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MS drops 360's 720p requirement News
Xbox 360 News by Robert Purchese
Black Rock's technical director David Jefferies has revealed that the 720p requirement for Xbox 360 games has been "retired" by Microsoft.
"Now we are free to make the trade-off between resolution and image quality as we see fit," wrote Jefferies as a guest contributor for Develop.
The reason, he said, is down to TV manufacturers such as Sony and Samsung equipping 720p LCD TVs with resolutions of 1366x768 rather than true 1280x720. The image, therefore, is upscaled using TV hardware, however good or bad it may be.
This is out of the developer's control and negates any effort expended trying to support that resolution in the first place. So, rather than drop features to reach 720p, Jefferies and Black Rock can now include extra anti-aliasing and graphical touches by using a slightly lower resolution.
Jefferies thanked Halo 3 for getting the ball rolling, after Microsoft "waived" its 1152x640 resolution.
But don't panic; Jefferies said this will become "less of an issue" as more and more tellies ship with full 1080p.
Black Rock made brilliant off-road racer Pure, and is currently hard at work on urban driving game Split/Second for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.
Our gamepages below can - like Craig David - fill you in.
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MasterNameless
03/09/09 @ 08:41
+7
"RE: this resolution statement. I guess everyone should pretty much agree on not caring about resolution as long as game looks good and plays good."
You would hope so wouldn't you. Logic doesn't often apply in these comments section though unfortunately, especially after Halo 3 gets a mention. :/ |
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+2
TBH I'd rather they'd have foregone the HD thing completely now, and stuck with their original aim of delivering Pixar-level detail and animation in SD, instead of a slight detail improvement to account for the massive increase in resolution. But it's happened, and SD games, unless upscaled well, all look like absolute wank on HD screens (well, all SD content does), so I'd rather they at least stuck to the standard to stop everything looking like a fuzzy mess.
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Psychotext
03/09/09 @ 08:44
+3
"Was this requirement actually enforced?"
Not really. You could always get out of it if you played nice with MS. I guess they've decided to do this now to level the playing field with Sony (who never had such a requirement)... no idea why they'd change it now though. |
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insane_cobra
03/09/09 @ 08:48
+2
It's only been a requirement on paper anyway, there have already been many sub-HD games on both "HD" platforms.
Personally, I don't care. According to research, screen resolution is only, what, the fourth or fifth on the list of things affecting your perception of image quality? |
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+2
Thanks Psycho, that's what I thought too...
To be honest, I'd be more interested for enforcing requirements towards the quality of the output, like no screen tearing due to disabled V-Sync (give us the option to decide whether the performance hit is worth it) or screen resolution not matching the game resolution (I'm looking at you Resident Evil) than this. |
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zoufouille
03/09/09 @ 09:14
0
Halo, the biggest microsoft license, isn't even 720p, so what's with this announcement?
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TheStylishHobo
03/09/09 @ 09:15
+3
Was there any good reason for them making TVs with 768p instead of 720p?
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KillerMonkey
03/09/09 @ 09:18
0
"Was there any good reason for them making TVs with 768p instead of 720p?"
For selling them to people who think more is automatically better? |
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altitude2k
03/09/09 @ 09:20
+1
@TheStylishHobo: it's very likely something to do with how divisible the numbers are which makes them either easier to manufacture or easier to support. If you divide 768 by 2, then by 2, then by 2 etc. you end up with it reducing to 3. This doesn't happen with 720.
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hiddenranbir
03/09/09 @ 09:33
+2
Because most people are just regular TV users, not console gamers. Until more people adopt the HD services from their television providers then they're unlikely to get a HDTV. Also, there just aren't that many HD channels to really encourage the majority to make the switch.
I also think a TV is one of things that people don't replace until it ends up broken. How we do, anyway. |
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Optimaximal
03/09/09 @ 09:35
+3
This sounds less like an announcement and more an excuse! Current console hardware has never proved capable of both the resolution AND detail promised by the 'HD' moniker, so why MS continued to enforce it was lame.
It's simple, if you want the best looking stuff in gaming today, you need to slap a decent amount of money on a top-range PC. I'm a PC gamer exclusively and even I can admit you need to spend more than £500 to get a decent gaming PC. |
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-1
"i bet a lot of 360 owners are playing in standard def on a HD tv as they dont have the tech knowledge like the more savvy among us."
I haven't seen a non-HDTV flat-screen for sale in a while and I think you'd have to be pretty tech savvy to get a decent CRT these days, since you'd probably be buying secondhand. The reason that HDTV owners are a minority isn't that the TVs are too expensive or that they don't understand the offering; they just don't care. |
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+11
The reason that HDTV owners are a minority isn't that the TVs are too expensive or that they don't understand the offering; they just don't care.
They're probably not even in a minority. The stat was something like more than half Gears 2 players play in SD. I wonder how many of those SD players are playing on HD LCDs using composite cables and think that they're playing in HD. Just after 360 came out a mate of mine told me he'd got a 360 Core system and was telling me how much better Halo 2 looked in HD. I asked him if he'd got the component or VGA cable and he said he was just using the yellow, red and white cables that came with it. I slapped him around the face.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 03/09/09 @ 10:40
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Mentalist(air)
03/09/09 @ 09:44
+1
Different rules apply to 1st party and 3rd party devs.
No, the same rules apply to everyone. But if you apply for permission, you can get some of them waived, just as Squeenix got the no-install-to-hard-disk rule waived for Final Fantasy XI, so PGR3, Halo3, COD4 and others got the 720p rule waived. The time must have come that so many titles were requesting a waiver for that rule that they just decided to stop bothering. |
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+6
I know a few people playing 360's on SD TV's, not through not knowing about stuff, but for a variety of reasons. Some just wanted to get a new console on the cheap, plumped for a 360 as its cheap, getting an HDTV adds on cost. I've got a mate who swears by a quality CRT as he can't stand LCDs (which from a purist point of view is fair enough, proper blacks, proper motion, also no upgrading of TV just for gaming).
We're still in the transition to HD, people are starting to get it and buy into it though. What we certainly DON'T need is to have 3D thrust upon us. Oh. |
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MasterNameless
03/09/09 @ 09:45
+3
@Zomoniac
My friend did exactly the same thing, he also received a slap. Idiot. |
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-3
I have to say that with my set it's quite obvious when things are up scaled from 720p to 1080p on my 360 I know that when released virtura tennis when meant to be the first native 1080p game on the 360 but I don't know of many else. As for HDTV I would love sky HD but it's a rip off one of the selling points when I got my tv was built in freesat at least I get to watch champions league in HD and the odd film on BBC HD but thats it. I agree not many people are going to make the switch until it is better value for money with greater choice my parents got sky digital within weeks of coming out (year 2000 I think it was) and there was no lack of channels when that launched just reflects how much of a rip sky HD is surely
Rant Over |
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0
Didn't Samsung make an HD CRT at one point? What happened to that? I'd love a CRT, I have 3 great HDTVs, and the 360/PS3/Blu-Rays etc look incredible, but every time I drag out the Wii or DC or other retro console I'm invariably horrified by how bad everything looks on the LCD. I just don't have enough room to accomodate one :(
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0
I play HD games on a (very nice) Dell monitor on PS3 and while 720p suff looks amazing, when the resolution drops too much lower it starts looking like shit. GTAIV is the worst culprit I can think of. This is a step backwards, I'd rather they stuck to a common 720p standard; and it affects me indirectly as developers making games for both systems now have less pressure to aim for 720p.
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0
"Didn't Samsung make an HD CRT at one point? "
Yes they did...it was a 32inch for £400 about 3 yrs ago and my local Comet had it in stock, it was also a 'slim' CRT about a third slimmer than a regular CRT. It looked very nice, although there were rumours on AV forums that it was quite a poorly made set.... LCD's suck for retro gaming..... |
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0
@Mentalist(air)
You're right, it should apply equally to everyone, but in reality it sadly doesn't. 1st party devs have a much easy time getting stuff waived than a 3rd party studio. There are exceptions to the rule, like you said COD4 and FFXI, but only when the game is considered to be a big seller.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 03/09/09 @ 11:23
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0
Who cares if you WERE "gauranteed" 720p?!?
I doubt you could even tell the difference unless someone on a website told you it wasnt running at "proper" 720p. As for 1080p.. The memory/bandwidth requirements for doing 1080p can severly limit developers.. Do you make the textures larger to look good at higher resolutions - at the expense of effects? A full screen render target at that resolution is going to set you back 8 meg alone... In fact, just taking into account front buffer/back buffer and depth buffer.. that's 24 meg gone straight away. Hmmm.. Actually, maybe this isnt the place for tech talk. |
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designerheadache
03/09/09 @ 10:47
+3
Get yourself a Samsung LED telly, they do the propper range of blacks and looks bootiful for HD telly/gaming :P
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+3
You can easily see the difference between a game at 1280x720; and something like the 1140x630 that GTAIV runs on PS3. There's less detail, and as there's more upscaling going on worse aliasing. I've played Halo 3 and that's another one that suffers from a lower resolution. PC gamers have been able to see the effect of immediate resolution changes for years.
Whether you prefer to keep the resolution up, or trade it for extra anti aliasing and a few other effects is a matter of taste; I much prefer the former. |
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Der_tolle_Emil
03/09/09 @ 11:12
+3
Spotting the difference in resolution is really easy - if you play a lot on the PC. If you have a PC and try out the various resolutions in a game you immediately see the difference and thus know what exactly will look different using a higher resolution. Once you know what difference the resolution can make you'll notice games running in a lower resolution quite easily.
I'm not saying that it is important that a game runs in 720p but all the people who claim that you can't see the difference are simply wrong. You can; Whether the difference in image quality matters or not is an entirely different discussion though. |
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chessboxer
03/09/09 @ 11:20
0
I'm a PC gamer exclusively and even I can admit you need to spend more than £500 to get a decent gaming PC
I spent more than that on my CPU, but I use it for more than just gaming. |
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frombrosis
03/09/09 @ 11:25
-3
Hrm, anyone else think this will make the comparisons between xbox360 and the PS3 closer now??
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0
@StylishHobo - all 720p LCDs are 1366x768 - because it's a standard LCD size used for regular PC monitors. Nobody makes 1280x720 monitors. A better question would have been, why set the lesser HD standard at 720p instead of 768p to fit with the manufacturing standard. I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason for that too of course. Heck, a lot of 720p plasmas are only 1024x540 screens and downscale the 720p image!
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OldK1ngCole
03/09/09 @ 12:19
+2
"If you have a PC and try out the various resolutions in a game you immediately see the difference and thus know what exactly will look different using a higher resolution."
Also try changing the output setting on your Xbox to 480p then back to 720p/1080i. If people can't see the difference maybe they need a trip to the opticians. But as you say image quality is a completey different thing. Maybe they've done this to get more Devs to lock v-sync (which does cause a performance hit) thus reducing screen tear and improving image quality.
Edited 3 times,
most recently on 03/09/09 @ 13:25
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+1
When my 720p HDTV went for repair and i had to get out my old SD telly it was awful trying to play 360 games. Far Cry 2 was unplayable, the tv couldn't handle all the detail. I'm so glad I have a HDTV for my gaming, sod that PC gaming crap, hunched over a keyboard staring at a 20" monitor or feet up on the sofa with a 37" HDTV with fantastic gfx, kind of a no-brainer really.
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MasterNameless
03/09/09 @ 12:41
+2
@JahB
I have a funny feeling that Bazfrag was joking. The extra exclamation marks and full stops give it away a little. ;) |
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