Tekken 6 PS3/360: The resolution game Comments by Richard Leadbetter

This article hurts my head.

Not a chance in the world that PS3 is going to get lower res...

The main problem with the PS3 is that the SPU's don't have access to the main memory. I know from a good source that even character animation is a difficult task because the animations information may not be larger then 256kb (kilobyte). Added to the lack of main memory access the PS3 also has the weakest GPU. A lot of standardly GPU tasks are off loaded to the Cell processor in order to keep up.

I hope that for the PS4 Sony will review the way the main memory is accessed as well as who will provide the GPU horsepower and total memory available to the software running on their system.

Maybe then we will finally be able to see some real HD games coming to the console market. Unfortunately at this time the PC is the only platform that really supports HD gaming across all games. Eventough the quality of the HD game is dependant on the amount of money the pc owner wishes to spend on his or her system.

i wonder why namco decided to go with the whole blurring thing.... especially since it's not something they could've just added for free, obviously.

Surprising... I really thought the Xbox 360 would trounce the PS3 version because of its AA advantage but the 360 doesn't have AA and the PS3 versions does! Who'd have thought, eh? :O

Motion-blurring in a game running at 60 fps seems pointless to me (as it does Richard Leadbetter) so I think I'll opt for the PS3 version anyway, not just because of the better image quality and lack of blurring but because it has a controller with a D-pad that is better suited to this game. Besides I've played all the previous instalments on the PS, why change now? ;)

I have been quite into this kind of thing and have googled quite a lot about image perception, 24 fps in films, 30 fps or 60 fps in videogames... After much reading there are some ideas quite important to know: First, is that the human eye can see up to 72 fps (that's been the considered "flicker free" resolution on CRT since the dawn of monitors). So why movies are 24fps and look good? The answer is that 24fps is good enough for movies but not for games.

Movies are filmed in 24fps and look good because of temporal aliasing (in non-engineering jargon, bluring). Each frame in a movie is not a perfect still capture of the image, it is a blured image that averages all that has been going on for 1/24 a second. Pause a DVD or Bluray in an action scene and behold of the blured arm that is about to hit the bad guys face. That bluring makes it easy for the brain to interpolate movement and understand the flow of the frames.

Computer graphics are generated in a rather "too perfect" way. They are sharp as hell and show no bluring at all. So, a game running at 30fps is producing 30 perfectly sharp images, thus making the brain have a much harder time when decoding fast movement (the ball in one frame is one place, the next frame it has moved 1/3 the screen... nothing in between). Try pausing a game in a fast moving scene, the image will be perfectly rendered with no blur to help the eye.

That explains why a 24fps filmed movie is smoother than a 30fps game. That is why 60fps games look better, as they are making it much easier for the brain to decode movement. Still, most articles say that the more fps are put into digitally generated images the better (all extra frames above 72fps make the eye gain natural bluring on the images, just like real life, and creating a better and smoother perception of movement).

And that explains why lately all devs are so concerned about effects such as bluring (a good blur seems to increases perceived framerate), depth of field (bluring objects that are not being focused) and antialiasing (better image quality and also softer, natural-looking images easier for the brain to decode).

The following article sums up a pretty good number of interesting points:
http://www.daniele.ch/school/30vs60/30vs...

Note: Actually the article goes against bluring in games and defends higher framerate, but it's rather old (talks about 3dfx as cutting edge...) and I've read other articles that say bluring is good. Current developers are also heavy into bluring, so it may depend on good implementation or different kinds of bluring. It's not an easy issue on any case :-)

looks better on ps3 even though the res is lower. the texture filtering is huge. there's still no excuse why both versions cant be 720p and 2xMSAA. just shitty devs if you ask me.

@Sl33py

ya Sony did make a few questionable decisions regarding their tech, but so did MS. CPU has to access memory through GPU bus? Either way these relatively low powered consoles still put out really good looking games like uncharted2, kz2, forza 3, gt5p etc.

It's two people fighting, how many polygons do you need to shift?

It's two people fighting, how many polygons do you need to shift?

It's two people fighting, how many polygons do you need to shift?

I'm actually quite surprised, too, Darren, especially when those same kind of graphics could be acheived on the 360 in less development time & money.

Don't know if this is revelant or not, but someone in that article says this...

"In terms of overall image quality across the two modes and two consoles, the PS3 gets the nod in "blur off" mode thanks to decent enough upscaling based on an anti-aliased image, while in default mode with the motion blur active, the 360's enhanced texture filtering gives clear image quality advantages."

What do you think?

What are the specs of the original Tekken 6 arcade machine by the way as the article oddly makes no mention of it? I'd have liked to have seen them compared with the console ports to see if any compromises have been made like, for example, was the original's resolution 720p?

Why a one-on-one fighter that runs at 60 fps cannot run at 720p with AA is a total mystery because the almost four year old DOA 4 on the 360 managed it as did the later Virtua Fighter 5 on the same platform. Tekken 6 certainly doesn't look any better than either of those although it's a fine-looking game in its own right. Maybe the engine Namco are using isn't all that?

I suppose ultimately you should just judge it on what it looks like and in that regard it looks decent. Would I have know it was sub-HD if I hadn't read Digital Foundry? In all honesty... probably not.

@UKGamer:
I'm actually not quite sure that Sony made those decisions willingly. Don't forget they were partnered with IBM and Toshiba on the Cell R&D. I think IBM got themselves a really good CPU for research and server solutions, hence the limited availability of memory on the SPU's. There is good reason why researchers love the PS3.

In my eyes, the Cell is not a CPU designed to 'do games', it's a processor to 'do calculations really fast'. I know games require a lot of floating point horse power, but not exclusively.

Also a big problem now is that the memory of the playstation 3 is divided in 'work' memory and 'video' memory, and there is no way around that setting.

In a perfect world the SPU's would have about twice as much direct access memory on them and full access to the whole main memory pool. As I said before, a better GPU solution and a bigger memory pool would really help as well. I hope Sony changes these things with the PS4. I suspect they will increase the Cell horse power by adding more SPU's on the Cell, I hope they will not limit their changes to only adding more SPU's.

@ukgamer

"Sony did make a few questionable decisions regarding their tech, but so did MS. CPU has to access memory through GPU bus?"

I think that was a deliberate and shrewd design decision by MS, their CPU had no on-board memory controller so they needed something to do the job, rather than have a separate chipset for it they got the Xenos GPU to handle it. The big bonus of this being the GPU has direct access to all main memory and they don't need two fixed pools of memory like the PS3.

DF could check the 50Hz SD Mode on a European Playstation.
Soul Calibur IV had a bad, stuttering 50Hz mode (the demo, at least).

I thought the PS3 version would be the obviously superior one due to arcade version being based on the same hardware. Seems the 360 handles PS3 ports very well!

need to know what resolution and visual features the arcade version had to compare it to the ps3 version.

People should note that just because the game ran on ps3 hardware in the arcade doesn't make it a ps3 optimized game.

To comment above-

Yeah but I'd have thought the PS3 version would still be easily the superior version due to sharing the same tech. Makes sense no? Games ported to the PS3 from 360 often look noticably worse.

No it doesn't necessarily make sense and its all down to how different the 2 systems. Your thinking is too simple (no offence)

@ 21

So basically what you're saying is though System 357 shares the same CPU, GPU and memory as the PS3, the 360 with it's totally diifferent CPU, GPU and memory allocation could produce the better looking version (due to a number of reasons)?

Interesting.....

yeah. If they make the game to run on the single PPC core in the cell for example. Porting to the 360 definitely would have the advantage since it has 3 of those power PC cores instead of the ps3s 1 and spus. A number of things can be going on. Who said the 360 version was the better version? What settings does the arcade tekken run at anyway?

system 357 specs

Namco System 357

Hardware : PS3 Based
CPU : Cell
CPU Notes : Microprocessor consisting of one 3.2 GHz PowerPC-based Power Processing Element (PPE) and six Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs).
A seventh runs in a special mode and is dedicated to aspects of the OS and security, and an eighth is disabled to improve production yields.
PlayStation 3’s Cell CPU achieves 204 GFLOPS single precision float and 15 GFLOPS double precision.
GPU : RSX
GPU Notes : Based on NVIDIA G70 (NV47) architecture. The GPU makes use of 256 MB GDDR3 RAM clocked at 700 MHz with an effective transmission rate of 1.4 GHz and up to 224 MB of the 3.2 GHz XDR main memory via the CPU (480 MB max)

Ram : 256MB Rambus XDR DRAM, clocked at CPU die speed.

---------just shitty devs if you ask me.

So true.Especially compared to KZ2 U2 and such like games.

Cross-platform games are unfair to PS3 owners,'cause the games could be better,the quality of Killzone 2/Uncharted 2 says so.

R500 has only poorest shader power, so it made limit up to NINJA GAIDEN2.
that was no shader.

360 has bandwidth problem of memory because Memory controller unit under the GPU,
and shared memory (UMA) architecture it clearly shows a problem when accessing CPU and GPU same time.

what? UMA memory architecture is more better??
it means "notebook PC(UMA) outshines discrete GPU system" ??
it's ignorance's bullshit.

so why PC games are not support notebook PCs??
it's strange.

PS3 Tekken 6 (Blur-Off, 2xAA):
1024x576 * 2 * (32/8 + 32/8) = 9 437 184 / 1 000 000 = approx 9.4Mb

Xbox 360 Tekken 6 (Blur-Off, no AA):
1365x768 * (32/8 + 32/8) = 8 386 560 / 1 000 000 = approx 8.4Mb

The PS3 setup is more demanding then the 360:s as we can see...