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[sportzhead]

framebuffer:

final output:

I would have sex with that car if I could.

 

[Helznicht]

framebuffer:
final output:

That Scaler SUCKS!

 

[Amadeus]

I would have sex with that car if I could.

yup.
good taste

 

[Cerebral Palsy]

omg i'm not buying a 360 now.

 

[raYne]

yup.
good taste

Indeed. Though it's a shame that's not the same car...

 

[kaching]

it seems the only games that 360 can actually play at 60 fps and at 720p are xbox live arcade games.

Which just confirms my thoughts that XBLA will be the best reason to own a X360 early on

 

[mrklaw]

So they're creating the game with distorted dials and text so that when it gets stretched it looks normal?

possibly. Not a big deal though - its similar to what they do with anamorphically encoded DVDs.



Shog, you mentioned non 16:9 output options. Care to mention some? AFAIK there are some VGA 4:3 options mentioned, and dash grabs of those. But that doesn't detail what the 'active' image area will be. Eg if its a 1280x1024 4:3 VGA resolution, will it actually create a 4:3 game image, or just letterbox the 1280x720 inside a 1280x1024 box? I thought it was the latter?

 

[Shogmaster]

Shog, you mentioned non 16:9 output options. Care to mention some? AFAIK there are some VGA 4:3 options mentioned, and dash grabs of those.

Yeah, those are what I was talking about.

But that doesn't detail what the 'active' image area will be. Eg if its a 1280x1024 4:3 VGA resolution, will it actually create a 4:3 game image, or just letterbox the 1280x720 inside a 1280x1024 box? I thought it was the latter?

Truthfully, now I'm fairly confused how exactly this will happen as well. I remember seeing so many weird resolutions on that dashboard pic, and I what about things like the fact that 1280x1024 isn't really 4:3? That's 1280x960. But I did see 1280x1024 in the pic too.

It's a big questionmark until I can play around with X360 in front of me.

 

[dark10x]

Remember when PS2 came out? Remember the hype surrounding it? Remember when its games started coming out at thirty frames?

Somebody has it backwards.

PS2 came out. It's games were coming out at 60 fps (for the most part)...but they were all field rendered and jaggy as hell. PS2 was bringing us 60 fps like no other machine before. It remains the king of 60 still today (for 3D consoles).

 

[eso76]

I call bullshit on those pics. I think they were resized without bicubic resampling, which makes them look unblurry and "in native res."

Why is the text on the corners of the screen all warped and of differing widths? Looks just like text that has a row of pixels missing, to me.

you're right...for example those "1" 's on the speedo-tach are all different from each other: if you look closer, some are thinner, some lack pixels, some are a slightly different colour...it definately looks like this screenshot has undergone some downscaling.

 

[Dave Long]

At the end of the day, this is not a huge deal to most people. However, I'm not sure it's all that cool for Microsoft to be telling developers they have to output everything in 720p and then turn around and allow their internal devs to skip out on that requirement.

So yeah, PGR 3 will still look superb. Just in case the haterz are still closing in on the 360 because of this. It's more of them just being disingenuous with developers and consumers. Kind of like backwards compatbility in a way...

 

[dark10x]

to be telling developers they have to output everything in 720p

Yeah, but they ARE outputting at 720p.

 

[Dave Long]

Ha! I guess that's the new splitting hairs, eh?

 

[XMonkey]

you're right...for example those "1" 's on the speedo-tach are all different from each other: if you look closer, some are thinner, some lack pixels, some are a slightly different colour...it definately looks like this screenshot has undergone some downscaling.

Ok, so assuming that these screens were downsized and this guy is blowing smoke up our asses, why hasn't Bizarre come out and put this crap to rest?

 

[Jerkface]

Somebody has it backwards.

PS2 came out. It's games were coming out at 60 fps (for the most part)...but they were all field rendered and jaggy as hell. PS2 was bringing us 60 fps like no other machine before. It remains the king of 60 still today (for 3D consoles).

I must have a different kind of PS2 then, because high profile first party games like Killzone, Shadow of the Colossus and The Getaway have nothing like 60 frames per second.

 

[antipode]

you're right...for example those "1" 's on the speedo-tach are all different from each other: if you look closer, some are thinner, some lack pixels, some are a slightly different colour...it definately looks like this screenshot has undergone some downscaling.

Well, remember that this is a JPEG compressed picture, and that the HUD is alpha-blended with the road.

It is kind of interesting, if true, that they rendered to a resolution that with 2x AA fits in the eDRAM. It could kind of make sense with the motion blur - they maybe wanted to save the samples in eDRAM frame after frame to blur them together, instead of resolving them, writing out tiles, then reading tiles back in and having to blend them together independently of the AA on the next frame.

 

[HomerSimpson-Man]

I must have a different kind of PS2 then, because high profile first party games like Killzone, Shadow of the Colossus and The Getaway have nothing like 60 frames per second.

You want to get into a framerate battle with this forum's most framerate acknowledged or even may say obsessed poster?

 

[dark10x]

I must have a different kind of PS2 then, because high profile first party games like Killzone, Shadow of the Colossus and The Getaway have nothing like 60 frames per second.

What the hell? Could you have picked worse examples? I think not. I mean, Killzone has THE worst framerate on the system.

I'm looking at the library as a whole here. The system has the highest percentage of 60 fps titles of any system yet released. Of this there is NO doubt. Do we need to begin a list war?

 

[Jerkface]

What the hell? Could you have picked worse examples? I think not. I mean, Killzone has THE worst framerate on the system.

I'm looking at the library as a whole here. The system has the highest percentage of 60 fps titles of any system yet released. Of this there is NO doubt. Do we need to begin a list war?

No, we don't. I was just pointing out that HIGH PROFILE first party games from Sony also suffer from some of the problems we're seeing in PGR3.

 

[Shogmaster]

Ok, so assuming that these screens were downsized and this guy is blowing smoke up our asses, why hasn't Bizarre come out and put this crap to rest?

Well, it was posted late in the afternoon and now it's night in GB, so if there is gonna be a response on the forum, we're gonna have to wait until tomorrow.

 

[PanopticBlue]

What the hell? Could you have picked worse examples? I think not. I mean, Killzone has THE worst framerate on the system.

I'm looking at the library as a whole here. The system has the highest percentage of 60 fps titles of any system yet released. Of this there is NO doubt. Do we need to begin a list war?

Actually it would be pretty sweet to have a list of all games ever made and whether or not they are 60fps.

Anyway, I'm a 60fps whore too but at this point I've accepted that PGR3 will be 30. Really I'm more concerned about that texture popping, or lod or whatever. That shit could be really distracting and very not next gen. Hell I'll prolly just end getting RR6 instead.

 

[eso76]

Well, remember that this is a JPEG compressed picture, and that the HUD is alpha-blended with the road.

yep, i've considered all that, but that's not the kind of artifacts that come with jpg compression or transparencies. If you have the chance, save the picture and zoom in on any letter for example, no way this is a 1:1 pixel exact reproduction of what was originally on screen (edit: not on screen, rather in the frame buffer)
I don't think this guy did anything on purpose, though, maybe there's some strange processing involved.

 

[Lord Error]

yep, i've considered all that, but that's not the kind of artifacts that come with jpg compression or transparencies. If you have the chance, save the picture and zoom in on any letter for example, no way this is a 1:1 pixel exact reproduction of what was originally on screen (edit: not on screen, rather in the frame buffer)
I don't think this guy did anything on purpose, though, maybe there's some strange processing involved.

As I said in some of previous posts, it could be that their text renderer is simply not perfect. The same thing happened to many games this gen.

You can see for exampe, how much off the kerning is on the text where it says "N Dimitrov". Such thing is a typical sign of an less-than-ideal text renderer and it would not happen because of any downscaling.

You can get simillar text problems in Flash for example, if you type in some text, and then set the rendering quality to "Low".

 

[Ryudo]

The thing i dont understand is that if this is true and that PGR3 is closer to 576p than 720p, why is the frame rate still an issue ? Why are they only able to reach 30 fps ? its not exactly boding well for the xbox 360 in terms of power.

 

[Helznicht]

The thing i dont understand is that if this is true and that PGR3 is closer to 576p than 720p, why is the frame rate still an issue ? Why are they only able to reach 30 fps ? its not exactly boding well for the xbox 360 in terms of power.

IAWTP, unfortunately.

 

[Shogmaster]

The thing i dont understand is that if this is true and that PGR3 is closer to 576p than 720p, why is the frame rate still an issue ? Why are they only able to reach 30 fps ? its not exactly boding well for the xbox 360 in terms of power.

Actually, this whole 600p thing is not about the amount of power but about the amount of EDRAM. The argument that's happening at B3D about this is that 1024x600 with AA is what exactly fits into the 10MB of EDRAM on daughter die without using frame buffer tiling. And the argument (using this mysterious post as "proof") is that according to some rumors, none of the launch games are using tiling, and that this is what Bizzare had to do without tiling to acheive the game visuals.

Of course it's kind of unbelievable to me that what basically amounts to a first party developer is not using tiling (which is a major design element of Xeno's EDRAM). Seems like if anyone, MGS efforts will be one taking full advantage of all Xeno's major design elements.

 

[op_ivy]

Actually, this whole 600p thing is not about the amount of power but about the amount of EDRAM. The argument that's happening at B3D about this is that 1024x600 with AA is what exactly fits into the 10MB of EDRAM on daughter die without using frame buffer tiling. And the argument (using this mysterious post as "proof") is that according to some rumors, none of the launch games are using tiling, and that this is what Bizzare had to do without tiling to acheive the game visuals.

Of course it's kind of unbelievable to me that what basically amounts to a first party developer is not using tiling (which is a major design element of Xeno's EDRAM). Seems like if anyone, MGS efforts will be one taking full advantage of all Xeno's major design elements.

sounds like a good time for me to chime in again...

what exactly is tiling? what are the benefits?

how is xenos designed for tiling?

 

[TheDuce22]

Look at the japanese launch games for DC and PS2. Its pretty stupid to assume the hardware sucks because some launch games have issues.

 

[Fuma]

Actually, this whole 600p thing is not about the amount of power but about the amount of EDRAM. The argument that's happening at B3D about this is that 1024x600 with AA is what exactly fits into the 10MB of EDRAM on daughter die without using frame buffer tiling. And the argument (using this mysterious post as "proof") is that according to some rumors, none of the launch games are using tiling, and that this is what Bizzare had to do without tiling to acheive the game visuals.

Of course it's kind of unbelievable to me that what basically amounts to a first party developer is not using tiling (which is a major design element of Xeno's EDRAM). Seems like if anyone, MGS efforts will be one taking full advantage of all Xeno's major design elements.

I think if this is actually the case we would have heard something about this before now. Devs should have been bitching left and right.

 

[Beer Monkey]

So since it appears that RR6 is likely to be rendering at triple the fillrate of PGR3, I'm assuming that nobody is going to bitch that RR6 doesn't have the graphical detail of PGR3? :lol

 

[op_ivy]

So since it appears that RR6 is likely to be rendering at triple the fillrate of PGR3, I'm assuming that nobody is going to bitch that RR6 doesn't have the graphical detail of PGR3? :lol

can we continue to bitch that regardless, it cant hold a candle to pgr3's stunning beauty?

 

[Ryudo]

So since it appears that RR6 is likely to be rendering at triple the fillrate of PGR3, I'm assuming that nobody is going to bitch that RR6 doesn't have the graphical detail of PGR3? :lol

Nobody will be playing it to make a comment.

 

[Shogmaster]

sounds like a good time for me to chime in again...

what exactly is tiling? what are the benefits?

how is xenos designed for tiling?

It's like this:

Xenos has 10MB of EDRAM on the daughter die, and it's sole purpose is to be used as a rendering scratch pad (much like PS2 and GC). But 10MB is not quite big enough for 1280x720 with AA and HDR. Infact IIRC, with 4xAA and 32bit HDR (10, 10, 10, 2), you need about 30MB of EDRAM to render the frame. But 30MB of EDRAM would be way too big and would have been too expensive to manufacture (even 10MB was too big to be cost effective in 90nm process that they had to split the GPU into Xenos the rendering core and the daughter die that houses the EDRAM to minimise the expense).

So MS and ATi decided that 10MB is the ideal cost point, and to get around the lack of frame buffer space, they designed Xenos so that it can tile the frame buffer into multiple parts that can be reassembled into full frame in the main RAM, and then sent out to the video out chip. This function is specifically designed into Xenos. So 1280x720 with AA and HDR will take 3 tiles to complete the full frame.

And that's Xenos and frame buffer tiling in a nutshell.

 

[Agent Icebeezy]

Can't another reviewer comment on this?

 

[Mr. Lemming]

It's like this:

Xenos has 10MB of EDRAM on the daughter die, and it's sole purpose is to be used as a rendering scratch pad (much like PS2 and GC). But 10MB is not quite big enough for 1280x720 with AA and HDR. Infact IIRC, with 4xAA and 32bit HDR (10, 10, 10, 2), you need about 30MB of EDRAM to render the frame. But 30MB of EDRAM would be way too big and would have been too expensive to manufacture (even 10MB was too big to be cost effective in 90nm process that they had to split the GPU into Xenos the rendering core and the daughter die that houses the EDRAM to minimise the expense).

So MS and ATi decided that 10MB is the ideal cost point, and to get around the lack of frame buffer space, they designed Xenos so that it can tile the frame buffer into multiple parts that can be reassembled into full frame in the main RAM, and then sent out to the video out chip. This function is specifically designed into Xenos. So 1280x720 with AA and HDR will take 3 tiles to complete the full frame.

And that's Xenos and frame buffer tiling in a nutshell.

Does tiling, as it is implemented on the 360, have any major performance disadvantages?

 

[Shogmaster]

Does tiling, as it is implemented on the 360, have any major performance disadvantages?

Well, to get true 720p with AA and HDR would take 3 clock cycles and that's not good as doing it in a single clock so I guess that's one. But keep in mind there are 500,000,000 cycles Xenos does per second, and it's not like rest of the GPU will be doing nothing in those other two cycles, right?

 

[Mr. Lemming]

Well, to get true 720p with AA and HDR would take 3 clock cycles and that's not good as doing it in a single clock so I guess that's one. But keep in mind there are 500,000,000 cycles Xenos does per second, and it's not like rest of the GPU will be doing nothing in those other two cycles, right?

So negligible impact... cool

 

[WHOAguitarninja]

Well, to get true 720p with AA and HDR would take 3 clock cycles and that's not good as doing it in a single clock so I guess that's one. But keep in mind there are 500,000,000 cycles Xenos does per second, and it's not like rest of the GPU will be doing nothing in those other two cycles, right?

So as long as it doesn't get another image from the GPU there should be negligible perfomance impact? Or am I missing something?

 

[Striek]

Well, to get true 720p with AA and HDR would take 3 clock cycles and that's not good as doing it in a single clock so I guess that's one. But keep in mind there are 500,000,000 cycles Xenos does per second, and it's not like rest of the GPU will be doing nothing in those other two cycles, right?

It only takes one clock-cycle per tile? That seems awfully cheap.

 

[Shogmaster]

It only takes one clock-cycle per tile? That seems awfully cheap.

That's theoretical. I'm sure real games take many more clocks to output a tile, depending on the situation. I mean, PGR 3 is 30 fps game, right?

 

[DSN2K]

Ive played alot of games on a crappy PAL 50hz TV so 600P(whatever its called is just fine)

 

[Gek54]

Is PAL HD resolution different?

 

[Shadow Moses]

Is PAL HD resolution different?

not really, we still have the normal resolutions but with an extra one.. 576p

 

[Ryudo]

PAL HD is 720P and up. 576p is considered "ED" whereas 480P is considered "SD".

 

[Shadow Moses]

PAL HD is 720P and up. 576p is considered "ED" whereas 480P is considered "SD".

Any "HD" is from 720p up.. 420p isn't

 

[Ryudo]

Any "HD" is from 720p up.. 420p isn't

I dunno where you get 420p from ?

 

[Error Macro]

Any "HD" is from 720p up.. 420p isn't

Put down the blunt, son.

 

[Shadow Moses]

I dunno where you get 420p from ?

from where you said Pal HD is from 720p and up, like NTSC HD isn't

 

[J2 Cool]

I would have sex with that car if I could.

http://www.smithappens.com/video_snlmercurymistress.php

Your move.

 

[Fafalada]

Ok, repeating some of what I said in Halo2 thread.

1066*600(true 16:9) fits into 10MB of eDram with 2xAA, without requiring any tiling.
This setting is supposed to be at least comparable to 720P with no AA - according to research from the, well this... company.

I have no doubt Bizarre evaluated both display options and chose the one that actually 'looks' better, rather then 'reads' better on PR paper sheet.
In a nutshell it seems 600P is still on the list of minimum accepted resolutions for 360.

Like some other people in the thread have mentioned, many PS2 and GC games this gen are running at non-TV resolutions also - most commonly 512x512 is used as alternative to 640x480/512 (In fact some of the best looking games this gen have used this).