PS3 vs Xbox 360 1080p support question!

[Flinty]

Can someone please tell me why most PS3 games don't support 1080i/p?

Does the Xbox 360 give you true 1080i/p picture though a HDMI cable?

Is there really a big difference?

[sj33]

1) Because it requires more processing power. Processing power which is much better going towards more detailed textures, effects, less jaggies etc. Resolution is only one aspect. Many of the 1080p games we see today look very sparse for this reason.

2) Yep, it does. It supports 1080p over HDMI, VGA and Component, though only about 3 games support 1080p on the 360 (Virtua Tennis 3 being one).

3) Not enough to justify the processing power. Give me a really nice looking 720p game over a clean-but-sparse looking 1080p game any day.

[mackemansj1]

However 360 will scale and very well to any res where as the ps3 its down to the game if it has scaleing or not.

[belmondo]

However 360 will scale and very well to any res where as the ps3 its down to the game if it has scaleing or not.

To elaborate the 360 has a fully featured hardware scaler that can scale games to 1920x1080, whereas the PS3 scaler can only scale horizontally. If a PS3 dev wants to support 1080p they have 3 choices:

1. Render the game in 1080p.
2. Scale to 1080p in software.
3. Render in 960x1080 and use the PS3 hardware scaler.

[sj33]

It's worth noting too that many games that boast true 1080p mode actually slow down more in 1080p than 720p e.g. Ridge Racer 7.

[Link83]

So what the best settings to have an Xbox 360 and PS3 at if you are using a 1080p screen? Are you best letting the console or the screen do the scaling?

[Dazzyman]

360 shove it at 1080p as they look great. I run my 360 at 1080p as I want full pixel.

PS3 its game dependant so its hit and miss you can untick some from 720p and it will change to 1080p instead others just dont support it and default to 480p. Some games what say they support it dont support it properly like Ninja gaiden sigma so they loose all the detail and go blurry. In all honesty their isnt that many 1080p games on PS3 so I use mine for films for 1080p. I cant say Ive had zero problem with slowdown on Ridge racer though at 1080p as Ive seen it at the same bits running 720p and Ive had that since JPN launch.

[MattyD]

You're best off letting the console do the scaling as the scalers in most TVs are nowhere near as good and may add extra input lag to the image.

With the 360 it's best to use VGA or HDMI and set the machine to the native resolution of your TV. If the game supports this resolution it will render it otherwise the machine will scale it but either way you get a crisp, full image with no overscan or artefacting.

Can't say about the PS3 as I don't have one but generally speaking I'd say it's better to have the game run in 720p if it only supports 1080 interlaced and not progressive. The drop in output resolution (which in any case is probably being upscaled in higher modes) is a small sacrifice for progressive scan.

[sj33]

^I'm not even sure if it's possible for a game to natively only support 1080i but not 1080p, unless the game itself is upscaling 720p.

But yeah, I'd say if your TV is 1080p native, go with that. Otherwise stick to 720p.

[MattyD]

^I'm not even sure if it's possible for a game to natively only support 1080i but not 1080p, unless the game itself is upscaling 720p.

I dunno if you're talking about the PS3 (which I believe doesn't support 1080i, it seems to be a common moan) but I just grabbed five games from the top of my 360 pile and they all show 1080i support on the back, but not all of them show 1080p. Gears of War does 720p or 1080i and that's it but the other four all say 1080i / 1080p (DMC4, R6V2, Orange Box, Halo 3).

1080i means the machine is only drawing slightly more pixels per frame than 720p so it's no big deal in terms of hardware performance.

[sj33]

Nah it doesn't work like that mate. A games console can't render in 1080i, you can't have an interlaced framebuffer. If the game is true 1080, then it'll be rendering in 1920x1080. Whether this is output as 1080i or 1080p is completely up to the video output of the console.

The game boxes are very misleading. Most 360 game boxes stated 1080i support even for games that we know rendered in 720p native (like GoW). This is because Microsoft are cheeky and count the internal upscaling as '1080i/p support'. That's why all 360 game boxes now state 1080p support (basically any game since the update that added 1080p upscaling support!). The fact that Microsoft have the cheek to count the upscaling as '1080p' on the gamebox is plain cheeky.

PS3 boxes are usually closer to the truth because they cannot upscale, and some games like RR7 will natively render at both 1080 (i or p is irrelevent, remember) and 720 depending on what resolution you set. Some games downscale for 720p mode, of course. And game boxes are not gospel as you know

[Link83]

Thanks for the replies I hope the original poster doesnt mind me adding some more questions!

So both Xbox 360 and PS3 games are natively 720p, just upscaled to 1080i/p? If so doesnt it just make more sense to set the resolution as 720p for both, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Also, one thing that gets me really confused is that all LCD TV's Progressive by nature, arn't they? So surely even if you feed it a 1080i source, it will just de-interlace it to 1080p anyway?

Lastly, slightly off topic, but on the Original Xbox when using Component Cables and set to NTSC - should I just have all the possible EDTV/HDTV options selected? (480p, 720p, and 1080i) Or just one/two of them? I was currently under the impression that I should have them all ticked, and that if the game supported resolutions higher than 480i it would automatically use it, but is that rubbish?

Thanks in advance

[MattyD]

So both Xbox 360 and PS3 games are natively 720p, just upscaled to 1080i/p? If so doesnt it just make more sense to set the resolution as 720p for both, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Also, one thing that gets me really confused is that all LCD TV's Progressive by nature, arn't they? So surely even if you feed it a 1080i source, it will just de-interlace it to 1080p anyway?

Lastly, slightly off topic, but on the Original Xbox when using Component Cables and set to NTSC - should I just have all the possible EDTV/HDTV options selected? (480p, 720p, and 1080i) Or just one/two of them? I was currently under the impression that I should have them all ticked, and that if the game supported resolutions higher than 480i it would automatically use it, but is that rubbish?

Thanks in advance

1 - It depends on the game. Some very popular games (Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 for example) don't even render 720p, but render a lower-res image and then upscale it somehow (Both 360 and PS3 can do it in software but the 360 lets developers have it 'free' through hardware as it has an analogue upscaler built in). Other games support these resolutions natively but the highest resolution they support natively varies, if you see what I mean.

2 - Yep, HD tellies de-interlace anything that's not natively progressive. Again this can cause input lag as it takes the TV hardware longer to take in both parts of the frame and calculate how to mash them together. It can also cause artefacting - if you play an old retro console on an LCD and it has the old 'flicker when invincible after death' thing, the sprite won't actually flicker but will appear to have scanlines missing, for example.

3 - A small handful of games did support 720p so I'd tick all that apply to your TV. It will only output whatever the game supports natively though. FYI there's a list of games that support 480p/720p for the Xbox at www.hdtvarcade.com

EDIT - I should add that the resolutions supported for Xbox games might depend on what region of the game you have.

[fahrenheit]

To elaborate the 360 has a fully featured hardware scaler...

This was a widely-held belief, but turned out not to be the case. All scaling is done by the GPU. The ANA/HANA chips are display chips and perform no scaling function.
This of course means there is potential for performance impact if scaling games to anything non-native.

[belmondo]

This was a widely-held belief, but turned out not to be the case. All scaling is done by the CPU. The ANA/HANA chips are display chips and perform no scaling function.
This of course means there is potential for performance impact if scaling games to anything non-native.

I know that ANA/HANA don't handle scaling, but apparently there is a hardware scaler incorporated into Xenos. You can read more about it (and scaling in general on 360/PS3) here:

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241