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slowmo on 27 April 2012
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archbrix said:
slowmo said:
brendude13 said:
slowmo said:
brendude13 said:

The difference between 720p and 1080p for gaming is very noticable.


Not unless you're on about PC gaming as 99% of PS3 and 360 games are upscaled from 720p.  In that case it's more indicative of a poor scaler in your display rather than the resolution that's making the difference.  If you mean in future that the difference will be noticable then I conceed you're correct , provided games are rendered at 1080p natively.  I still think there is a market for 720p 3D gaming next gen though as I don't think displays are cheap enough to do 1080p 3D gaming widespread and the consoles will not have the horspeower either.

Oh yes, I meant PC gaming. My friend has a 1080p monitor and Battlefield 3 wasn't running so smoothly. He said he would drop the graphics settings but I told him to drop the resolution to 720p, I couldn't believe how much of a difference it made.


It's a double whammy when you drop the resolution because as soon as you go below a panels native resolution you always get the slightest "fuzz" on edges.  In the scenario you mentioned a 720p panel would actually probably look better and sharper than your friends 1080p TV at a 720p resolution, it would be sharper and reduce the perceived quality gap.  It's just another limit of the display technology.

Not sure if you're talking about something specifically related to PC game settings or not; I don't game on PC and am not schooled in this area.  But if you're referring to HDTV panels, that's not the case.  A good 1080p panel displays 720p every bit as good as a native 720p TV.  Of course, there can always be exceptions, but that's not a limit of the display technology, but rather the fault of a specific TV, and is definitely the exception, not the rule.

I heartily disagree, a good 720p panel can be better at displaying a 720p signal than a 1080p panel.  It's a simple fact that if a panel is sent a input signal at it'as native resolution with no scaling required to match the input to the display then it will be superior to one that is scaled.  The exception is of course 720p devices that have resolutions of 1366x768 for example because although they are 720p displays they are not Native 720p (which is 1280x720) so every input is actually scaled on these display devices.  The reson this occurs is if you have to display a 1280x720 signal into a 1920x1080 display there is no nice division of pixels so you will get pixel overlap that the TV's scaler will compensate for, it just isn't as sharp as viewed originally. 

There is a lot more to it and generally speaking you would be mad to not buy 1080p today given prices but it is incorrect to say a 1080p is better than a 720p TV for all circumstances because it just isn't true.  There are plenty of sites that explain this in far more detail, it's all to do with input signal resolution, digital scaling and output resolution.