1080p Meaningless This Generation

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://ozymandias.com/archive/2006/08/14/Home-Theater-Magazine_3A00_-No-Difference-Between-1080i-and-1080p-for-Movies.aspx' target='_blank'>http://ozymandias.com/archive/2006/08/14/Home-Theater-Magazine_3A00_-No-Difference-Between-1080i-and-1080p-for-Movies.aspx</a><br /><br /></div><i>"There's been a lot of interest in the PS3 due to its stated 1080p output for both games and movies (via Blu-ray). What's interesting is that a lot of folks don't realize how meaningless 1080p actually is in this generation. Let's take games first. The PS3 has roughly the same pixel-pushing capabilities as the Xbox 360. Don't need to take my word for it, it'll be obvious soon enough over the next year. Even if this wasn't the case, consider we now live in a multi-platform development world, and that the current sweet spot developers are targeting is 720p due to the extremely similar system specifications. Simply put, a developer who is planning to release their game for both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 will aim for a common attainable ground. In fact, I'll stick my neck out and predict that that you won't see any 1080"x" games for the PS3 this year."</i><br /><br />The article then goes onto describe why 1080p is meaningless for TV as well, i.e. due to the number of frames and the amount of data available to push out to the screen. Hmm, while I understand the arguments, I am not sold yet. Or rather, I have already been sold on the 1080p TV thing. I am hoping the the PS3 will be able to help me prove some critics wrong in a few months. Moreover, I do believe that a TV is an investment so one might as well buy one for the long run rather than something that would make you want to buy a new one in a couple of years to take advantage of that next new technology. So for those of you that have bought one already, don't fret yet.

[Felix Torres]

Hmm, I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding still going around about the 360 game rendering capabilities.

MS requires developers to render their games *at least* at 720p.
This is a floor, not a cap. Many games (50% of the current ones, at least) can and do render at both 720 and 1080i.
The 360 hardware, much like the PS3 hardware, and the original XBOX, for that matter, can all render games at any of the standard ATSC resolutions at will. How well they do it is a game quality issue. And that is where the arguments about 1080p not being necessary come into play; they double the cpu requirements without increasing the game quality.

Some games can't afford the CPU rendering costs for 1080 but many can. In fact, one of the more amusing things about the 360 is that most of the live arcade games render at 1080. Including the retro games that were originally designed for sub-VGA resolutions. Plenty of left-over resources to do full HD with those.

What the PS3 does offer that the 360 doesn't it that while it doesn't *require* developers to render at any specific resolution, it does provide 1080p output via HDMI *if* any developer should choose to render at 1080. But since the PS3 hardware is *not* twice as fast as the 360 hardware (if it is faster at all) the only games likely to support 1080 rendering on the PS3 are the ones that don't stress the hardware to start with, just like on the 360. So, for cross-platform games, we can expect that if a game can render at 1080 on the PS3 it should also render at 1080 on the 360 because both systems appear to be comparable in real-world power, specmanship or not.

Bottom line is that the gaming experience on both boxes is going to be driven by the games, not the hardware. There are architectural differences between the two systems but they are essentially trade-offs; MS sacrificed peak power for balance--Sony traded off flexibility for specmanship. Come november, the market will decide which approach sells more and to whom.