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Forums - Sony Discussion - PS3 games and the lack of 1080p

NJ5 on 21 February 2008
ookaze said:
 

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.


For your information, I'm writing this post on a 24'' PC display running at 1920x1200. Regarding your rant about 16:10/16:9, it's irrelevant since I said "higher than 1080p".

 



My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957

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HappySqurriel on 21 February 2008
MikeB said:
HappySqurriel said:

For the most part, the difference between a PS2/XBox/Gamecube game and a PS3/XBox 360 game (in terms of graphics) is the advanced shader effects. In order to support the exact same shader effects at 1080p rather than 1080i/720p you need (roughly) twice the processing power in your shader hardware on your GPU.

Realistically, the PS3 and XBox 360 can not support 1080p at 60fps without a noticeable downgrade in the quality of effects which are being used; being that many of the best looking games on either platform are 720p at 30fps, by moving to 1080p at 60fps the games would probably have been reduced to similar effects as the Wii currently produces (on 480p at 30fps).


Yes with regard to the 360, but the PS3 is different due to its Cell processor. The Cell is very suitable for adding all kinds of effects, taking workload off the GPU and can even be used as additional pixel shaders.

The 360's ideal rendering resolution is 600p with AA as this perfectly fits the EDRAM memory (highest FPS output). If you want to do HDR, AA usually need to be dropped to achieve good framerates due to tiling.

The PS3 Cell/RSX approach is very different. The RSX is able to handle more shader ops per second than the Xenos, 96 (Xenos) vs 136 shader (RSX) ops per clock. In addition the Cell can do a lot of other stuff previously workload performed by graphic chips (freeing up workload for the GPU to do other stuff).

Some perspectives by a Heavenly Sword coder (Heavenly Sword is a 1st generation PS3 title which uses (NAO32) HDR, 8xAF and 4x MSAA at 720p):

http://pixelstoomany.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/why-gpus-are-not-so-good-at-post-processing-images/

Some additional comments from the devs behind Motorstorm:

"If by cooperative rendering you're referring to SPUs supporting the RSX, I strongly believe that this approach will become far more widespread. In addition to reducing the vertex load on the RSX through the use of culling and vertex pre-processing, this approach also provides an efficient mechanism to introduce procedural geometry.

Historically, CPUs have provided course grain scene culling using view frustums, occlusion planes, portal visibility and BSP-trees with GPUs left to perform fine grain rejection using guard band clipping, occlusion and backface culling. While such features improve fragment performance, they don't reduce vertex processing overhead.

The leap in performance provided by Cell gives us the bandwidth to significantly reduce RSX time spent processing vertices that don't contribute to the final scene. The favoured approach is to use SPUs to generate minimal scene/instance specific index and vertex buffers from compressed data."


You're an idiot that doesn't know what he is talking about (as usual) ...

You can off load clipping and culling processes to the CPU in order to render less polygons and to limit the overall strain on the GPU, but when it comes down to your shaders you are limited to the shader hardware that your GPU has. Both the XBox 360 and PS3 have 48 shader pipelines with the XBox 360 having a more flexable architecture.



MikeB on 21 February 2008
HappySqurriel said:
MikeB said:
HappySqurriel said:

For the most part, the difference between a PS2/XBox/Gamecube game and a PS3/XBox 360 game (in terms of graphics) is the advanced shader effects. In order to support the exact same shader effects at 1080p rather than 1080i/720p you need (roughly) twice the processing power in your shader hardware on your GPU.

Realistically, the PS3 and XBox 360 can not support 1080p at 60fps without a noticeable downgrade in the quality of effects which are being used; being that many of the best looking games on either platform are 720p at 30fps, by moving to 1080p at 60fps the games would probably have been reduced to similar effects as the Wii currently produces (on 480p at 30fps).


Yes with regard to the 360, but the PS3 is different due to its Cell processor. The Cell is very suitable for adding all kinds of effects, taking workload off the GPU and can even be used as additional pixel shaders.

The 360's ideal rendering resolution is 600p with AA as this perfectly fits the EDRAM memory (highest FPS output). If you want to do HDR, AA usually need to be dropped to achieve good framerates due to tiling.

The PS3 Cell/RSX approach is very different. The RSX is able to handle more shader ops per second than the Xenos, 96 (Xenos) vs 136 shader (RSX) ops per clock. In addition the Cell can do a lot of other stuff previously workload performed by graphic chips (freeing up workload for the GPU to do other stuff).

Some perspectives by a Heavenly Sword coder (Heavenly Sword is a 1st generation PS3 title which uses (NAO32) HDR, 8xAF and 4x MSAA at 720p):

http://pixelstoomany.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/why-gpus-are-not-so-good-at-post-processing-images/

Some additional comments from the devs behind Motorstorm:

"If by cooperative rendering you're referring to SPUs supporting the RSX, I strongly believe that this approach will become far more widespread. In addition to reducing the vertex load on the RSX through the use of culling and vertex pre-processing, this approach also provides an efficient mechanism to introduce procedural geometry.

Historically, CPUs have provided course grain scene culling using view frustums, occlusion planes, portal visibility and BSP-trees with GPUs left to perform fine grain rejection using guard band clipping, occlusion and backface culling. While such features improve fragment performance, they don't reduce vertex processing overhead.

The leap in performance provided by Cell gives us the bandwidth to significantly reduce RSX time spent processing vertices that don't contribute to the final scene. The favoured approach is to use SPUs to generate minimal scene/instance specific index and vertex buffers from compressed data."


You're an idiot that doesn't know what he is talking about (as usual) ...

You can off load clipping and culling processes to the CPU in order to render less polygons and to limit the overall strain on the GPU, but when it comes down to your shaders you are limited to the shader hardware that your GPU has. Both the XBox 360 and PS3 have 48 shader pipelines with the XBox 360 having a more flexable architecture.


You are wrong on all accounts, the RSX can pull off more shader ops per second. RSX + Cell crush the shader op potential compared to the Xenos.

An interesting raytracing demo using exclusively SPEs for rendering graphics including MSAA,

"IBM Interactive Ray-tracer (iRT) using three Sony Playstation3s (PS3) to render a model that is 75x more complex then those used in today's games. Ray-tracing is the rendering technique used by the film industry and is considered to complex for today's game systems. The code was written using IBM Cell SDK 2.0 on Linux. The iRT is totally scalable and only requires one Cell SPE to run. More PS3s = More SPEs = Higher client frame rates. All images are at least 720p 4x multi-sampled, with dynamic light sources, procedurally generated atmosphere, and dynamic shadows."

Sure they are using 3 PS3s for this, but PS3 games have the advantage of RSX to achieve more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34ya8

Please don't start name calling and especially when you're wrong you only shed a bad light upon yourself. You don't grasp what can and cannot be achieved.



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

Entroper on 21 February 2008
MikeB said:

You are wrong on all accounts, the RSX can pull off more shader ops per second. RSX + Cell crush the shader op potential compared to the Xenos.

(off topic raytracing)

Please don't start name calling and especially when you're wrong you only shed a bad light upon yourself. You don't grasp what can and cannot be achieved.


The difference between Xenos and RSX in raw specs is very slight.  The RSX has 24 pixel-only pipelines that do 2 vector ops per cycle, and it also has 8 vertex-only pipes that do one vector op per cycle.  The Xenos has 48 pixel-or-vertex pipelines that do one vector op per cycle.  The RSX has a 10% clock speed advantage.

 



http://entroper.no-ip.org

MikeB on 21 February 2008

@ Entroper

The difference between Xenos and RSX in raw specs is very slight. The RSX has 24 pixel-only pipelines that do 2 vector ops per cycle, and it also has 8 vertex-only pipes that do one vector op per cycle. The Xenos has 48 pixel-or-vertex pipelines that do one vector op per cycle.


Correct, but note with regard to those 48 ops vs 48 ops per cycle, on the Xenos you would perform vertex ops dragging down the potential pixel shader op figure. The more vertex ops you dedicate the lower this figure, in comparison with the PS3 there's no real top potential advantage to unified shaders.

But IMO the RSX and Cell should also be looked at together to reveal the PS3's true potential, the RSX was designed to work hand in hand with the Cell.



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

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epsilon72 on 21 February 2008

Somebody thinks that a game has to be 1080p "native" on PC? and that there are no monitors with a resolution greater than 1920x1080?


PC games do not have "native or recommended resolutions". Before I started playing PC games on my 1080p display (1920x1080 native), I was playing them on a smaller but higher resolution 1920x1200 (WUXGA) display.

...and 1080p means only 1,080 lines but an arbitrary number of columns???? No....1080p is only 1920x1080, or else you're not getting full 1080p.

Geez, no offense, but someone needs to verify their facts before they post.



Kytiara on 21 February 2008

@MikeB: I don't think talking about ray-tracing while also discussing modern video game graphic techniques is all that useful. Raytracing is just number crunching, which has already been shown is something the ps3 is good at. The whole point of vertex shaders, etc... is that ray-tracing isn't practical for real time apps like games (yet).



MikeB on 21 February 2008

@ epsilon72

...and 1080p means only 1,080 lines but an arbitrary number of columns???? No....1080p is only 1920x1080.


That's FullHD. 720x480 pixels and 640x480 pixels are both 480p resolutions.



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

MikeB on 21 February 2008
Kytiara said:
@MikeB: I don't think talking about ray-tracing while also discussing modern video game graphic techniques is all that useful. Raytracing is just number crunching, which has already been shown is something the ps3 is good at. The whole point of vertex shaders, etc... is that ray-tracing isn't practical for real time apps like games (yet).

The number crunching potential of the SPEs can be used for adding effects, I just used the Raytracing example to debunk what can and can't be done (as the RSX wasn't used in the rendering of graphics on Linux).



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

epsilon72 on 21 February 2008
MikeB said:
@ epsilon72

...and 1080p means only 1,080 lines but an arbitrary number of columns???? No....1080p is only 1920x1080.


That's FullHD. 720x480 pixels and 640x480 pixels are both 480p resolutions.

I do know what 480p is already...but I'm kind of confused as to what you are saying here.

"Full HD" and "True HD" are just marketing/sales terms used to describe 1080p, which is officially 1920x1080 pixels. 1280x720 is 720p (although some "720p native" tv's have the odd resolution of 1368x760). 640x480 is VGA (most of the time NTSC/480 is 720x480).

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