Those who have their hands on the Final Fantasy XIII demo, which came bundled with the special edition Advent Children Complete, have been reporting an interesting aspect of the game. It runs in 1080p! Most current generation games run in 720p, and if you have a PS3 hooked up to a 1080p TV, then in the settings you can check off all the resolutions so that the PS3 auto detects what the game wants to be output as. If all the check boxes are selected, then a game like Uncharted will run at its native resolution of 720p, while a game like Super Stardust HD will run at 1080p.
Now that most of the technical jargon has been explained, here is what is interesting about the FF XIII demo. The PS3 chooses to run the demo at 1080p, which means that the supported resolutions for FF XIII are 480p/720p/1080i/1080p. Having said this, just because the game supports a 1080p resolution, does not mean that it is running at a native 1080p, but rather an upscaled 720p. Metal Gear Solid 4 is an example of this (though the game actually ran at 1024x768 and then upscaled). However, there are some aspects of the demo which appear to be running at a native 1080p, not an upscaled 720p.
Take these screenshots for example:
1080p Screenshot
Upscaled Screenshot
The first screenshot is a captured screenshot from the opening cut scene of the demo, and the second is the same screenshot, downscaled to 720p, then upscaled back to 1080p (using a powerful upscaling algorithm). There is noticable detail lost in the upscaled version, which suggests that the original was not upscaled, and is actually running at a native 1080p. The rest of the game appears to run at 720p, which includes the shorter in game cutscenes, and gameplay.
So we are going to be able to play a game with beautiful cut scenes, but at what cost? Well with higher resolutions, higher video bit rates are needed, and based on that screen shot there is very little compression. Therefore, the amount of storage required for all the cut scenes in the game could add up very quickly. For example, most Final Fantasy games have close to 1 hour of cgi videos, so assuming a similar trend for Final Fantasy XIII, even at a lower video bit rate of 20 Mb/s, the storage required is around 9GB. The CGI cutscenes alone will take up almost 1/5 of a dual layer blu ray disc, or a full DVD. This amount is not even counting all the other videos that will not be cgi, but rather, the game's engine quality graphics with extra filters and such. So while this might not affect the game's end result on the PS3, it does add to the question “How many discs will the 360 version be on?” which Square Enix has so far refused to answer.
What does this all mean? Well simply put, we are going to be getting some amazing eye candy when playing Final Fantasy XIII.
http://www.ff-xiii.net/index.php?page=news&p=more&numb=376
Those screen shots were beautiful wow, gimme FFXIII!
