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Forums - Gaming - I just realised if 720p is so horrible, how did we survive

Davman on 14 April 2014

Guys it depends on the distance you are playing the game,

believe it or not i see much bigger difference if i play 720p on my pc on 40 cm distance from 24"" inch monitor than playing in 3 meters distance from my 46" inch tv.



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Arkaign on 14 April 2014
Pemalite said:
ArnoldRimmer said:

Oh... I guess I really misread your OP then and need to apologize. I guess I prematurely considered this to be one of those countless "720p is enough, there's hardly any visual difference between 720p and 1080p" threads. Which I agree to, but consider the endless discussions about it to be pointless and annoying, because they're ignoring the actual problem.

I don't quite understand though why you claim both 720p and 1080p to be "crap", yet (as I remember) started this thread by pointing out how much worse it was just a few years or decades ago. If you consider 1080p to be "crap", you must consider N64, SNES or even NES graphics to be downright disgusting.


720P (HD) and 1080P (Full HD) *are* crap.
It's the kind of resolution you should expect out of a 5-10" mobile device or tablet, not a 60" panel, it's 2014, not sometime last century. :P

Once you go QHD (4x 720P) then you never look back, the PC has had those panels for YEARS.

Arkaign said:
If you have a garbage 1366x768 TV that they sell as 'HD', then it makes no difference whatsoever. And to be fair, there are a fair number of those out there sold over the past 6-7 years. They will be dying off and handed down constantly though. When you can get a decent LED 50" 1080p display for $499 at WalMart, it's hard to justify 720p existing.

DX12 is laughable as well, as the big gains are bringing draw calls to a lower level, skipping the CPU bottleneck that happens with the PC DX11 and older APIs. The problem is that the XB1 out of the box already had low-level draw calls enabled. DX12 will help PC, and help ports, but will not give the XB1 even a 5% GPU improvement in efficiency (and that's being exceptionally generous).


Here is the kicker.
Depending on Panel Size, Resolution and Viewing distance, there is actually NO discernable difference to the human eye after a certain point.

Thus by extension people who are playing an entire room away on a 27" 1080P panel would see zero difference between 720P and 1080P.


As for Direct X 12, you nor anyone else literally has no idea what is happening on that front as not enough information has been made available other than some high level and pretty sparse stuff, so don't pretend you know what is happening on that front just yet.


That's certainly true.

Testing reveals this :

http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/720p-vs-1080p-can-you-tell-the-difference-between-hdtv-resolutions/#!D5F1U

That reveals clearly what I've always seen to be the dominant answer I get (I love testing if people can tell the difference from the couch whether someone can tell 720 from 1080). If I put in a super blurry/artifacting crap Bluray (I have the terribad original Gladiator BD, lol), they can't. If I put on almost anything else, they can. Games are even easier because the information density is staggeringly lower than photographed content.

Notice the sweet spots on that scale. Basically people with 50-60" 1080p sets who sit 8' away are prime customers that can benefit from 1080 unless their eyes are failing. It goes without saying that people spending $500 on consoles tend not to be those that watch on a 27" set from 12'+ away (it takes all kinds in this world though, hah).

And yes, I agree that it took way, way, WAY too long to even get to 1080p, and that the resolution is laughable considering that someone's average iphone or galaxy will now have a higher resolution. Still, 1080p is roughly double the pixels of 720p, so at an equal size panel (let's say 60" @ ~7.5' for my average setup), 1080p content looks very notably superior. If I had at 60" 4K set and good 4K content, that would be another large improvement.

With prices like these : http://www.walmart.com/ip/Sceptre-X505BV-FMDR-50-1080p-60Hz-LED-HDTV/27678567

720p stuff should be dying off now, other than on the small displays, where they will probably linger a while can't believe they still sell them in 2014, but sadly they do). 720p is terrible value though.



Pemalite on 15 April 2014
Arkaign said:

And yes, I agree that it took way, way, WAY too long to even get to 1080p, and that the resolution is laughable considering that someone's average iphone or galaxy will now have a higher resolution. Still, 1080p is roughly double the pixels of 720p, so at an equal size panel (let's say 60" @ ~7.5' for my average setup), 1080p content looks very notably superior. If I had at 60" 4K set and good 4K content, that would be another large improvement.

That's an understatement.
John Carmack worked on the origional Quake on a 28" 1080P CRT computer monitor almost 20 years ago.

I'm happily running triple 1440P panels for my gaming needs and once we have single scaler-based IPS 4k monitors, will probably jump at three of those.




www.youtube.com/@Pemalite

GodOfPeace3 on 15 April 2014

The only reason Xbone isn't called Xbox 720 is because they knew after people saw how weak it was they would start calling it Xbox 720p.

That kinda says a lot about how bad 720p is. They didn't want to give fanboys extra ammo.



Pemalite on 15 April 2014
Skeetys said:
The only reason Xbone isn't called Xbox 720 is because they knew after people saw how weak it was they would start calling it Xbox 720p.

That kinda says a lot about how bad 720p is. They didn't want to give fanboys extra ammo.


Or perhaps the Wii proved that, hardware and graphics actually didn't matter, but the experience as a whole?

If everyone was so hung up on graphics, then we wouldn't have any console gamers left they would have jumped on the PC. ;)




www.youtube.com/@Pemalite