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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."
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...
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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
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.
I got rid of my Wii for the opposite reason. It looks like crap on a HD set.
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.
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and the lack of any interesting games (no, FPSes aren't and never have been interesting).
Translation: I think all first-person games are the same! Call of Duty is the same as Fallout 3! Aren't I smart and sophisticated?
Answer: No.
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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
Put simply, most games shipped in Europe in the pre-HD days were done with chunky black boarders at the top and botom of the screen to get the same number of lines as NTSC and thus avoid the slowdown issue normally associated with moving from NTSC to PAL. PAL60 is a fudge that allows them to use the whole of the screen without any slowdown and in general it works pretty well if your TV supports it.
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.
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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?
Also useful for playing NTSC-material on PAL screens to keep the original framerate and avoid having to resample the audio (or change the speed).
Are PC developers neglecting EGA users?