HappySqurriel said:
I didn't know that rendering at a lower resolution and scaling to 1080p counted as 1080p ... I guess I can go out and buy an upscaler and attach it to my Wii and claim that Mario Galaxy is a 1080p game, and my upscaling DVD player is displaying images that are the same as Blu-Ray movies. |
Essentially, upscaling is the way the Xbox360 supports 1080. Sony went ahead and announced that the PS3 was the only console capable of 1080 resolution, and then MS did a firmware update and said, "hey, so do we." In reality, the Xbox360's firmware update allows for up-scaling to 1080, not "true" 1080 which I believe is hardware-related, not firmware/software related. The PS3 is the only system that does actual "true" 1080, but in a vast number of the early games, it wasn't used, but the PS3 had the ability to, shall we say, streamline those titles to look more 1080-ish.
But again, most HDTV's are only now getting to 1080--at the time the PS3 launched, however, I believe that pretty much only some of Sony's HDTV's actually did 1080 and everyone else played catch-up soon after. On top of which I believe that 720 is still the most commonly used HD resolution. I could be mistaken. To date, I don't think there are actually any Xbox360 games built for 1080 for the reason that it isn't a true hardware-based ability. Much of what Microsoft and Sony did with a lot of the 1080 mumbo-jumbo was spin-doctoring with an ironic lesson that maybe 720 is the way to go.
Feel free to come in with some other, newer facts if you have them, though, because some of what I'm going on might be dated information.
For instance, are there actually external hardware upscalers? I haven't heard of that. Probably need a firmware update from Nintendo to allow the use of such an object on the Wii. Or some hardcore hacking of the thing because I have serious doubts Nintendo would ever support such a thing. In theory, the Wii is capable of doing it's own upscaling to higher resolutions, but it would require a firmware update with the unfortunate side-effect that it would be way too taxing on the CPU thus making it pointless. The lesson for the Wii is, from what I've read, get a Plasma TV, jam the Wii into that 480 and just be happy it goes that far (apparently the Wii isn't too LCD TV-friendly on the visual side).







