More than aging hardware, ridiculous RAM size. What were the designers exactly thinking when they put ONLY 512 mbs of RAM, and SHARED with video RAM?

No matter how fast that RAM is, it's still the main bottleneck the 360/PS3 have. Less RAM = less texture detail-filtering/AA/resolution.

What ? Black ops had 1080p last time i played it on the PS3, so why not ... ? Your talking about games for the Xbox 360, I haven't played on a 360 for years, so i'm not very good at that topic.

Neither console is capable of rendering 1080p in complex scenes, and as people demand graphical progression on half decade old hardware, the average resolution is actually *dropping*. As far as I know, no non-2D console game has done 1080p entirely.

Most console games are 720p (or less), just because the hardware is getting a little old at this point. Some are upscaled to 1080p, especially on xbox, but almost none are actually 1080p. Skyrim will be 720p or less on the consoles.

I was under the impression that consoles automatically scale their games to the apropriate resolution. I play on a 1080p TV with a 360 and all of my games are in HD. Some of the AA/Multisampling is bad due to the dated hardware, but it's otherwise just fine.

It's also worth noting that the PS3 and 360 are the same graphics-wise. PS3 can just hold more on its BluRay discs.

On the PS3 black ops runs at 960x544, it uses hardware upscaling to give you the 1080p option.

Think of it kinda like a DVD upscaler, which has a 1080p output. The original DVD is pretty low res and they use blurring and other techniques in the process of upscaling it.

Oh... Ok, my bad :cryvaultboy:

They scale the output resolution from the rendered resolution. It's like taking an image and then resizing it to be bigger - there's not actually any more detail in it, it's just bigger.

This is what I would do if my hardware supported that. My three monitors look like this:

11 22 3333
11 22 3333
22

this thread amuses me since they wont support anything higher than 480p 500 +/- for the consoles.. i'll be surprised if they do

What about Final Fantasy XIII (PS3 version)? I've heard that it was, but I don't know.

As for resolutions, 720p is perfect for me. :shrug: My TV only supports up to 720p resolutions, according to the box, anyway and games such as Killzone 3 and Uncharted 2 look amazing with that 720p resolution. If Skyrim turns out close to as good-looking as Killzone 3, I'll be ecstatic.

Final Fantasy XIII is 30fps at 720p, something some graphics enthusiasts refuse to believe when it's pointed out to them (because they refuse to think anything less than 60 fps at 1080p can look awesome). I once had someone literally refuse to believe it in a reply when I told them that. They get those visuals by not squandering the power on extra pixels per frame and extra frames per second.

It might have been mentioned, but upscaling is often used in a marketing context it does not belong in at all. Sure the PS3 can "upscale" to 1080p, but that doesn't mean much of anything. Your 1080p TV upscales just as well on its own. It has to in order to display non-native resolutions.

Very very high chance for 720p on consoles.

Nope, 720p, I believe. I think the prerendered cinematics are 1080, though.

What resolution something is has no direct correlation with how good it looks, you can have a very good looking low resolution game and a very bad looking high resolution game. A higher resolution just gives you more pixels in a scene, it changes nothing about what that scene looks like. Things are more detailed, and keep a detail level further away, lines are sharper and text is easier to read. A higher resolution is almost always better, but it's also harder to render, so if you don't have much spare power anyway...

Interesting, it seems I might have overestimated what consoles can do. I might have been fooled by the numbers, if Black Ops, which is supposed to be 1080p and can even be turned to it separately on PS3, only is 400x1000 or somthing like that.. But makes me wonder how it still looks so good?

Most console games are 720p or less. Skyrim won't be an exception.

Codblops is 960x544 with 2xAA. Personally I think it looks absolutely terrible, but that's really got more to do with the art style than technical ability. The important thing to note is that your GPU can only do so much, if you drop resolution you have more spare power for other things, and if you've never experienced 60fps at decent resolutions it's really not surprising that you don't have anything to compare 30fps at... that, to.

It looks "good" if your standards are low. Most players standards are low as they haven't experienced anything better and can't even afford anything better. They actually have bad graphics and bad sound quality, but they think it's good.

Example:
Most PC players play with bad quality sound cards that are integrated to their motherboard, and have bad speakers, and they still think their sound quality is good.
Anyone who knows what good sound quality is gets a separate sound card and high priced headphones or big speakers.

I'm actually amazed how many think Skyrim will be 1080p on consoles. I know many hope for it, but it is highly unlikly after all.

I can flip that on its head:
They look good if you aren't super picky.

N64 games can still look good to me. Hexen (PC) in all its sprite-filled pseudo-3D still looks good to me. Obviously higher looks better. Also most people aren't going to notice the difference between 720p at 30fps and 1080p at 60fps. You're more likely to notice the FPS than that resolution increase too I bet. In my opinion games have been looking fantastic since the Dreamcast/PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era (and the late 1990s for computers). Things have only gotten better from there.

Good art direction trumps graphical capabilities any day too in my opinion. Obviously both together is superior, but I feel kind of sorry for people that think "bad graphics so I can't enjoy this" because that means they have a sort of handicap at being able to appreciate good game design for what it is, rather than for how it looks.

I'm inbetween you two. Art direction is much more important for visual quality, but technical superiority is required to enable a lot of styles. For example, I don't think that the consoles have the hardware required to pull off a good looking realistic style. Certainly they can produce good looking games, but realism is a technically demanding art style.

However we're not talking about that, we're talking about resolution - the difference between 720p and 1080p, as well as the difference between 30fps and 60fps, is noticable. You can do a double-blind if you want, but if you legitimately cannot tell the difference then you are certainly in the minority and may even qualify for a minor medical condition! The eye doesn't do sight in frames, rather it sees motion, slow scenes are pretty much indistinguishable, and, indeed, you can go much lower with very slow scenes (Consider looking at a wall in 1fps and 100fps - what's the difference? There's no motion in either - does that make the two framerates the same?)

There's a huge gap between "This has bad graphics so I can't enjoy this" and "A higher resolution is preferred". For example, I'm a huge fan of great graphics, and think it really enhances the quality of a game - but I've just stopped playing Deus Ex after several hours. You *can* enjoy and prefer decent graphics without requiring them.

My point isn't that it's not possible to tell. It's that I don't care when it's not at 60fps, at all. I don't notice it, and I probably wouldn't unless it's side by side or on a giant screen. Why would I want to be able to? A friend I have online is a chef. He mused once that it's a curse knowing how to make higher quality food, because most people are happy with far lesser quality food than he knows how to make. I see it as that. Could I train myself to notice right away? Well I'm sure I could, but why would I want to do that when I'm happy as is? The first video games I saw were Intellivision and my brother's Commodore 64. I grew up through the NES-PS1/N64 eras and the PS2 came out shortly after I finished high school. I'm still impressed by PS2 graphics and blown away by current graphics. It's not a matter of not being able to tell the difference. It's a matter of not caring. Do most movie goers complain about 24fps? Insomniac, third party developer that works primarily with Sony, has shifted into a stance of supporting 30fps. The pulled in data anolyzing what their customers want and they found that a more detailed world won over 60fps.

For me it's about game play features. Clearly going from early 2D games to later 2D games was a huge advancement in game play. There are many games on the SNES or Genesis that could not have been done on their predecessors. Clearly the advent of common 3D games brought entirely new genres into play. Then more powerful machines have allowed for large (seemingly) seamless game worlds. What now? More physics? More graphics? What actual game play can this hardware bring now? If it's just graphics sure I will look in awe, but if it looks good enough for me I don't care what the resolution or FPS is, even if higher resolution and higher graphics is preferable.

I will go so far as to say that with 2D displays, I can't imagine ever needing more than 1080p at 60fps on regular sized screens. I'd rather they spend the power on better looking visuals at 1080p than "waste" the power on ever higher resolutions.

Of course, while there comes a point where a resolution is too small, I'd rather have a better world than a bigger resolution - I just don't see why I should have to choose, so I don't.
Oh, and nobody complains about 24fps because TV/Film is filmed at significantly higher FPS, and then compressed down with heavy motion blurring. It comes down to motion, not how often the screen updates. 24fps with no blur is not smooth.

I agree that the design of the game is a big part of it, comparing demon's souls and oblivion for example: Demon's Souls has, imo on PS3, much better graphics than oblivion, but OB has a different design that makes it look more beatiful to look at than demon's souls. Thus, design matters greatly when it comes to creating beatiful objects and people.

Actually, I would add a correction to the above in this thread: on the Xbox 360, Oblivion used 576p. (1024x576, hence the resolution of a lot of earlier screenshots being this) Very few AAA games for the 360 actually ran 720p. Instead, the game "upscaled" from a lower, semi-HD resolution to reach 720p. This includes even Halo 3 and Halo: Reach, which run at 640p. (1138x640) The "upscaling" doesn't add any detail: it just takes the image and stretches it up, using some filtering to avoid it from looking blocky and pixelated, like really old games might look when stretched. (it can look BLURRY if you upscale it too much, but going from even 576->1080 won't hurt it too much)

The reason for this? The console has a bit of a limit on memory and pixel throughput once you start stacking on modern high-end shaders, AND have to multi-render in order to achieve the (mandated by Microsoft) anti-aliasing. To the best of my knowledge, most PS3 games DO manage full 720p, because while the console is very close to the graphical capabilities of the Xbox 360, it cannot do HDR and AA at the same time; the flip side is that it means that it frees up power it was going to use on one of them, and can use that to boost the resolution a little. In almost all games on the PS3, they pick HDR, and have no AA: this is why, with a good TV, you can notice jaggies in the PS3 version when they aren't there in the 360 version. It's not a hands-down advantage for either console: you basically get your pick of "AA or higher resolution." (one exception is Final Fantasy XIII, which has AA on the PS3, but does not have HDR at all)

If Skyrim tries to enforce a higher resolution, then the detail levels will suffer as a result: the consoles aren't magical "black boxes" that arbitrarily always reach a specified level. They CAN get lag, and they CAN fail to reach certain things... Just that they have fixed settings, carefully picked by the developers to get the best balance at all times. So bumping the resolution means, say, cutting draw distance or lighting detail to compensate. The gamer in the end won't know the inside battle and negotiation that took place in order to make sure they're always getting 30fps, but it happens all the same.


Well, for one, FF XIII doesn't use HDR, as I noted above. Careful examination of videos of the game reveal that the lighting model is static, which saves a LOT of processing power, at the expensive of realism. Instead it relies more on frequent scene-changes and pre-scripted changes to things like bloom and saturation filters: things that do post-processing with a raw image (basically Photoshop-type effects) rather than actually adjusting the lighting model while it renders. The result is it takes a lot less power: 6th-generation consoles like the PS2 used those effects heavily. (think Shadow of the Colossus and Metal Gear Solid 3)

And of course, FF XIII also relies a lot on simpler, more-enclosed scenes: due to the less-freeform nature of FF games, they can do this to minimize the amount of extra objects on screen that svck away computing power. Even more important, it makes sure the programmers can always know WHAT will be on-screen: no players dragging monsters or items from a different area over. This lets them design things to run very close to the limit, rather than leaving in a "buffer zone" of memory/power to make up for things the player might do that are unexpected.


Actually, it can have a point in a console, just like how a PS3 is a better blu-ray player than stand-alone ones. You see, the specifications for upscaling or HD content playing are vague: as long as it puts the right number of pixels on the screen, all's considered good. Many TVs then will cheap out on filtering, and include a very weak upscaling chip: sometimes it doesn't filter at all, and just stretches, like how Microsoft Paint did back in Windows XP: sure, you get a bigger picture, but you get blocky and jaggy artifacts.

Both the PS3 and 360 include more dedicated hardware that specifically uses bilinear filtering when upscaling: it's dedicated circuitry that handles upscaling and upscaling alone. This means you ALWAYS get filtering, which is better than it being left up to the TV, in case your TV cheaped out. Of course, even better would be the option to select other types of filtering other than bilinear: 2xSAI, for instance, works VERY well for cartoon (especially anime) styles, and actually can dramatically improve visual quality: almost as much as if the original had been drawn at double resolution to begin with. But even still, bilinear is better than just plain stretching without any form of filtering/interpolation.