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."

Comments

Old Snake would never approve.

[jx100]

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!

User interface size

[Jared555]

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.

Why does someone have a $300-$400 console but not.

[TheRealRainFall]

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.

PAL50 isn't new

[YesIAmAScript]

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).

Re:boo hoo?

[mustafap]

>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.