720p or 1080p for consoles : V - Skyrim

» Tue May 17, 2011 8:48 pm

It makes perfect sense - it's 1080p in that it has 1080 vertical lines, but it only has 1280 horizontal lines. Obviously you can't use this resolution for widescreen gaming, but if you're rendering, say, a center element for a menu, you can do it, and then say your game is 1080p. All marketing.

1080p has 1080 vertical lines and 1920 horizontal lines. 720p has 1280 horizontal lines.

» Tue May 17, 2011 3:22 pm

Oh, when I say size I mean resolution. It's like zooming in, if I took a picture that was 50x50 and wanted to put it in a 100x100 hole, that would be 'upscaling' it. Indeed, the word itself gives a good hint - "up" "scaling", scaling up!
The basics of it really are that simple, the filtering is to reduce the obviousness of resizing, and can work quite well in hiding the fact - but you can never introduce new information. Rendering at 1080p gives a significantly better image than rendering at 720p and upscaling, but rendering at 720p and upscaling looks better than rendering and outputting at 720p.

I'm... lost. It doesn't introduce any more pixels and therefore it doesn't increase the resolution at all nor does it change the size of the outputted images (not like it could; the entire TV screen is already taken up by lower resolution images) because it has nothing to do with the complete size of upscaled images, but it results in bigger pixels? How do you fit larger pixels of the same amount as that of 720p on a screen with no more space on it?

» Tue May 17, 2011 6:19 pm

I'm... lost. It doesn't introduce any more pixels and therefore it doesn't increase the resolution at all nor does it change the size of the outputted images (not like it could; the entire TV screen is already taken up by lower resolution images) because it has nothing to do with the complete size of upscaled images, but it results in bigger pixels? How do you fit larger pixels of the same amount as that of 720p on a screen with no more space on it?

Both

By increasing the resolution the number of pixels also increases. Pixels don't get bigger.

» Tue May 17, 2011 10:23 pm

1080p has 1080 vertical lines and 1920 horizontal lines. 720p has 1280 horizontal lines.

And yet 1280x1080 is both a supported backbuffer resolution and a used one, and they still call it 1080p!

I'm... lost. It doesn't introduce any more pixels and therefore it doesn't increase the resolution at all nor does it change the size of the outputted images (not like it could; the entire TV screen is already taken up by lower resolution images) because it has nothing to do with the complete size of upscaled images, but it results in bigger pixels? How do you fit larger pixels of the same amount as that of 720p on a screen with no more space on it?

It does increase the resolution, it does this by making the existing pixels "bigger" - or rather, by making what was one pixel now multiple pixels. If you resize an image to twice its original size, for example, each pixel will now be 4 - from
X

to

XX
XX

Double the "size", the same information. Filtering would then go through the whole image and try its best to remove the "blockiness" this creates.
Your TV can only display one resolution - its native resolution. However, it has a hardware scaler in it that can up or maybe downscale video you pipe into it. If you send 720p at a 1080p TV, it upscales it and displays it. If you send 1080p at a 720p TV, it (I believe) downscales it to 720p.

So however you do it, footage is being scaled to your TV's native resolution. Whether you do it on the console and send the TV 1080p, or do it on the TV and send the TV 720p, it gets output at the same resolution.

Why do the consoles do it, then? Because upscaling is easy - filtering that to remove artifacts is less easy, and a lot of TVs don't bother. Upscaling it before you send it to the TV ensures a consistent image across different models of TV.

» Tue May 17, 2011 9:41 pm

Its going to use 720p since about 95% of games today use that format.