Ridge Racer 7: The 1080p Dream Comments by Richard Leadbetter

Great game, but jesus those uncompressed screenies are unbelievably ugly.

do a RR6 and RR7 comparison :D

Seeing this, it's hard to understand why there are so few true 1080p games. Is it because developers are to lazy/bad to optimize for that resolution or because of budget and time restraints? Or is it the ever mentioned difficulty in programming PS3? Kind of hard to believe if a launch title managed to do so already.

Isn't Wipeout HD "True 1080p @ 60fps" as well?

Seeing this, it's hard to understand why there are so few true 1080p games. Is it because developers are to lazy/bad to optimize for that resolution or because of budget and time restraints?

The more that I think about it, the harder it is to give an answer to that question.

Ridge Racer 7 features relatively standard-length tracks, with at least as many nice graphical features as you'd expect from any racing game, with you racing against lots of different cars of different types....there's really nothing there that suggests that any technical aspect of the game has been cut down in order to achieve something close to 1080p60.

Isn't Wipeout HD "True 1080p @ 60fps" as well?

In a sense, but Wipeout HD does dynamically change resolutions (specifically horizontal resolution) when the game gets busy in order to maintain framerates. Of course, people generally don't notice this and it is mostly 1080p60, so whether the resolution changing actually stops it from being a 1080p60 game is up to you.

It's not a matter of laziness. 1080p is over twice as many pixels to draw as 720p, and only a small percentage of your audience is going to appreciate the extra resolution.

Any console has its limits, there's only so much complexity you can throw at a scene in 1080. If you were a developer and had to choose between a game that ran 1080p (that only a small percentage of your customers will actually appreciate, remember) or one that could have twice as complex shaders/materials in 720p, what would you choose? The second option will let you make the game look much prettier for the majority of your users.

Looking at those uncompressed screenshots you can see RR7 has very simple materials and postprocessing, hence they can afford to do 1080, but I doubt it's worth it for many games.

True 1080p is 1920x1080 which very few console games have managed this generation. Ridge Racer 7 on the PS3 is one, Virtua Tennis 3, FIFA Street 3 and NBA Street Home Court are examples of others although the latter two drop the framerate from 60 fps to 30 fps in order to achieve it.

I was quite amused to see Geometry Wars 2 mentioned as it's hardly the kind of game that pushes the hardware. Granted there can be lots of effects and particles and stuff, it's nevertheless a vector-based game so hardly impresses in the same way the games mentioned in the first paragraph do.

The truth is the current crop of consoles are not really designed for 1080p at all, although the PS3 at least has Blu-ray movies to back up its claims. If you want to play all games at 1080p then you'll have to either wait for the next gen machines or buy a PC.

Hellz yea, PCs in da hizzouse!

Isn't there something like close to 40 native 1080p games on the PS3 (both PSN and retail, not including WipEout HD)?

RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDGE RACER!

Isn't Super Stardust HD in 1080p60fps? LIKE Geometry Wars yet it gets a mention?

Does anyone remember Phil Harrison talk about 1080p in the Edge article, shortly after the UK launch of the PS3? Didn't he say all 1080p game would *have* to be 60 fps? Was there ever any technical validity in this?

Ah 1080p gaming. I remember Sony claiming the PS3 would have 2 HDMI sockets as they claimed it was capable of pushing two 1080p signals!

Namco have always done interesting things with the RR franchise. I always remember the "interlaced" version of Ridge Racer 1 they released with RR Type 4. I'm not sure why they described it as interlaced as all PS1 games were interlaced at 480i... It's just a shame they couldn't squeeze all the cars onto the track in that mode.

I'd really like to see another Ridge Racer this gen. I don't know why Namco just do them when there's a new console out. Going back to the PS1 games, when you consider the graphical leaps they made from RR1 to Type 4 I'd really like to see what sort of improvements Namco could make if they allowed their developers to make more than one game per system per generation.

I'm a big fan of RR7. It's a nice arcade racer which is easier than the PSP counter parts (specifically Ridge Racer 2). I would prefer to play this than something like Gran Turismo or GRID.
@ Law07

SSHD isn't 1080p. It's something like 1280x1080, but I'm sure that there are a reasonable amount of true 1080p games on the PS3.

@ photoboy

I think price (both manufacturing and retail) may have been a big factor why the PS3 didn't have twin HDMI. There are still many who see it is expensive now at £299 (and it's being sold at a loss).

There are more 1080p games on the PS3 but they're only 1080p in the sense that they output 1080 lines vertically. More often than not the horizontal resolution is less than the standard 1920 and instead is stretched or scaled accordingly. Thus true 1920x1080p is beyond the capabilities of the current consoles because they lack the memory and processing power to output all games at that resolution. If you want proper 1080p as standard then the PC is the only way to go at the moment.

siro, Eoin... you are not serious, are you? flanker22 gave you the answer, that game looks like a PS2 game upscaled. See the 720p and 1080p stills, it just looks horrible... WipeOut HD looks much better, but still has fairly simple geometry and textures.

Current consoles just can't do 1080p60 racing games, pity but true. No big deal, GT5 and Forza3 looking awesome on sub-1080p resolutions.