Has the PS3 already reached it's limit?
Has the PS3 already reached it's limit?
An Article on 1up states that the new title Haze will be rendered at an resolution of 576p (1024x576) and will then be upscaled to 720p. In much the same manner this was done in GTAIV as well, which rendered it's content in 630p.
The real question is: Have developers yet to unlock the true potential of the next-gen console, or will we see further decreases of the resolution in the future, to keep the framerate steady?
Supporter for the resolution cut could say that a high framerate and good textures are much more important then the resolution, but opponents could say that with more and more high-def LCD's and projectors sold to common households, this could become a real problem, because the graphics look very pixelized when upscaled to such a screen.
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armed with Photoshop and a calculator, I created a picture to illustrate the dramatic differences in resolution:
Picture for the Article
Starkiller, you use a small picture to show the 20% difference of size between 720p and 576p, but at the large scale, I don't find much quality loss in upsizing 576p to 720p.
I tried it myself: http://b.imagehost.org/view/0883/see_the_difference.png
Maybe it's a sample with a low amount of detail, if you were to provide me with a 720p screenshot, rich of detail, I'll be glad to do it again.
The picture is that small to fit the exact 600px a picture for an article needs here at GamersGlobal. And I didn't made the picture to show a loss of image quality, but to show the differences in size in comparison to each other, so all my picture is really saying is: "look how much smaller 576p really is".
But just to prove a point, here's an enlarged part of your second picture, I enlarged it without using any bicubic methods or interpolation, so the original pixels stayed intact.
As you can see, the right side (you reduced and upscaled) looks like someone used a light blurring filter on it.
But that wasn't really my point, I just tried to keep the article unbiased, but the truth is, I recently bought a PS3 and the game GTAIV with it and I was very dissapointed with the graphics, not that Rockstar didn't do a great job design-wise, but I'm used to play all my games on my PC in 1920x1200 on my 28'' LCD, now seeing such low resolutions with GTAIV was a shock for me, and that the few games I played on the console weren't using any form of anti-aliasing (to save CPU power I guess) made it even worse. I compared the GRID Demo between PC and PS3 and on the highest settings, the PC version looked twice as good.
Well I assumed the PS3 uses at least bicubic for resize.
Well, the PS3 uses a ton of filters to blur and cover up the lack of details, that's why some people even say that the PS3 version looks better than the 360-version, but again, I only created that picture to prove a point, details will get lost, there is no way around that, if you can see it, is of course another topic.
But to make my point more drastic, I'm used to a picture of 1920x1200, thats 2,304,000 pixels total, if I now see a screen in 1024x576 (589,824 pixels), upscaled or not, of course I will notice it, it's only about 26% the amount of information I had before. (720p is 40%)
Yes I agree, but what you're used to is, again, another topic.
I think most people still don't have a HD tv and there the 576p (which is PAL) are ok.
So on a normal TV, you don't have any quality loss anyway.
On a 720p capable TV, you can notice quality loss in comparison to a 720p game.
Here, I did it again with another image that seems to have more detail:
http://b.imagehost.org/view/0883/well_I_dont.png
Zoom in as far as you like and if you see any difference, email me :D
Good illustration, although it's more symbolic than showing the difference in quality. Like it anyway :-)
I don't see this so drastically. Same has been the case with Halo 3 on the 360 (though the title didn't really look any fabulous that it was a must-do for gaining the "extra-bit" performance). It's always a hard decision the developers have to make if you program on hardware that is in the one or other way limited. Even if the PS3 had the uber-CPU (which it doesn't), it'd still be to no avail - 2 times 256 MB of RAM remain 512 MB (mind the minus 80-90 MB for the OS running in the background [Xbox 360 = about 30 MB for the OS]). Same goes for the PS3's NVidia GFX - a limitation in itself.
Well, the surprising thing here is not that this happened, but how early on in their life-cycle this happened, these next-gen-consoles are supposed to last for another 5 years. If PC-titles look twice as good NOW, how about in 2 or three years?
Thats why I raised the question in the topic, did they really hit their hardware limit already, or is there still more developers can squeeze out of it?
I wondered if the graphics of games will improve as fast as they did before in the next 5 years, as the HD-Graphics of many games require lots of manpower and money. Is that effort worth it?
Maybe I think that because I am happy with 256 colours as well :)
That's definitely something some could argue about, and there are two sides to this: One could say that Crisis sold respectfully well because It had cutting edge graphics and not because it had such an immersing storymode, so there are people out there, that have a rather expensive system who want to see something for there money. On the other hand, alot of people switched to consoles this last year which hurt the PC-market pretty bad, so it's also a save assumption to say that the market will be slower for the next year or two.
But my guess is, that there will be a point when console graphics will start to look a bit dated and the PS4 (or whatever it will be called) is still a few years away, so that's when the PC will have it's comeback.
I hear you when you say that graphic isn't everything, I played through the first Bards Tale on a green screen, more then 20 years ago, but I also say that vision is our strongest sense and that I can't wait to see the graphics of the future.
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