You can tell the difference between a 24fps movie and a 60fps movie. In fact, it is more dramatic than you might imagine. I was really amazed at the difference just when dealing with framerate upsampling. Some new DVD software, PowerDVD 9 in my case, has the ability to upsample frame rate as well as pixels. What it does is rather than just displaying a frame multiple times (since monitors are higher than 24fps_, it actually uses various algorithms to calculate intermediate frames. While this doesn't work right all the time and produces some artifacts, over all it works amazingly well and the quality is spooky. Motion is just so very smooth compared to the normal film. It is an extremely noticeable improvement. It would of course be a better improvement if it was actually shot at 60fps to begin with.
Also, one of the reasons that film works to the extent it does at 24fps is because of motion blur. If you look at individual film frames, you discover that as motion gets faster, things blur owing to the exposure time. This helps it look more natural to our eyes since fast things blur to our vision in real life. Well, games don't do that. They display nice, clear frames. Thus when something moves fast, it looks more jumpy. Eventually this problem may be solved, some games are working with motion blur, but it is far from universal at this point and even when implemented it isn't perfect. To truly work as film blur does, the GPU would have to render multiple sub frames per real frame and combine them in an accumulation buffer before outputting them. This, of course, requires more power.
Finally, there is the issue of input lag. Another way to express a 25fps output rate is a 40 millisecond refresh time. If you send a command to the game, the earliest you'll get a visual response is 40ms later. It'll actually take longer, of course, since there's lag on the controller and processing and such. With a 60fps output rate, you are only talking a 17ms refresh time. Now this isn't all just silliness, we are dealing with numbers around the limits of human perception here. You start to get perceptible lag, which makes your game play experience less pleasurable. Remember with games you are just dealing with outputting a fixed stream of data, it responds to the player and thus the amount of time the response takes matters.
Not everyone lives in the USA, with it's $500 HDTVs. Even up here in Canada, the absolute cheapest 42" 1080p LCD TV is $800, and that's some brand no one's ever heard of. If you want a brand you might recognize, you've already hit the $1000+ mark, plus taxes, so easily $1200 or more. I can afford a Xbox360, but not along with a HDTV. Nevermind, there's basically zero content in HD . Zero ATSC feeds here, and the only HD [lite] chans my cableco carries are networks I never watch (and they want like $100/month for it, along with a $600 cable box).
Thanks, but no thanks.
I realise HD is the future but if SD support is mandatory (and it is), the frigging game should be playable in SD.
PAL 4:3 and 16:9 are both 720x576 - they get scaled vertically to 768x576 and 1024x576 resp. (well, actually, +20 for both and the outer 10 pixels on left and right aren't visible, but that's a small detail :-)). If you ignore the scaling (and the resultant overscan), and compare pixel for pixel, you get a factor of ( 1920 * 1080 ) / ( 720 * 576 ) = 5. NTSC is different - 720x480 which is displayed at 640x480 and 854x480 (too early to double check maths :-)) giving an effective improvement factor of 6 (again comparing samples only).
Also interlacing doesn't reduce the frame rate - there are still 25 frames per second. What it does is split the frame into two fields which are half the resolution (effectively meaning that you get each field scaled vertically too).
SD widescreen sets are still 720x576. All SD sets will then stretch the image to get the correct aspect ratio. A 4:3 set stretches 720x576 => 768x576; whilst a widescreen set stretches 720x576 => 1024x576.
Well not quite. There is no hard limit to the horizontal resolution of an analogue TV - the horizontal dimension isn't divided up into pixels, it is simply a continuously varying signal. If you're driving the TV off RF or composite then the horizontal resolution is restricted by the modulation (high horizontal frequencies will bleed into the chroma carrier, so the modulators will usually need to filter them out). SVideo, RGB and component shouldn't be affected by these limits, so you can drive your TV at pretty much whatever horizontal resolution you like - you're now limited by the internal components of the TV. (This applies in both 4:3 and anamorphic 16:9 resolutions, although it obviously makes sense to have square pixels if your TV can cope with being driven at that kind of resolution).
Of course, if you are using an inherently digital TV, such as LCD, DLP, etc. then the TV will sample the received signal into individual pixels, and depending on the TV it might have a fixed horizontal sample frequency, no matter what aspect ratio it is displaying.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
you can't even buy a non-HD TV in the UK any more, so who cares?
Also, I haven't seen any TV or DVD player in recent times that can't cope with PAL60. I have been recording HD video from cheap digital cameras (which use 30fps) for some time, and it works just fine on everything that I've tried.
There are good console games. But for the most part its pretty obvious that good gameplay and gameplay mechanics have taken a back seat to eye candy. Sadly the gaming industry is focused on the soft market and they are completely underestimating the market for people who like more extensive gameplay. Its abigger market then they realize. We just need more independent developers and publishers.
You're a fucking moron. If you delace then only one of the dimensions gets halved.
What? Just spend the $400 on a new console, then $1200 on a new TV, $600 for the cable box, and then $100/month for HD cable. It only works out to $8000 for the next 5 years! Why not pick a 52" TV instead, along with a Blu-Ray player and replacing all your movies along with that?
No wonder the Wii sells so well!
1) 720x576 may be the spec for an analogue PAL TV, that doesn't mean that's what a console renders at for it's standard def. Wouldn't surprise me at all if it did 640x480 as that is very common in the PC world and they are using PC based graphics chips. Remember that older consoles, like the SNES, worked at extremely low resolutions like 256x256. You don't have to target the spec resolution.
2) An analogue TV isn't going to resolve its spec resolution anyhow. Unless you've got an extremely expensive studio monitor, you aren't actually going to get 720 distinct pixels in a field. They are going to blur and bleed together. That's not the case for digital HDTV. You can easily get as many clear and distinct pixels as your screen supports.
3) You don't get the same chroma resolution on an analogue set. PAL, like NTSC, uses a much lower bandwidth for chroma data than luma data. Also, because of the phase cancellation concept, its vertical chroma resolution is particularly poor. This is not a problem with HD games, as full colour data is transmitted to the TV from the console. In digital terms, one might say a PAL signal has 4:2:0 colour resolution, DVI/HDMI has 4:4:4 colour resolution. In reality analogue doesn't map so neatly to digital and it is lower still. Colour is something PAL and NTSC are not good at.
What it comes down to is that you really get a much better image, especially for digital data, on an HD screen. You will note that even back in the days of all analogue all the time, desktop computers didn't use regular PAL or NTSC screens. The reason was because the image quality is so poor. Does a horrible job for text in particular, but really isn't good at all for computer generated imagery. Hence they used more expensive displays that could produce the images they needed.
Well, now we don't have to deal with that difference. LCD HDTVs are made on the same technology as your LCD computer screen, and their interconnects use the same signaling. With an HDTV, you can have all the same resolution you get on a computer, and new consoles are made to take advantage of it.
I haven't seen a new SD-TV for sale since probably 2006. Are people still using them? Come to think of it - I haven't seen one in use either since around the same year.
This is blinging
This bugs me less then the games that it looks like nobody even bothered to test in SD.
Dead Rising is the most famous example. The text is UNREADBLE in SD. It was pretty fun getting that demo and then not having any idea what the hell to do becuase they just threw a wall of blurriness at you. Lost Odyssey's character status icons were simlarly illegible (but the other parts of the game were okay), and I've seen the same lack of attention to it from lots of other games.
It's pretty silly. They didn't put on the box "does not function correctly without HD", so I expect the game to at least work on SD. Now since then we've upgraded to HD and things work fine, but it caused more then one game purchase to not happen.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Actually the effects are more complicated.
Interlacing means that each line on the screen is only drawn 25x per second. It does not mean you have only half as many lines. The result is that thin horizontal lines tend to flicker, but it does not diminish the resolution.
What DOES diminish the resolution is the rather coarse dot pitch and low video bandwidth of old TVs. Especially if you connect to the antenna port on the TV. So you get an image that is maybe as sharp as 640x480 standard VGA on a decent computer monitor.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I'm going to jump in here with the same complaint about Forza, being the game I've played most on either XBox console and the reason I got a 360 at all. Aside from the interface being too small and too blocky of fonts to be clear in SD (my 27" made in 1987 can't handle it well, while everything is clear on my 20" made in 2004, though both are SD and both have an s-video port), they try too hard to model the real life tracks as closely as possible. Even in HD, if you're not playing on a 40-50 inch or larger screen, you can't read many of the distance markers or see clearly braking markers and cones from a useful distance. The developers could fix this by slightly altering the signs and other objects as necessary, but seem to assume that everyone who will play the game has hardware at least as good as what they're using to develop the game.
Valve gets one thing right better than any other developer when it comes to this issue - they do hardware polls through Steam fairly frequently, all users can see the poll data, and they tend to develop their games to run well and be playable in the UI and framerate on the average hardware of their users, instead of assuming everyone will have high end equipment. It's very frustrating to see online games with dwindling populations get killed off because the developers constantly make "optimizations" that give a 25% increase to the top 10% of their users' systems (increase them from 200 to 250 FPS on their 80Hz displays) while giving a 25% decrease to everyone else.
In short, playtest your game on what you expect to find at the house of the kid whose parents were barely able to save the money to buy the console and game for a combined birthday and Christmas gift (when those two events are some number of months apart), and the game will look great for everyone. HD is supposed to be an upgrade, to make things look better than an already working SD version.
I've done development for the Xbox 360, and one of the submission requirements is to have the game properly tested on SD hardware. You can fail a submission if this has not been done, and for that MS do not release the game. It surprises me that it appears there's no such requirement for PS3 games...
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
Something you overlooked, USA doesn't make TVs anymore, there are no America TV manufacturers any more.
So your answer is that we should all retard progress, and dump higher resolution displays and go back to good 'ol CRT, because Nintendo is doing the best sales-wise?
Nowadays doesn't everyone own an hd tv?
No. Indeed, I don't know a single person who does.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
HD is simply higher resolution, and even budget PC hardware has been able to do HD-comparable resolutions for years. I wish people would stop making excuses that going to HD can result in framerate and responsiveness problems when the real issue is that developers are simply throwing in too many polygons, too many pixel shader effects, using memory for textures instead of the frame buffer, and basically making their 3D engines too inflexible. Oh yeah, and the fonts are too small. Force these people to use an SDTV over a composite cable once in a while, please.
What next? Benchmark pissing wars? I've already had my fill of PC enthusiasts gloating over 140 FPS with their $600 video cards, completely oblivious to the fact that if the video isn't synced with the 60Hz LCD display, the graphics are actually going to look [i]worse[/i]. Consoles are already showing PC-like issues like frame tearing and no v-sync. Haven't we already fixed these problems in the PC industry?
It's well worth it for watching all the sports in beautiful HD.
did you forget where you're posting? this is slashdot
You do know that the whole world produces games? You have probably heard of that game called "Grand Theft Auto", right? It's produced in the UK (Rockstar North). PAL is NOT some outdated standard because you 'Mericans use NTSC.
Nothing uses 320x240.
NTSC pretty much does, per field.
Seriously. Standard definition of a PAL TV is (approximately) 720x576.
Composite video signals are made of two frequency bands: luma and chroma. Chroma in PAL occupies the band 4.43 MHz +/- 0.6 MHz. Therefore, luma has to fit in below 3.83 MHz in order not to cause ugly artifacts. Nyquist's theorem states that such a signal can be perfectly reconstructed from samples at a rate of twice the highest frequency, in this case 7.66 MHz. Each scanline is 52 microseconds; 52 * 7.66 = 398 pixels, which is very close to 384x288 which would give square pixels with the 288 lines per field.
The result is that thin horizontal lines tend to flicker, but it does not diminish the resolution.
Super Smash Bros. Melee for GameCube and Super Smash Bros. Brawl for Wii have an option to blur the screen vertically (using a [1 2 1]/4 filter IIRC), precisely to get rid of flicker. So yes, there is a tradeoff between flicker-free video and resolution in SDTV.
My argument is that [failure to play well at 24 fps] is a flaw in the game design, not in the display device.
Let me guess: you're a fan of turn-based games and FMV-heavy games, not real-time games.
PAL60 is a perversion of the standard
So is the 288p mode that 8-bit and 16-bit home computers and every game console up through PS1 and N64 used.
And even if you stick with interlaced signals like those of the Dreamcast, PS2, and newer consoles, there are brazilians of people who would disagree with you. Brazil uses PAL-M, which is PAL60 where even the color subcarrier has been moved down to NTSC frequencies.
I live in a one room apartment you insensitive clod!
Yes, i have tv in the bathroom. Nudge Nudge, know what I mean, know what I mean!
with a 20" widescreen HD screen, you end up having to sit a foot away to read anything.
How close are you sitting to your monitor while you read this comment?
I don't need to waste money on new TVs when my existing ones are working perfectly.
And even when TVs do break, people whose living room TV is an SDTV (like my aunt) tend to go buy another used SDTV from a pawn shop rather than upgrade to an HDTV.
People who buy a new console and play it on an SD tv are idiots and deserve to be neglected. Why not just use your old console with your old tv, they have better/equal gameplay anyway if you don't care about being able to see whats happening clearly. Besides, its only about US$120 for a 19" 1366x768 resolution LCD monitor, and then its also only like US$200 for a 24" 1920x1200 res screen.
Ah, irony, thy name is timmarhy. What I enjoy most about your posts is the anticipation: How stupid will he make himself appear this time? That, and the satisfaction of knowing that, while everyone thinks that Americans are stupid and uneducated, Australia has you.
Of course HD doesn't suck in and of itself, but for people with SD sets it does. Most people with SD sets were PERFECTLY HAPPY with an SD picture. It's just that now everyone's throwing HD pictures at SD sets and it turns out looking like crap, either letterboxed (somewhat acceptable) or fullscreened (oy).
Just ask my relatives that I helped set up with digital converter boxes. Crappy digital pictures and a bunch of crap channels they never wanted in the first place. Oh joy!
Another example: DirecTV out of the goodness of their hearts is giving me three full months of all the Showtime channels for free. All in glorious fullscreen! So I look up - why are the Showtime channels in fullscreen and not letterboxed? Answer - well if you had DirecTV HD they would be letterboxed. Can we sign you up?
</rant>
Naturally I am going to be buying an HD set in the near future (and sending my perfectly functional SD CRT TV to be "recycled" i.e. probably sent off to China to be stripped down by poor souls who'll be dead from lead poisoning by the time they're fifty. But I digress.) But there's definitely going to be a population buying HD simply because they want a working picture, not a better one.
OK, you can call the waahmbulance now.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
It's well worth it for watching all the sports in beautiful HD.
do you know where you're posting?
Are PC developers neglecting EGA users?
>Yes, i have tv in the bathroom. Nudge Nudge, know what I mean, know what I mean!
Nope, sorry, that went completely over my head :o)
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
If you can "barely tell a difference on TV shows", then you're most likely using coaxial for your HD TV, in which case, no, you wouldn't notice much of a difference because coaxial limits you to 480i. However, using component will let you get up to 1080i and HDMI goes all the way up to 1080p. If you are using HDMI and running HD shows at 1080p and claiming you can barely notice a difference, then you need to get to the doctor pronto to find out wtf is wrong with your eyes.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Actually, one of the selling points of the PS3 was the ability to play my PS2 games (I still have a first-gen PS2 that won't play a few brand-new PS2 games.) but Sony fucked that up so many different ways that I just forgot about that and instead decided to buy the PS3 because it had more standards compliance than the 360.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This is bullshit. There's a Sharp TV manufacturing plant in Memphis right near the corner of Raines and Mendenhall, across the street from the bowling alley. I lived behind it for half my Memphis life. It was still in operation when I moved away from Memphis two years ago.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I think you're confusing coaxial connections for watching television shows, which can be HD, vs coaxial connections for playing games, which aren't.
I currently work as a tester on a very high profile first party title. I've been on the title since it started testing and the game has gone through many wonderful changes. One that hasn't, and that I've consistently brought up and even wrote broad reaching bugs about is the SD support on both NTSC and PAL. As of right now, it's impossible to read the EULA, or read any text on screen, such as names or key text.
I can assure you the title was probably tested, in both 480i and 576i on standard def tvs, but the developers probably ignored the issue and waived it. The same thing is probably going to happen on the title I am on.
You know what would change this? My guess is to start getting reviewers to review the games on standard tvs.
As a side note, this is an issue with both Microsoft and Sony, before anyone brings it up.
This is true of Lost Planet and Halo. My buddy has an HD set while I have SD, and he is always wondering why I can't see the minimap clearly - because it apparently renders much crisper in HD - almost to the point of all detail being lost in the SD view.
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
What people sometimes forget with interlacing is that it trades off spatial for temporal resolution. I'll talk US formats instead of PAL, but the concept is the same.
On ATSC 1080i-30 broadcasts, the nominal 30 Hz framerate is actually a 60 Hz field rate, and if you have a good deinterlacer what you will get is the 1080i-30 signal converted into 1080p-60 for display on a native 60 Hz progressive screen. The best deinterlacers don't just scale each half resolution field to a full resolution frame, but sample data from adjacent fields to help determine how to fill in the missing lines.
Many converted frames will be somewhat blurry compared to a real 1080p-30 signal, but the doubled framerate will give you better precision of motion. However, with a bad deinterlacer you'll just get a blurry mess, where the non-moving parts of the screen look like 1080p and the moving parts end up looking like 540p (or worse, if you get comb distortions).
The problem is that quality of deinterlacers varies dramatically, and I wish they would just adopt progressive rates and stop broadcasting interlaced at all, now that CRTs are falling out of fashion. For programs that really prefer the temporal resolution, they should allow 1080p at double framerate (60 Hz instead of 30 Hz here in the US) and just let the perceptual coding of the compression format (MPEG) do its work to degrade the spatial resolution during high motion (so you don't have to double the bitrate). Even better, do this while also enabling better codecs like H.264 so we can get better imagery into the same broadcast spectrum.
I use a MythTV system to record ATSC broadcasts, and sometimes I run offline conversions of interlaced programs to deinterlace at double the framerate, using the best software deinterlacer mode in mencoder, where motion-compensation vector fields are used to figure out how best to combine data from multiple fields. The results can be quite stunning, if your playback system is beefy enough to handle the high bitrate and pixel rate.
HD channels are like $5 extra a month here. Not sure about UK
Seems backwards. It's like having an expensive stereo in a cheap car.
What's really bugs me is that the consoles seem to render at the same resolution, regardless of what the final display will be. That means that playing games in SD is often more hardware intensive than playing in HD, because after rending in HD, it has to be downscaled to SD. It's really silly that games will suffer from increased tearing and framerate drops in SD. Lowering the number of pixels the system needs to push should improve frame rate. The downscaling is also really poorly done, so aliasing can also be really attrocious. Graphically simple games, like Echochrome, would look better in SD if they were Wii games, because they wouldn't suffer from that.
Sadly, the primary benefit of moving to HD is not that the resolution has been improved. It's that the hidious conversion between HD and SD has been removed.
A better idea which cuts around affordability issues is to just use the high-def display most people already have - their computer monitor. HDMI to DVI cables are pretty cheap. Personally, I use a VGA adapter for my 360, it even splits off the audio for my speakers and it still looks amazing.
Not really.
The Xbox 360 and the PS3 target the young adult demographic, specifically teenagers and college students. None of these groups have any particularly huge amount of disposable income (or at least not huge enough to spend on both a console and an HDTV). Those still living with their parents might luck out due to living expenses being less costly and the possibility that the family might buy a set for everyone in the house, but college students, in particular those who have to work their way through college, typically have expenses so high and income so low that their choices for the remaining income after fixed expenses are between spending a lot on luxury goods and spending more on necessities. For many, the choice is between spending $1000+ on a good system and buying a decent amount of food.
But when its $300-$400 for a console or $500 for a TV twice as good how is it even a contest?
The person I was replying to specifically mentioned not being able to tell the difference between SD and HD tv shows. =)
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Well I'm no expert, but I think it's pretty hard to play console games without a console, whereas TV broadcasts, as well as anything that outputs to a TV, can be viewed on just about any TV set. If the goal is to play console games, I would imagine the console itself is a higher priority.
They need options to make menus bigger or smaller.
COD fanboys hated the Killzone 2 controls because they were different. Instead of twitch controls, Guerrilla Games developed a system that relied more on acceleration. It isn't a faulty design that results in lag, but weight being modeled successfully. But the COD crowd left KZ2 and went back to their beloved game. GG has given the option to change the controls to make them more "precise." KZ2 is not the Halo killer.
If this is true, why are console games nowadays still made with coupled game state and graphics state? Any game developer worth his/her salt will decouple game state updates and input polling from the actual rendering. On the Xbox 360 and PS3 you have several cores. Use them by creating hardware threads goddamnit!
Glenn Fiedler wrote a pretty decent (though a bit dumbed down) article about this years ago: Fix your timestep
In the old days of Atari/NES/SNES/SEGA MS/SEGA Genesis, this was less common due to the nature of the development environment. Interrupts for vertical blanks and horisontal blanks were used for timing (instead of an RTC) and for frame-based effects.
interlacing by definition means every other scanline.
-]Phreak Out[-
Nothing uses 320x240
The Jakks Pacific TV games you can buy in Walmart do (same resolution on PAL and NTSC), and I suspect the V-Tech and Leapfrog and Radica ones do also. The newer ones are 640x480 though.
I don't think that we should get rid of higher resolution TV's, I think maybe there should have been a bigger gap between when HDTVs became available and games, etc. started coming out that REQUIRED an HDTV to be properly played.
This is true but you can get a used PS2 or PS1 for 10$-20. You can get a used xbox for around $10-20. The price of games are trivial. I mean why complain about a system that has graphics you can't even seen? Better to get an older system that is designed and infinitely cheaper.
Of course it does. One of the very things that it does add to the experience is what other posts are complaining about. Namely the fact that you can put text on screen that is readable without having to cover half the picture with it. If you are playing a game and your character finds a letter or other text it is nice to be able to read it without the artists having to draw it in inch high letters.
This of course has the side affect of making games more difficult/impossible to play on a SD screen. As someone who owns an Xbox 360 and a HDtv my view on this is that if you want to be able to play the latest games to their fullest then you should get an HDtv, otherwise you should realise that you won't be getting the full experience, and in some cases this may make it difficult to play.
Everyone makes out like buying an HD screen is a massive outlay of money. You can pick up an LCD pc monitor for £60-100 that you can hook an Xbox straight up to for HD gaming. Hell you could get a second hand CRT computer screen for peanuts and it would still be 5 times the resolution of your SDtv. Yes it wouldn't be as big but that is the trade off that you make. Gimping game development by saying that everything has to be completely clearly legible on a screen running at 720x480 is certainly not the answer.
I can't imagine PC gamers complaining that the latest games look shit at 640x480 or 800x600. If you want to play the latest games you have to move with the times. HDtvs aren't exactly new tech.
People who are going to invest in a HD TV are going to want one that will last a long time. Most people get tvs for a while not 2-3 years. And so they are going to need to spend more than 500 bucks. 500 dollar HD TVs at costco are priced at that point for a reason.
I do somewhat agree with you. It should have been mainstream, like now, where LCD TVs are dirt cheap and they don't even sell CRTs anymore. However, wasn't the first HDTV released in like 1998? That's 11 years. It was 7 years until the 360. How long do you want? 30 years?
Originally the Killzone 2 control scheme was designed to give a feeling of "weight" to the game, but this translated in the minds of players to a feeling of clumsiness and inaccuracy. Responding to this criticism patch 1.27 added an option for a "High Precision" control scheme that felt more like other FPS games, enhancing the amount of difference between small and large stick movements.
Existing players needed to tick a box in the game options after the update to swap over, hence ensuring that people already used to the controls were not alarmed by the changes, while new players who joined after the 1.27 patch enjoyed the new precision mode by default and could turn it off if desired.
In short, Killzone 2 does not have laggy controls at all in my opinion and saying so makes me think that the person quoted has not made the change over to the new control system. This would have been a valid concern at one point but has not been true for some time now. If they are aware of this and still find it laggy then they are welcome to their view but I suspect we're hearing the view of somebody who has not correctly configured the game to take advantage of the optional responsiveness increase.
It only runs 23.976 when converted to TV.
And film IS noticeably juddery. We'd be much better served with a 48fps film standard.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95