So I hooked up the ps3 to the CRT...

[Citizin]

Component/VGA's 640 x 480 is tons better than shitty composite 480i or whatever. You would get better colors, sharpness and contrast through an LCD through RGB than an old CRT using Composite or S-Video.

It's the video input that matters.

[Niode]

Most people don't even notice with CRT since it hides a lot of the problems with interlaced video signals.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

Improved picture quality and definition. That's the point. And that's all that matters. It's a tool for artists to create more intricate work and for me to enjoy it, so I take it without question.

Higher resolution does not equal higher quality graphics.

I posted this in another thread, but I'll post it here again:
http://insomnia.ac/commentary/not_powerful_enough/

Resolution is only a very small part of it. There's a whole bunch of stuff that's been around in cinema since Terminator 2 hit the big screen that consoles still can't do in realtime yet. As the linked article shows, watching a DVD in 480i gives more realism than a modern console in 1080p due to reasons outside of resolution.

Beyond that, LCDs and Plasmas still don't have the colour definition of CRT. Many graphic artists and broadcast professionals are still creating and colour-checking work on CRTs before pushing them out to flat panels.

You shouldn't take anything "without question". You should do the research to understand why it's being used, and if there's a better way of doing it.

very very VERY good article. I must agree w/ every aspect of that as when doom3 came out, all my friends that were running cards that might as well be integrated were trying to keep detail and resolution high, then they learned that a 1280x800 resolution on a 12" screen is completely unnecesary and scaled it down to 640x480 w/ medium settings and were having a blast. As much as i like high resolution id rather have awe-inducing effects. Especially true for Crysis.

[lordofduct]

and I asked myself, "why are we shelling out all this money for HD sets". Really besides the fact that everything was cut off into a wide aspect ration (gah!) everything looked fine, sure you couldnt see the wrinkles as clearly or the cracks on the ground as deep, but otherwise it was fine. Anyway Id like your opinions on this, it really makes me mad though that I shelled out 800 dollars for my HDTV and now im back saying whats the point...

Try to buy a monitor the size of a regular HDTV. I don't know about you but a 30 inch monitor costs FAR more then a 30 inch HDTV.

Secondly, monitors look good because they support the higher resolutions. It isn't like HD is a new idea, its just a new standards system set up for OTA digital broadcasting. It's nothing to with technological advances, but instead with a bunch of manufacturers sitting down and saying "ok, this is our new standard and we should all make our products to conform to them so that all displays we sell can intermingle with the broadcasting standards easily".

The thing is a monitor at 1920x1080 and a HDTV at 1920x1080 will probably look different. Computer monitors are designed differently. A computer monitor is designed with readability in mind. Computer need to display a lot of intermingled media such as text, video, 3d graphics, etc. HDTV displays are geared more towards film and television broadcasting, where realism of colour is a priority.

Try hooking your computer to a TV. It looks pretty good, but it looks far better on your computer monitor. Because your computer monitor was designed with the content in mind. TVs are expecting whales to be swimming through the big blue ocean on the new documentary from Discovery.

[lordofduct]

Compare the hair on the two ladies or the details in the clothes of the fighters. There is a huge gap in image quality, and though DOA 4 offers much higher definition, what it helps define is an obvious lack of detail. But how can this be? How can it be that even the tiniest, decade-old TV and any cheap-ass DVD player can put your 360/huge-HDTV combo to shame?

UMMMM... maybe because one is a REAL PERSON, and the other is a 3d model drawn by a human.

Let's look at a side by side photograph and painting of a human being... which looks more real? THE PHOTOGRAPH!


Now of course you have a point, the XBOX 360 and PS3 isn't powerful enough to render life like graphics in real time. But resolution is a step toward it.

Let's say for instance that you want to render something constructed of 50K polys. But this model is standing ohhh, really far away from the camera. Now the dimensions of the viewable space of it is a fraction of the screen... at 1920x1080 this section is about, let's say, 100x100 pixels. At 480i this section is about 30x30 or so. Which do you think will fit more verts?

[RyaNtheSlayA]

Compare the hair on the two ladies or the details in the clothes of the fighters. There is a huge gap in image quality, and though DOA 4 offers much higher definition, what it helps define is an obvious lack of detail. But how can this be? How can it be that even the tiniest, decade-old TV and any cheap-ass DVD player can put your 360/huge-HDTV combo to shame?

UMMMM... maybe because one is a REAL PERSON, and the other is a 3d model drawn by a human.

Let's look at a side by side photograph and painting of a human being... which looks more real? THE PHOTOGRAPH!

thats not the point he is trying to make although I thought that at first too. Hes trying to point out that if a developer were to shell out the power into a 480i effects spectacular, it would look better simply due to the fact its got more detail, though at a lower resolution.

oh and w/ the letterboxing issue on new games, it can bet bypassed although it will annoy some of you. Go into system, display, video output, and change it to 16:9 aspect, though it will squish the games on your 4:3 it will fill the entire screen

[elvis]

UMMMM... maybe because one is a REAL PERSON, and the other is a 3d model drawn by a human.

I do contract IT work to a number of film and visual effects companies, and trust me when I say some of these artists can get pretty damned close to making a rendering look like a real person. Much closer than any video game I've ever seen, and good enough to fool movie goers watching on the big screen at 24 frames per second.

And that's the point of the article: modern games consoles are wasting a lot of power on things that don't matter, like resolution. What's needed is better realtime rendering systems (more emphasis on trying to achieve a real time ray tracer, for instance). This current trend of just pumping low quality modelling and artwork out through substandard graphics engines at 1080p isn't the answer. Likewise just throwing more polygons at a model doesn't make it better. It's all wasted processing power on stuff that doesn't really improve things. We're just taking yesterday's software technology (taking a pre-lit texture and wrapping it around a polygon, which has been the same process for almost 15 years now) and using it on today's hardware.

I would love to see realtime raytracing with added global illumination happen at 480p. That would utterly blow away any current graphics engine at 1080p.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_illumination

Of all the consoles out there, the PS3 has the best chance of achieving this due to the Cell architecture (6 usable SPEs). Although the XBox 360's tri-core architecture wouldn't be bad either. I really hope we see someone attempt this during the life of these consoles.

[RadarScope1]

I posted this in another thread, but I'll post it here again:
http://insomnia.ac/commentary/not_powerful_enough/

OK, I have to say a few words about this. I think we all understand that the effects and artwork trump resolution. It's the same reason a great band that has real soul but a shit recording studio can put out a record ten times better than some bullshit boy band with a million dollar studio at its disposal. We all get that.

But ... are you fucking kidding me? Wait for games to look like movies then bump quality from 480 to 720? Really? We've been waiting for games to look like movies since Night Trap and Sewer Shark hit the Sega CD. Hell, we're still waiting for animated movies to look like movies. The best we can get is a Pixar film or FF: Spirits Within. And you know what? FFSW still looks like CGI. Basically, it looks like a game to most people's eyes and it's not even anything done "in engine."

While I absolutely, 100 percent agree that all games should have options for text in SD resolution and 4:3 aspect ratio, to say that we should not have consoles that take advantage of what is now standard tv tech is ridiculous. Letting devs work on the PS3 at 480 instead of 720/1080 is NOT going to make games "come to life" like some fucking Walt Disney miracle. Can you imagine the backlash the SD games would receive among hard-core types compared to HD games? Whole forums would burn.

New TVs are too expensive, I agree. And pushing pixels ain't everything, I agree. But the dude who wrote this article is smoking some serious shit if he thinks devs can make real-life, real-time images on any console at any resolution. He's just wanking while typing.

[lordofduct]

^^agreed^^

PC games have been high res for years, and PC gamers have always expected these higher resolutions.

There is more to a higher resolution then just poly count. But it is also detail of textures and effects. Let's compare what higher resolution adds to the already existent poly counts and texture sizes:



Far more detail out of the same exact image.

Yeah it takes more processing power to render it at a higher resolution. But comparing that to the amount of added processing power to increase realism is a much steeper curve.

Compact this on the fact that everything has to be drawn.

Yeah you know some people in the CGI film industry? So do I. They get paid a LOT, and every model they pump out takes time to draw and to perfect. The longer it takes to make a model the longer it takes to complete the game unless more artists are highered. A film can sacrifice this because of a couple reasons: a) their budgets are much larger, b) they can pre-render each frame, c) the film doesn't have to be interactive.

Game development utiliizes a lot of tricks to get the whole real time animation to work properly. A film can be changed frame to frame and brushed up. A video game can not. Animating models is an arduous task and sometimes doesn't mesh well with the different masking, texturing, and polygon counts. Let's say its a vert animation, you increase the vert count, and the animation takes twice as long to make and brush out. But even then a vert animation isn't versatile enough... so we have bone tweening. But with a bone tween you aren't sure about how this is going to effect the UV mask and also has a chance of causing internal mesh clipping. All of this ruins realism.

My point, as you push this further and further... the cost to make a videogame sky rockets! We're already making million dollar games, I mean come on. The demand for games need to get up there to warrant the cost it will be to make anything prettier... not just for the hardware, but for the artists! And then don't even get me started on the programmers who then have to balance all this work and construct an engine that utilizes everything (I'm sorry, but the reuse of engines like we do with the Unreal and Source engines cause games to continually seem relatively similar... perpetuating the bloat in specific genres of games).



So hey, higher resolution IS A GOOD THING. It's a low cost increase in image quality!




....

Then you can step further. Some games aren't trying for "realism" and instead are trying for their own look and feel. My best friend is a modeler for a game company. He does what they want of him, but his personal preference is low poly artwork. He likes to see what beautiful things he can create in under a certain number of polys and as few amount of rendering tools. And he is pretty spanking good at it, I've seen him model some amazing stuff with so few polys it could probably run on a 32x (well not the textures).

There are other things like cell shaded work. And cartoony work. The higher resolutions really assists these visual styles a LOT.

And then probably the most beneficial. Seeing as this IS a old-school community. 2D games! I hope I don't even have to explain that one...



....

as for the cost of new displays... well that has nothing to do with the gaming community. Your television is doing far more then that. They've come down in price a lot... I mean come on I own a 1080p 50 inch widescreen display which I bought for 880 US dollars. That's CHEAP! A SD television of the same size before HDTVs came out would of cost the same if not more.

You can pick up nice regular size 720p sets for dirt cheap now a days as well. I bought my mom a 720p LCD panel for christmas 2 years ago. It cost me 200 dollars. I don't remember the exact size (20 something inches, maybe 24 or 27), but it was twice the size of the old SD set she had. When I was in highschool the first NEW TV I bought cost me 300 dollars, and it was SD. So I'm not seeing a huge increase in price here. I just see more "highend" sets marketed to people. In the 80's and 90's I remember people saw the SONY set in the store, but still bought the Zenith cheapy.

[elvis]

Wait for games to look like movies then bump quality from 480 to 720? Really?

I think the gist of the article was "put more effort into effects rather than resolution". Not so much "keep everything at 480p until we get there". You're putting words in the author's mouth.

New TVs are too expensive, I agree. And pushing pixels ain't everything, I agree. But the dude who wrote this article is smoking some serious shit if he thinks devs can make real-life, real-time images on any console at any resolution. He's just wanking while typing.

Again, more words in his mouth. He's merely suggesting that people developing graphics engines should consider putting more effort into moving the effects forwards, rather than just scaling resolution.

If you look at 3D engines in general, and the number of people working on them, little seems to be done at the core engine level. There are the occasional industry innovators (John Carmack comes to mind) who strive to push out well optimised code that tries to do new things (he was the first man to put shaders in a video game, long before we heard the term "pixel shaders" in common use, or even as a feature in Direct3D). But these people are few and far between. Overall the rate at which new features are entering 3D engines has come to quite a crawl. Part of that is a limitation of modern hardware (video cards are nothing more than glorified rasterizers, which is holding back a few things), but most of it is to do with people looking for quick wins, rather than long-term improvement.

Far more detail out of the same exact image.

For what gain? Outside of draw distance, what good is higher resolution?

So hey, higher resolution IS A GOOD THING. It's a low cost increase in image quality!

It's a good thing only if it doesn't come at the expense of something else. If it was a "free" addon, then fine. If higher resolution meant sacrificing some other better effect, then it has hindered the game. Particularly so if draw distance isn't an issue (say: RPGs, fighting games, etc where you don't care about things in the far distance).

To surmise: I'm not against extra resolution full stop. I'm against people thinking that extra resolution is a preferred goal, and ignoring the dozens of other features in game engines that have been lagging for the last decade, at the expense of bumping resolution.