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Pemalite said:
Mr Puggsly said:

I thought 720x480 was 16:9 because that's a fairly common widescreen resolution in gaming and video.nce in clarity. He was complaining about the transition of SD to HD. I think it was a very needed transition.

Nope. It is 854x480. 16:9 is the ratio or 409x920.

720x480 is a 4:3 ratio... Or 345,600 pixels.
The PAL variant is 720x576 which is 5:4 ratio or 414,720 pixels.

Feel free to throw some numbers into this calculator.
https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/math/ratios.php

Yes it was a very needed transition, but it wasn't as dramatic in terms of pixel count as 1080P to 4k or 720P to 1440P.

Mr Puggsly said:

Either way, I don't think we really had much 480p content actually doing 854x480 due to lack of support. Consoles capable of 480p were really doing 640x480, but games did go natively lower to reduce GPU load.

Depends on the console.
In general any console that is doing 480P widescreen is likely doing 854x480 scaling. I.E. Gamecube, Wii, Original Xbox, Xbox 360.
The rendering resolution may differ from that.

Older consoles like the Nintendo 64, Playstation 1, Sega Saturn will tend to fall towards 320x240 with some titles being 640x480.

Mr Puggsly said:

Even when games were doing widescreen they didn't really change to a 16:9 resolution. I believe they just made the picture narrow so it would look normal when stretched wide. A few PC games actually allowed this. You could run the game at 4:3 ratio like 800x600, but there would be option to make it widescreen. I think Halo 2 did this, it ran smoother than just using 1280x720 and still looked pretty good.

Again. Depends on console and the output methods used. That didn't really happen on the OG Xbox with component.

Mr Puggsly said:

I was comparing 640x480 to 1280x720p as these were the common resolutions in console gaming. Either way, even the sub HD games like CoD on 7th gen look much sharper than 480p.

They are sharper because of the output method being digital rather than analogue.

Mr Puggsly said:

Yeah, old games look much better on CRT TVs. It softens the pixels, old games also look pretty good on projector even though its HD.

Lots of aspects to consider like progressive vs interlace scanning as well.

Mr Puggsly said:

When I had my Wii connected I actually used component cables. I prefer games look pixelated versus muddy on standard RCA cables.

Component is generally better than composite due to the extra channels employed for the video.

The move to 480p to 720p was a very significant transition in regard to what our eyes can easily perceive. As was moving from 240p to 480p. The transition to 1080p and 4K wasn't as obvious, even if the number of pixels grew significantly.

From the little research I did, I'm pretty sure 6th gen consoles and Wii were primarily doing 640x480 natively in games, lower wasn't unusual to help performance. Although its worth noting the original Xbox had a surprising large list of games that did 720p.

Component is analog yet its at par wit HDMI. Also just by adjusting the resolution in PC games, its obvious that 480p and 720p are a world of difference.



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