New Thread idea: Wii games and the lack of 720p

So what if Blu-Ray and the hard drive allow more texture room in the Roms? You still need room in the RAM to actually show them off. That is why 1080p is not feasible for most games. Resolution needs RAM to be higher. The PS3 has only 512MB.

It's not that hard to put together. 

Tell your friend to get FullHD.

1)For the BR movies...theres a definite difference at 1080p.

2)There are some games that do 1080p and more coming.

3)Most FullHD TVs have really good upscaler chips...so you get upscaled 1080p no matter what.

 Blu-ray will just allow for more varied hi-res textures to be used in a game allowing for very different looking environments rather than having the same textures being re-used all the time.

Regarding old TVs people often mistakenly assume the lower resolution plays part in less severe aliasing issues, this is of course a complete misunderstanding of what's the true reason. Lower rendering resolutions cause more jaggies due to larger pixels, also a lower than intented for resolution can cause pixels to unexpectedly neighbour each other (more contrast than intended).

NTSC is often jokingly referred to as "Never The Same Color", basically old TVs aren't able to output the exact color like was originally intended, thus with modern HDTVs and monitors more contrast (as intended by developers) is visible. Also the shittier the connection you use to connect your console to a screen can play part in this. You will notice far lower image quality but also experience fewer aliasing issues.

I find the whole lesser-resolutions-are-acceptable arguments somewhat odd.

Perhaps it's because I own a 1080p TV and can clearly see the differences? Perhaps it's because when watching DVDs or playing 720p games the upscaling is very noticable for me, yet bizarrely not for others? Perhaps it's something else? I just don't know.

What I do know is that I want 1080p for all my games, if possible. If I compare Tekken 5 Online, Locoroco Cocorecho, PixelJunk Monsters, Super Stardust HD, or any 1080p game with most retail release games, the differences are immediately apparent. Ratchet and Clank looks great, but it is not anywhere near as sharp as the aforementioned. Similarly, Uncharted is amazing, but it is clearly upscaled, and does not look anywhere near as sharp or detailed as a 1080p game would. Personally, I'd prefer all games to be in 1080p, and I can't really understand why others wouldn't.

For example: when setting your PC up, do you set it at the lowest resoultion: say, 640x480? Erm, no, it looks crap, and you hardly fit anything on the screen. Neither would you be happy with 800x600, or even 1024x768. My laptop runs at 1440x900 (I have a pretty big screen for displaying art when on the move), and I'd still prefer a slightly larger resolution if I could get it. More details, more on the screen, more space.

By comparison, 720p is typically 1280x720, and 1080p is typically 1920x1080. I know what I'd rather have displaying on my screen.

Indeed, when I play old games that run in low resolutions, such as Baldur's Gate that runs at 800x600 (if I remember correctly), it looks like crap on my monitor: the resolution is too low, details are jaggy and lost, faces are blobs, etc.

Similarly, running upscaled games from 600p, or 720p, or, indeed, anything that isn't 1080p, loses detail. And for someone with a 1080p set, I'd really rather that wasn't the case.

Fortunately, it seems that some developers are slowly figuring out the PS3 and will be producing games at the detailed resolution I'd prefer to enjoy, rather than an upscaled fuzzy-fest that, whilst being utterly playable, looks crap when compared to the alternatives.

So, sure, if you're happy with lower resolutions, then I'm glad for you. Personally, I am not, and will always prefer games to run at the best resolution for my TV. That is expressly not 600p, or 720p, it is 1080p, and I sincerely hope more games use that resolution natively in future.

However, to answer the OP: The PS3 does run games in 1080p, there just aren't many of them. Indeed, many of the PSN titles run in that resolution, as do Blu Ray movies. Thus, a 1080p display is well worth the asking price, as many titles will look sharper, and movies will look far better. Further, many developers are apparently close to making 1080p run smoothly on the PS3, so the next generation of PS3 titles will also look better on a 1080p set.

Also, much like a monitor will show more on-screen when you up the display resolution, the PS3 displays more on-screen when you up its resolution to 1080p for a 1080p TV. For example: the XMB shows more, you see more when browsing the internet, and similar.

In short: 720p sets for PS3 are not worth it if you can afford a 1080p TV, so, if you can, buy 1080p every time. I have, and I'm hugely happy with what I have.

So you're saying that 512MB isn't enough to show a game in 1080p?  How come PC's have been playing in higher resolutions than this for years and using less than 512MB of RAM as well.  The bottom line is that the PS3 is capable of showing 1080p and I'm pretty sure the developers will find ways of storing textures and optimising the code to use less memory so that they can display in 1080p.

Anyway, there are already games out there that display in 1080p and it will be a task for the developers to come up with games that utilise this higher resolution while adhering to the evidently small amount of RAM contained in the PS3.

Only time will tell.

Perhaps PC games have had resolutions far higher than 1080p *technically*, but you just failed to understand what a 1080p game means, which PC sure enough didn't have.

A 1080p game means a game whose native or recommended resolution is 1080p.

There aren't even 1080p monitors, whose native resolution is 1920x1080, as monitors are 16:10.

Technically, there are no 1080p PC games precisely because most monitors are 16:10 anyway, and not 16:9.

And I don't know of any monitor that is big enough to have a native resolution of 1920x1080.

Strangely enough, games on PC can have higher resolutions, but there is no way to display this resolution on monitors, you have to buy a HDTV for that.

And keep in mind that 1080p just means 1080 lines of resolution for every frames, the horizontal resolution can be anything (960, 1920, ...) and it will still be 1080p.

So actually, PS3 has more 1080p  games than listed here. And I think XB360 has at least one (I think it has 3, but I'm not current on the games).

Finally, people that say there's no difference between 720p and 1080p are laughable. Especially when these same people bash the Wii for not being HD.

We are talking about a device which has very high bandwidth, so not all data needs to be in memory for levels like was for instance the case for Resistance 1 and Motorstorm, first generation PS3 games which only streamed 7.1 quality audio. Note they do still look great even while having all the data pre-loaded for each level!

This is where texture (and to lesser extend geometry) streaming comes into play. With Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction Insomniac's game engine matured further into a next gen gaming engine.

To quote Insomniac:

"Ratchet & Clank on the PS3 uses texture streaming which allows us to get about 150 MB of extra VRAM in each level. This allows for much higher resolution textures than we used in Resistance, as well as more texture variety."

Well the OP is asking why we don't have 1080p PS3 games.  I don't see how shams' post was irrelevant at all, it was directly on the topic.

Texture streaming has been around ever since graphics cards had their own memory.  It's simply a programming technique that can be applied to any hardware that has multiple levels of storage with their own size/speed tradeoffs.