PS3 games and the lack of 1080p

[rocketpig]

Kyros said:
"1080p still looks better with 4xAA over 2xAA. Any PC gamer knows that."

Yeah but 1080p 2AA looks better than 720p 4AA so it is no sacrifice

"If hardware wasn't some kind of limitation, we would be seeing more true 1080p games than we do,"

Arg no we wouldn't. Todays consoles are perfectly able to display 1080p games (as year old PCs were able to display 1600*1200 games).
But of course the per-Pixel operations for the scene would have to be halfed against 720p (double the pixels).

So a developer has the options:
a) a game with twice the per-pixel operations (like shader effects etc.) for 720p or less per-pixel operations for 1080p. This has nothing to do with absolute power and would hold true for much more powerful systems. The ratio would still hold true.

Since the number of customers with 1080p displays is much smaller than the number of customers with 720p he would essentially give most customers a worse game if targeting 1080p.

Thats all, if there were more people with 1080p displays the situation would be different. Is this too complicated?

It is a sacrifice, whether you want to admit it or not. If given the ability, Polyphony would absolutely run 4xAA @ 1080p, just like PC developers have been over the past few years. It's a no-brainer that makes the game look better.

If 1080p is so overblown and isn't worth marketing to such a small demographic, why did Sony spend millions of dollars to convince potential PS3 owners that their new machine would run 1080p/60fps and then fail to deliver it with even their biggest blockbuster games?

For example... The garage in GT5p runs at true 1080p... The game itself runs at upscaled 1080p with 2xAA. The 720p version runs at 4xAA. So, the more hardware intensive the action is in the game, the less visual doo-dads you get with the game.

Sorry, your argument doesn't make sense. If 1080p is such a small market, why bother making 1080p games in the first place? And those games that are 1080p, why do they all contain a small environment (basketball games) or are far less hardware-intensive than every other game that sports a 720p resolution? If 1080p was so easy to do on this hardware, why are some games not even running at 720p, but instead are upscaled from 600p/620p? Shit, apparently even 720p is a tough task for some developers. Good developers, too.