xbox 360 or PS3?

[Deleted User]

donnajunkie wrote: »

if it is correct that none of the mentioned games are 1080p and are infact just upscaled by the console then why dont all games just say they are 1080p? surely they would get away with it? are you saying that the console is selective and will only upscale certain games?
do you see what i am saying. if the console set at 1080p upscales all games to 1080p then why does it say on the box for gears of war that it is only 1080i if the console is upscaling it to 1080p?

I'm fairly confident that stating each game is 1080p when it isn't would be in breach of advertising regulations and also the Trade Descriptions Act. The console will upscale any game to whatever resolution you have your console set to output at unless the game is native in that resolution. It's only as selective as you tell it to be.

donnajunkie

aliEnRIK wrote: »

1080P was probably just out of reach for the programmers to upscale to when they made it

are you saying that the game comes already upscaled rather than it being the console doing the upscaling?

actually all this is fairly irrelevant to what made me initially comment. the fact is a 360 game that has 1080p on the box can at least be upscaled to that. when a game like killzone 2 on the ps3 says 720p only then surely that means that will be all you get and it wont be upscaled? otherwise why wouldnt it say 1080p on its box also if it does get upscaled to 1080p like 360 games do?

donnajunkie

anewhope wrote: »

I'm fairly confident that stating each game is 1080p when it isn't would be in breach of advertising regulations and also the Trade Descriptions Act. The console will upscale any game to whatever resolution you have your console set to output at unless the game is native in that resolution. It's only as selective as you tell it to be.

i'm confused so are you saying information given here is wrong and they are 1080p if it says so on the box but that you only get 1080p on screen if the console is set to 1080p and the tv is also 1080p?

aliEnRIK

Donna
All games have a core native resolution which could be ANYTHING
The gamesconsole then upscales to either 720P, 1080i or 1080P
Some games DO have a core 1080P resolution to start with (Meaning the machine would have to 'downscale' for lesser tvs)
As for Killzone ~ Whatever it says is the highest resolution will be its limit for upscaling (Meaning it COULD be upscaled to 1080P if the programmers had wanted to, but the performance hit would have been too great)

[Deleted User]

donnajunkie wrote: »

i'm confused so are you saying information given here is wrong and they are 1080p if it says so on the box but that you only get 1080p on screen if the console is set to 1080p and the tv is also 1080p?

If you have a TV that can display a 1080p signal, you have your xbox 360 set to output at 1080p and you play a game that the box states it is 1080p then yes, that game will be in 1080p.

If, on the same set up, you play a game that is 720p or less, then the console will need to upscale the video in order to fill the screen to the resolution you have told it to output at. Since the source is being upscaled, you can't describe it as being a 1080p source, as it's not.

sardegnadream

I think I know which console is best based on a very recent consumer survey carried out by discerning local criminals.

I did, until last night have both consoles but in a side by side test they preferred to nick the PS3

I imagine the thought process was "Well if I rob the Xbox I would have to nick a wireless card, batteries for the controller and sign up to Xbox Live, nope the PS3 is weapon of choice, accept no subsitutes!"

PS before anyone jumps on me the last bit was just a bit of fun I like both consoles, actually I like the remaining one even more now!!

Andrew

donnajunkie

aliEnRIK wrote: »

As for Killzone ~ Whatever it says is the highest resolution will be its limit for upscaling (Meaning it COULD be upscaled to 1080P if the programmers had wanted to, but the performance hit would have been too great)

thats does sound like something a ps3 owner would say doesnt it? its also a bit rubbish of sony to want to try and push a console as the best thing and then make a flagship release game only 720p when the console can do 1080p.

i wonder what games are 1080p native then? well most 360 games releases now say they are 1080p. now people here are saying some of them arent 1080p. how are the buying public supposed to know which are and which arent if all are saying they are 1080p on the box?

Idiophreak

360 all the way. The only real thing the PS3 has over it is the noise (or lack thereof)...Oh the noise!

360 is awesome for the Media Extender stuff, the seamless MSN integration, the sheer number of people with the things (like said above, it's what your friends play that's important...) and the current cheapness of games.

I'm interested to see why people seem to think the PS3 is more powerful? Most things I've read have said there's very little in it...I get the feeling a lot of people *assume* it's more powerful because it costs more, without actually backing that up a whole lot...

aliEnRIK

Idiophreak wrote: »

I'm interested to see why people seem to think the PS3 is more powerful? Most things I've read have said there's very little in it...I get the feeling a lot of people *assume* it's more powerful because it costs more, without actually backing that up a whole lot...

The PS3 has the capabilities to achieve more than the 360. But the 360 is far easier to program for and as yet no ones even come close to programming the PS3 as effeciently as it should be
Maybe towards the end of its life the PS3 will pull away in terms of quality ~ who knows
As for the price ~ it costs far more simply due to the fact it has a built in bluray player and wireless capabilities

Idiophreak

aliEnRIK wrote: »

The PS3 has the capabilities to achieve more than the 360. But the 360 is far easier to program for and as yet no ones even come close to programming the PS3 as effeciently as it should be
Maybe towards the end of its life the PS3 will pull away in terms of quality ~ who knows
As for the price ~ it costs far more simply due to the fact it has a built in bluray player and wireless capabilities

Again, any reference for why the PS3 has these better "capabilities"?

If you look at things like this:

Thursday, October 25, 2007
PS3 misconceptions and spin

I read various game forums from time to time, and often see gamers complaining about 'lazy ports' to the ps3. They often mention how the ps3 is the most powerful game console and blame developers working on the console for doing a bad job. Sony has all of these people duped by impressive marketing spin, and I'm often amazed at how potent this type of rhetoric proves to be. For those unaware, I'm going to break it down simply and explain exactly why ports to the ps3 will never be as good as their 360 counter parts, and why most ps3 exclusives will likely continue to suck. First, lets debunk a few common misconceptions:

"The PS3 is more graphically advanced than the 360"

Fill rate is one of the primary ways to measure graphics performance - in essence, it's a number describing how many pixel operations you can perform. The fill rate on the PS3 is significantly slower than on the 360, meaning that games either have to run at lower resolution or use simpler shader effects to achieve the same performance. Additionally, the shader processing on the ps3 is significantly slower than on the 360, which means that a normal map takes more fill rate to draw on the ps3 than it does on the 360. And I'm not talking about small differences here, we're talking roughly half the pixel pushing power.

"Ok, fine, but the cell is like, super powerful"

In theory, sure, but in reality it doesn't work out that way. Game code simply doesn't split well across multiple processors. You can probably find a way to split a few things off fairly easily - put the audio on one processor, animation on another; but generally the breakup is always going to leave several of the SPUs idle or underutilized. On top of that, it's usually not CPU speed that restricts the visuals in games - it's fill rate.

"Uh, Blue Ray!"

Great for watching movies, but not so great for games. Getting data off the blue ray drive takes about twice as long as it does to get the same data off the 360's DVD drive. That translates into longer load times, or god forbid if your streaming from disk, tighter constraints on the amount of data you can stream.

"But it's got a lot more space than DVD"

Ok, you got me there - it does have a lot more space, and there is the potential to use that to do something cool, but thats unlikely to be realized in any useful way. There are tons of compression techniques available for data and I'd personally rather be able to get my data faster than have more of it. Most developers who use the entire Blue Ray drive are doing it to work around other problems with the ps3 such as it's slow loading - for instance, in Resistance: Fall of Man, every art asset is stored on disk once for every level that uses it. So rather than storing one copy of a texture, you're storing it 12 times. If you took that entire game and removed all the duplicate data, it would likely fit on a DVD without any problem. They do this to speed up load times, which, as I pointed out before, are painfully slow on the ps3. So in this case, the extra space is completely wasted.

"Once developers figure out the PS3 they'll maximize the hardware and it will be amazing"

I suspect a small number of PS3 only developers will optimize the hardware to do something cool. However, this will be an exception to the rule, and will likely involved game designs that are specifically designed for the hardware and funded by Sony. If those will prove to be fun or not is another question.

Most of the performance centric research into the PS3 has been around making it easier for developers to get the same level of performance you get out of the 360 naturally. For instance, some developers are using those extra SPU's on the cell to prepare data for the rendering pipeline. Basically, they take the data they would normally send to the graphics chip, send it to an SPU which optimizes it in some manner, then send it to the graphics chip. So, once again we see an 'advantage' in hardware being used to make up for a disadvantage in another area - a common theme with the ps3. And this introduces an extra frame of latency into the equation, making controller response slower.

So, the common theme is this; developers must spend significantly more time and resources getting the PS3 to do what the 360 can already do easily and with a lot less code. Lets look at how this translates into practical realities for a moment:

Why the PS3 version often pails in comparison to the 360 version, and why exclusives often suck:

As outlined above, getting equivalent performance out of the PS3 requires a lot of work unique to the platform, and in many cases, even with all these tricks, you still won't see equivalent performance. Thus, many ps3 games have simplified shaders and run at lower native resolutions than the 360 versions. On top of this, there is shrinking incentive to do this work; the PS3 isn't selling.

The code needed to make the PS3 work is most likely only useful to you on the PS3, as the types of tricks you need to do to make the thing perform are very unique to the platform and unlikely to be useful on any other architecture now or in the future. These issues all stem from unbalanced hardware design, and any future hardware that is this unbalanced will likely be unbalanced in a completely unique way.

Finally, there's the problem of resources. Game Development is, at it's heart, a resource management challenge. Given finite resources, do I have these five engineers work on optimizing the PS3 version to look better, or do I use them to make the game play better and fix bugs? Do I change my design to fit with what the PS3 hardware does well, or simply run the game at a slightly lower resolution on the PS3 to make up for it? Developers striving to push the PS3 hardware have often sacrificed their game in the process.

This post might come across as a lot of Sony bashing, but it's just the reality from the trenches. Sony let their hardware be designed by a comity of business interests rather than a well thought out design that would serve the game development community. They are going to loose hard this round because of it, and I hope that in the next round they take lessons from this round and produce a more balanced and usable machine.

That's posted by a (supposedly independent Harmonix Dev, Jason Booth - And it doesn't seem the hardware's much more capable at all...

I think it's fair to say the bluray is why the PS3's more expensive - the wireless is pennies (tbh I was *shocked*, though, when I got my 360 and found it wasn't wireless out of the box - not bothered, but in this day and age )