This was just something that was on my mind and was wondering if someone who is knowledgable about the topic can answer it for me.

The resolution on the two console versions are 1152 x 720 and 1024 x 720 for the 360 and PS3 repsectively. As you guys may (or may not) have noticed, this causes the image to get stretched. I remember hearing that the 360 resolution was done this way to reduce the amount of data so it could fit in the frame-buffer. I don't know what the explanation was for the PS3 version.

My question is this:

If they needed to reduce the resolution, why did they only remove pixels from the horizonal and stretch the image instead of removing a proportional amount of pixels from the horizontal and vertical and maintain a 16:9 apsect ratio and not stretch the picture?

Thanks in advance for any (serious) answers you guys can give me.

I wish the mods would just ban your account already. Stop hijacking other people's threads with your ****.

it might have to do with the different architecture of both consoles and simple time constraints for customizing the screen resolution to fit each console.

Sloppy work - drop the process hungry blurriness and pump up resolution or at least make it an option.

Let me rephrase this:

I am not asking why the 360 or the PS3 were not able to be full 720p or why they two have different resolutions.

What I AM asking is why did Crytek just chop pixels off the horizontal part of the frame, thus stretching out the picture, instead of cutting a proportional amount of pixels off both the horizontal and vertical so as the maintain a 16:9 aspect ratio and, therefore, not stretch the image?

There has to be a reason for it. This is not something specific to this developer or this game. Lots of console games from lots of different developers have left the vertical at 720 and then just removed some horizontal pixels. If other studios have done the same thing then there must be a reason for it.

And you once again completely misunderstood my question. That or you are a troll or a PS3 fanboy who hijacks every PS3 thread that could possibly be used by you to spout on with your Microsoft Money Loop conspiracy.

Post only if you have an answer to the question I asked please.

Well, the higher the native number of pixels, the less action/work is forced on the scaling engine. So, if you upscale 1024x720 to 720p or 1080p it will take less work for the engine than let's say 1024x640.

Yo Nigel, i saw the Return of the Troll yesterday and i figure you had a side appearance.

So, if you upscale 1024x720 to 720p or 1080p it will take less work for the engine than let's say 1024x640.

Ok, but why couldn't they have done a resolution that had the same pixel amount as 1024x720 that was closer to a 16:9 ratio?

Oh, and a big thank you Animoe for giving an answer that actually belongs in this thread.

Hm, good question. When talking video, there is always a so called blanking frame sitting behind the active video. This actually determines how high the pixel clock i.e. the bandwith is the video is consuming.

Maybe, if they would have modified the resolution to be closer to 16:9, the pixel clock would have been higher and more complex to process but that is just a guess.

I actually think that its a massive improvement from the PS3 demo, I was very worried that the squashed screen was going to be on the full release and I tried multi play last night and I didn't find it too shabby at all, by no means perfect as it should have been but if it had been anything like the demo I would'nt have even bothered with the multi player aspect of the game. Loving the camaign though.

Sloppy work - drop the process hungry blurriness and pump up resolution or at least make it an option.

The blurriness is there to hide the hideous nature of some of the texture resolutions, u drop that and game going to look a whole lot uglier than it does now.

They probably could have given the time, optimised the engine to make use of the unique ps3 architecture and got that little bit extra out of it, but it boils down to time and money. The game had already been delayed once by three months, and another delay would have had the ceo of ea and shareholders gunning for them. so they went for the easiest way to fit it within the constraints of the bandwidth available. maybe they might (if we lucky) add a hud that isnt stretched into a patch, but even this would have eaten into available bandwidth, which is why its upscaled.

ps3 and multplatforms dont really go well, and the tech pushing nature of crysis 2 means that, they probably struggled to get it all in perfectly, as they are new to using ps3, and also they do not get direct technical and financial assistance from sony like kz3 or uc2 did. So when push comes to shove, they do best they can, but when money becomes an issue, they just dont care, as they have to justify this to a ceo and shareholders, and in all honesty, they cant, as game will sell lot less on ps3 than 360.

we didnt get that bad a deal anyway, the resolution makes little difference in motion, and ps3 has other things that compensate the res difference , such as better texture filtering, better anisoptric filtering , better lighting, better frame rate in heat of battle, and other little things that slightly balance it out.

U should see the biching amongst 360 owners about how their frame rates are awful, and they have a ug in game which adds a film accross the visor making everything grainy lol

i own both systems, and believe me the 360 demo was not all that either, so id just live with it, r sell it, as games blurry and sore eye inducing on both systems. I chose ps3 after reading digital foundry article which said ps3 has better frame rates when battles get intense.

heres iqgamer article if u want a look

http://imagequalitymatters.blogspot.com/

AF is **** tho and just makes it look worse and out of focus - Id rather see crisp jaggies than power cost AF - just up the rez a tad and drop the AF and forced 1080 upscale ugliness

I cannot believe what a hard time people are having understanding what it was I was asking. It was nothing even close to being about the PS3 being a lower res than 360 or which is better. I just wanted to know why they took pixels off the sides, thus stretching the picture, instead of taking a proportional amount off the top and bottom as well as the sides so the aspect ratio would still be 16:9

Anyways, someone has already answered my question. For any of you who are also curious why Crytek reduced frame-buffer data this way, here is that user's post:

http://www.gamesas.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=196628#p196628

AF is **** tho and just makes it look worse and out of focus - Id rather see crisp jaggies than power cost AF - just up the rez a tad and drop the AF and forced 1080 upscale ugliness

do you even know what af is??

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c0/Anisotropic_compare.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering

look at that image, thats what af does, in some 360 screen shots u see things in background blurring whereas they dont on ps3 version

its simply down to the fact that rsx gives a memory cheap way to upscale, but it can only do it vertically instead of horizontally as well (360 xenos has a brilliant upscaler built in )

its all down to the fact that this game is a 360 game, and they could have made it look good without the incredibly high AF [its at 16] which also uses up a bit of performance. but they didnt, they were lazy in the PS3 and didn't care as the 360 was their main target, this game revolved around the 360.... look at the demo, came out early on he 360 first then the PC later the the PS3 got an extremely bad old build or completely 360 port a week before it came out, while the 360 had the best demo out the lot. thus making as many peope as possibly buy the 360 verion of the game, which they pretty much did, look at its sale's, smashes PC and PS3, their aim was succeded. this game is made to look the best it possibly can on the 360, while compensating what it can be like on the PC and PS3. It svcks but you just gotta deal with it.

No its not , man u dont give that crap a rest. Its relatively cheap to do the af on ps3, as the ps3's strength lies in things like physics and lighting (thats why the ps3 has technically more advanced lighting too ), whereas the 360's strength lies in bandwidth heavy effects like alpha transparency etc, as these effects come at no extra cost to the console when applied, as long as it stays at resolution of 1152x720p or lower, but that extra resolution wasnt due to bandwidth issues on ps3. The 360 has vast bandwidth due to 512 mb unified ram, plus the 10mb edram built into the gpu, whereas ps3 has 256 mb video ram and 256 of ram for cpu. This can lead to bottle necks in information if certain bandwidth heavy effects etc ( alpha transparency for example) are placed onto the gpu. as they were working multiplatform, it is difficult to shift work from the gpu (which is strength of 360) onto spu's. it requires a lot of optimisation on engine, and a lot of knowledge of the ps3 architecture, plus if ur not acquainted with ps3 very well, a lot of time and money(staff and time cost money, plus delaying of product). So to save time and money, they lowered resolution so that everything fitted within the available bandwidth on ps3. If they worked exclusively on ps3 it would be different, theyd work purely to its strengths and move things onto the spu's, but cryengine 3 is a piece of middleware, which doesnt work exclusively to strengths of ps3, but tries to work for both. Maybe given more time , it will be optimised better, like they have done with unreal engine 3 over time, but it wont happen overnight.

so give up ur anto anisoptric filtering campaign, as ur talking out ur rectum. reducing the af wouldnt affect it, as its dynamic af , so it changes between 4 and 16x af according to whatever it can afford to produce without affecting image negatively.