I explained this to a friend today in this manner:
Microsoft's marketing says a lot of stuff that requires asterisks, then comes clean on those asterisks only in tech interviews. For example: MS says all 360 games support all HD output resolutions. The small print associated with that claim is that this is made possible by way of a dedicated scaler chip that decouples render resolution and output resolution. They've said this publicly, but most people not interested in the details of graphics rendering will not hear about it or care. What they're going to hear is that all 360 games support all resolutions.
At the end of the day, this is a net positive. People like your friend and I get to have a clean 1080p signal go to our TVs, and Developers get to optimize the resolution to whatever works best for them. In Epic's case, that's 720 horizontal scanlines. In Bungie's case, that's two framebuffers with 640 of them. When you get to consoles as opposed to PCs, the real benefit for developers is that they can optimize to the limits of the hardware in an absolute sense. Real tradeoffs make a huge amount of difference.
The unfortunate thing is that when MS sells things like this, whenever someone like you hears what they're doing behind the scenes it leaves a bad taste in your mouth because you feel misled. Really, what you've gotten is the layman summary of a fairly complicated technical message.
As a note: you point out that the Gears box and website advertise 1080. Notice that it says 1080i, not 1080p. This is precisely because when Gears was released the Xbox 360 scaler driver had not been updated to support 1080p. Now that it has, all games support 1080p and that's reflected on the boxes.
"In fact, if you do a comparison shot between the native 1152x640 image and the scaled 1280x720, it's practically impossible to discern the difference."
Unfortunately, this is an example of Luke Smith, Games Journalist not actually knowing what he's talking about. Of course there's no difference between an image and a scaled up version of the same image. Perhaps he meant to say that there's no discernible difference between a 640p image scaled to 720p and a native 720p image. It's really too bad he made that mistake, one way or another, because the rest of his explanation was good.
Personally, since all of my 360 games get upscaled to 1080p anyways, I didn't notice a difference. And the lighting is great
Gears and Bioshock run as a single 720p image that is passed serially through multiple framebuffers, then sent to a scaler chip to give you 1080p. Halo 3 is rendered at what one could call 640p in two simultaneous framebuffers that are later combined and are then scaled in the *exact same way*. What you don't understand is that (a) the resolution difference is only 80 vertical scanlines, and (b) the dual framebuffers for Halo employ separate lighting models whereas Gears only uses multiple framebuffers to eliminate screen tearing. Halo 3 sacrificed some resolution to produce a high-detail, realistic lighting model that is beyond what we've seen on Unreal Engine 3, at a framerate that is much more consistent.
No, you're right, those were CG kids. What I'm wondering is how much of that trailer was realtime Xbox 360 graphics... The E3 trailer was reportedly in-engine, so presumably this would be too, but it seems too clean to me. I guess I need to see it in HD to see the appropriate seams. If it is realtime I probably couldn't be more impressed.
Slashdot Mirror
I explained this to a friend today in this manner:
Microsoft's marketing says a lot of stuff that requires asterisks, then comes clean on those asterisks only in tech interviews. For example: MS says all 360 games support all HD output resolutions. The small print associated with that claim is that this is made possible by way of a dedicated scaler chip that decouples render resolution and output resolution. They've said this publicly, but most people not interested in the details of graphics rendering will not hear about it or care. What they're going to hear is that all 360 games support all resolutions.
At the end of the day, this is a net positive. People like your friend and I get to have a clean 1080p signal go to our TVs, and Developers get to optimize the resolution to whatever works best for them. In Epic's case, that's 720 horizontal scanlines. In Bungie's case, that's two framebuffers with 640 of them. When you get to consoles as opposed to PCs, the real benefit for developers is that they can optimize to the limits of the hardware in an absolute sense. Real tradeoffs make a huge amount of difference.
The unfortunate thing is that when MS sells things like this, whenever someone like you hears what they're doing behind the scenes it leaves a bad taste in your mouth because you feel misled. Really, what you've gotten is the layman summary of a fairly complicated technical message.
As a note: you point out that the Gears box and website advertise 1080. Notice that it says 1080i, not 1080p. This is precisely because when Gears was released the Xbox 360 scaler driver had not been updated to support 1080p. Now that it has, all games support 1080p and that's reflected on the boxes.
"In fact, if you do a comparison shot between the native 1152x640 image and the scaled 1280x720, it's practically impossible to discern the difference." Unfortunately, this is an example of Luke Smith, Games Journalist not actually knowing what he's talking about. Of course there's no difference between an image and a scaled up version of the same image. Perhaps he meant to say that there's no discernible difference between a 640p image scaled to 720p and a native 720p image. It's really too bad he made that mistake, one way or another, because the rest of his explanation was good. Personally, since all of my 360 games get upscaled to 1080p anyways, I didn't notice a difference. And the lighting is great
Gears and Bioshock run as a single 720p image that is passed serially through multiple framebuffers, then sent to a scaler chip to give you 1080p. Halo 3 is rendered at what one could call 640p in two simultaneous framebuffers that are later combined and are then scaled in the *exact same way*. What you don't understand is that (a) the resolution difference is only 80 vertical scanlines, and (b) the dual framebuffers for Halo employ separate lighting models whereas Gears only uses multiple framebuffers to eliminate screen tearing. Halo 3 sacrificed some resolution to produce a high-detail, realistic lighting model that is beyond what we've seen on Unreal Engine 3, at a framerate that is much more consistent.
No, you're right, those were CG kids. What I'm wondering is how much of that trailer was realtime Xbox 360 graphics... The E3 trailer was reportedly in-engine, so presumably this would be too, but it seems too clean to me. I guess I need to see it in HD to see the appropriate seams. If it is realtime I probably couldn't be more impressed.
Also, that shield grenade is freaking bad ass.