Resolution: Native vs Upscaled

[Shigun]

Greetings All,

I was hoping that I could get some help in understanding a bit when it comes to determine which is better quality - running in native resolution or upscaled. For some background to this to help show what I'm after - I have a PS3 and a friend has a 360 and we were talking about native resolution in games, mostly the amount of games that do 1080p natively. I had thought the 360 had more up until a quick Google search proved I was wrong. We then got in to talking about how the 360 upscales all games to 1080p to display them. And this leads into the question I have for this forum - Does the 360 upscaling the game to 1080p make it look any better, the same, or worse. I had always thought that native resolutions were better than upscaling them for the most part, so I never questioned my PS3 displaying all its games at native resolution until now. After searching these forums and googling a little bit I couldn't find anything that answered my questions, and I had the feeling if I asked here I would probably get some quick replies.

So, to sum it up... My query is mostly does the 360 upscaling improve the picture quality for games? If anyone can provide details about this, or links to articles that discuss this it would be greatly appreciated. Also any articles that explain the upscaling (how it turns the 720p signal into a 1080p signal) would be great as well.

Thanks,
- Shi

[tron3]

This is a no brainer. Look at it this way. Do you want glasses or contacts to give you sharp vision, or would you rather have it natively?

Native resolution is best unless it is standard resolution. In that case, upsampling can help. Even then you might face artifacts. Because there are so many factors you can only try both and see which is better.

In todays hi-def market, native HD is usually better.

[WickyWoo]

For DVD, set upscaling to the native resolution of your television. If you havea crappy upscaler, or an excellent TV, try both the player doing it and the TV, and see which looks better, as one chip may be better than the other. The cheaper the TV, the more likely the player is to have a better one

[Phane]

Native 720p is better than 720p upscaled to 1080p in most instances. The exception would be on a 1080p native monitor (like DLP or LCD), in which the 720p resolution would be upscaled to 1080p anyway, in which, you might want to figure out which does a better job upscaling, the 360 or your TV, and stick with that (there are multiple methods that can be used to upscale).

Upscaling from 720p to 1080p attempts to mathematically draw 1.5 pixels for every 1. It has to do some rounding when it comes across odd numbers of pixels because you obviously can't draw half a pixel. This rounding results in a loss of quality.

Upconverting would be better, as it doesn't just systematically add 1 pixel for every 2 but uses more complicated algorythms to make the image look sharper. As with upscaling, there are multiple methods that can be used to upconvert, and not all will reap the same results. However, I don't believe the 360 Upconverts, it only upscales, which will generally result in a poorer image. Additionally, I don't know of any TV's or displays that upconvert... they only upscale. That's why people get upconverting DVD players.