Criterion Comments on 1080

[juanleche]

http://www.criteriongames.com/forum/...php?f=12&t=127

Re: 1080i Support?
by HamishY@Criterion on Mon Feb 25, 2008 7:32 am

We are dedicated to providing players with the best game possible within our means. We chose 720p because it gave the best performance and results for the majority of people. I presume you were wanting to improve the quality of the experience by going to 1080i, but in reality it would significantly affect it and not in a good way. Both the memory constraints and the performance cost mean that for our particular game the trade-off is not beneficial either to frame-rate or graphical quality. We will continue to look at ways we can achieve 1080i without serious compromise, but as it stands right now it is not looking likely. Even an extra 1-2% rendering cost would start causing significant framerate problems.

I hope you understand.

Hamish

In my opinion if some games can upscale without suffering (see warhawk, uncharted, assasins creed and turok which added support after releaseing the game) and other developers can not acheive this, then there is a real breakdown in sharing know how amoungst the dev community, which is a shame really.

Of course if the PS3 could upscale ala every other HD device (like you cable STB or 360) then the disparity would be a non issue

[The Don]

not that it makes too much of a difference, but I think that 720p suits gaming more than 1080i...

if it were 1080p, then that would be a substantial upgrade...

[Grim Reaper]

wasnt the game suppose to support upto 1080p?

[Amon37]

The problem is he is ASSuming that people want 1080i for better graphics when that isn't usually the case. If it's a graphical upgrade go all the way to 1080p.

It's because some TV's only support 480p and 1080i

[juanleche]

fixed link

[juanleche]

http://www.criteriongames.com/forum/...7&p=1376#p1366

Re: 1080i Support?
by HamishY@Criterion on Wed Feb 27, 2008 10:16 am

Hi tibbar110,

To clarify, the way that X360 does the upscale is part of the video interface / DAC, so essentially the upscale is free to the extent that the developer has no control over it - the OS will just resize to what the output needs. On PS3, you can upscale, but only as part of the conversion from the "rendering buffer" to the back buffer. The back / front buffers have to be correctly configured for the output mode, which for 1080i/p is a bigger memory footprint than for 720p. In addition, the scale is not free as it goes via the GPU. This is not to say it is particularly expensive, but it is NOT free. So essentially we have to pay a rendering and a memory cost. In our case, both of these costs are critical so we would have to gimp other parts of the game to achieve 1080i. The question is whether doing this to get to 1080i would actually end up looking better than what you have now with super anti-aliased 480i/p or even better with anti-aliased 720p. In our eyes, the compromise is not worth it as things stand now.

In response to others in this thread,

1) There is no magic bullet that just takes 5 minutes to turn on if we had only read the manual e.g. some super HW scaling chip. It does not exist.
2) If we find a way to make the game look better, we will.
3) Because other games have enough spare rendering time / memory to support 1080i doesn't automatically mean we do. We have different constraints than those games and we are pushing the hardware pretty hard.
4) The back of the box of ALL PS3 games clearly state which HD modes they support and we comply with all the Sony TRCs on this matter.

If we DO manage to find a way to do this in the future, be in no doubt that we will gladly update the game to make it better.

I hope this answers everyone's questions.

Hamish

Very informative, more questions for that elusive SCE insider

[Stiny-Ray2]

People if you have one of the older HD TV sets like i do ie...doesn't support 720p its sucks if you have a PS3. The only reason i have a PS3 is for my love for the Blue Ray technology. I am not going to buy a 720p set just to play PS3 i would rather buy a X-Box 360. PS3 need to fix that issue the 360 don't seem to have any problems listing games at 720p and 1080i. Again if push comes to shove and i want to play some games...i would just buy a XBox 360 for my primary gaming machine and my PS3 for a Blue Ray movie player only. I am not going to to pay $1000 - $1500 for a new TV just to play PS3 games when i could spend $350 for a X-Box 360. After spending what i spent for a PS3 i think being unable to play games in my TV's native resolution is unfair to me as a PS3 costumer. The 1080i issue is a huge flaw for the PS3 as it stands now...that's why the Xbox 360 will always be around.

[juanleche]

More:

Re: 1080i Support?
by HamishY@Criterion on Wed Feb 27, 2008 2:46 pm

@foo
Thanks. We try to be upfront and honest as possible.

@statix
The details of that article are not essentially wrong, but the interpretation is arguable. What I have been talking about *is* this 960x1080 buffer configuration. The horizontal scaling *is* free, but the issue stems from the fact that 960x1080 means you are writing to 1036,800 pixels rather than the 921,600 pixels for 720p. This is actually both a 12.5% increase in your rendering fill cost *and* a 12.5% increase in the amount of memory your screen buffers cost (plus any other related buffers). So compared to going full 1080p, this is much better, but very far from being negligable for us, because we are so close to the edge in both performance an memory. The GPU scaling I mentioned earlier was a potential way to reduce render cost further at the expense of some quality, but you would still have performance problems and it would not address the memory issues. We would have to start seriously gimping parts of the game to make this work, because everything is so tightly bounded. As I have tried to explain, the situation is far from simple and if we can find a way to do it, we will.

So thank you everyone for your feedback. We will continue to look at ways we can improve our games now and in the future.

Hamish

[Stiny-Ray2]

I have 17 Blue Ray movies and counting...i still haven't brought one PS 3 Game. My kids have a ton PS2 games which they still play on my 60 Gig PS3 thank goodness for backwards compatibility.

[Ascended_Saiyan]

^^ I guess you just don't want to buy any PS3 games. If you don't like any PS3 games, you shouldn't like any Xbox 360 games either.

BTW, upscaling sucks...period. I want native 720p and 1080p games. If you can't do them natively, I don't want to deal with them. Upscaling 600p and 640p images on my 70" 1080p TV looks blurry. So, this upscaling talk doesn't really matter. Developers just need to bring us games in the native resolution promised (HD resolutions).

[Proteus]

640p Halo 3 sucked major bootay on the X360. OMG, that game looked awful!

Upscaling only means 'up blurring' on X360 I've come to find.

I agree that content should be 1080p. If COD4 can do it, they all can.

[Shin-Ra]

Except CoD4 isn't 1080p, it's 'up-blurred' 600p as you would put it.