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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Will the next Nintendo handheld have a HD screen?

 

Do you think it will?

Yes 201 63.21%
 
No 117 36.79%
 
Total:318
sc94597 on 06 March 2015
SlimShadyDroid said:

Actually, smartphones have a PPI of over 500 these days (Samsung Galaxy S6/Note 4 come to mind). The thing about T.Vs is that the ditance between the viewer and T.V. is usually enough to make a low DPI a non-issue (though they are bringing out 4k and 8k).

Computer monitors and Laptops (looking at you, Macbook air, you ugly screen having peice of crap) have very low resolution screens, but they are bringing out higher res displays (UHD, QHD). 

I was talking about the worst cell-phones, because that is where Nintendo would look. 

No need to clarify the other stuff, I know it already, it isn't relevant to the discussion at hand though: whether or not screens within the required pixel density (QVGA) are still frequent enough so that costs of production don't increase.



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Teddy on 07 March 2015

Can't see it an it is not needed for such a small screen size it woild be wasted.

A 852x480, 16:9 would be good substitute for small screen size.



Teddy on 07 March 2015
sc94597 said:
HokageTenshi said:

lower resolution makes the programming much easier and faster so that...

time and manpower for development is the cost for every game...

How does it make the programming easier and faster? If I programmed a game and ran it at 480p on one platform and 720p on another, the cost of development doesn't change. In fact, we see this on open-platforms like Android, and IOS all the time. The games run at the resolution native to your screen (in fact you need third party apps to make them run less if you want.)  In fact, in many cases a higher resolution might LOWER development costs, because you don't have to think of ways to make up for low image quality, such as say text-scaling or showing a feature in a game that would otherwise be obscured by the low image quality.  The only thing a higher resolution output would affect is what GPU you need to put into the console to run the visuals you want to run at said resolution. That is a hardware cost, not a software one. The reason why development costs increased is that games became more complex to produce and software technique had to be discovered. This has only so much to do with resolution in as much that resolution was a burden before and limited how complex games could be and now it is large enough that it isn't. 


Because less pixels means design of graphics easier, when you used more pixels it makes design longer and you put in more detail, you woild know this if you have designed and programed a game, if you did then the 720p would just be a scale up by the hardware and therefore be blurry and blocky. Scale up an 8 bit game 320x200 pixel graphics to 1080p and see what I mean. Like if you make a standard television SD and display it on HD 1080p scaled up looks like rubbish. Anyway you would know this if you programmed games and graphics so I am calling BS on you. 8 bit games on Commodore 64 were often made by one person, today you need a team of people as big as any film and often a lot longer in developement. Design of graphics is a lot more and a team is needed of artists, it is not a case of doing an 8bit graphics and just allowing the hardware to somehow magically transform that 8bit pixel block into a fully rendered quality to be displayed in 1080p. I know this is an extreme example but that's how you will understand how wrong you are.



Materia-Blade on 07 March 2015
curl-6 said:
Alby_da_Wolf said:

Also a Ferrari or a Lamborghini give you more HP per dollar than a Rolls Royce, but a Rolls Royce isn't bought for its horsepower.

Horsepower is pretty important to gamers today though. Not of paramount importance, as 3DS demonstrates, but it does matter a lot, as Wii U vs PS4 shows.

Horsepower was never important to any gamer. Wii U vs Ps4 has nothing to do with horsepower.



sc94597 on 07 March 2015
Teddy said:
sc94597 said:

How does it make the programming easier and faster? If I programmed a game and ran it at 480p on one platform and 720p on another, the cost of development doesn't change. In fact, we see this on open-platforms like Android, and IOS all the time. The games run at the resolution native to your screen (in fact you need third party apps to make them run less if you want.)  In fact, in many cases a higher resolution might LOWER development costs, because you don't have to think of ways to make up for low image quality, such as say text-scaling or showing a feature in a game that would otherwise be obscured by the low image quality.  The only thing a higher resolution output would affect is what GPU you need to put into the console to run the visuals you want to run at said resolution. That is a hardware cost, not a software one. The reason why development costs increased is that games became more complex to produce and software technique had to be discovered. This has only so much to do with resolution in as much that resolution was a burden before and limited how complex games could be and now it is large enough that it isn't. 


Because less pixels means design of graphics easier, when you used more pixels it makes design longer and you put in more detail, you woild know this if you have designed and programed a game, if you did then the 720p would just be a scale up by the hardware and therefore be blurry and blocky. Scale up an 8 bit game 320x200 pixel graphics to 1080p and see what I mean. Like if you make a standard television SD and display it on HD 1080p scaled up looks like rubbish. Anyway you would know this if you programmed games and graphics so I am calling BS on you. 8 bit games on Commodore 64 were often made by one person, today you need a team of people as big as any film and often a lot longer in developement. Design of graphics is a lot more and a team is needed of artists, it is not a case of doing an 8bit graphics and just allowing the hardware to somehow magically transform that 8bit pixel block into a fully rendered quality to be displayed in 1080p. I know this is an extreme example but that's how you will understand how wrong you are.

I don't develop games, but I do program a lot (computational physics) and understand how it works. I call bullshit on you. Unless the texture resolution is very low, you  don't have to touch the original game, and all you have to do is put a line of code that increases the render resolution, if your engine doesn't already have that setting, not upscale it. Otherwise you would have to develop the same game for different resoution displays, if what you say were true. Or things like emulators that render games at higher resolutions would not exist. The only thing a higher resolution (by itself) makes harder is optimization, because more pixels <=> more hardware power. It isn't the pixel count that has made dev teams explode in size. It is the plethora of other advancements that come with a less limiting resolution. The higher the resolution, the more likely a developer needs better textures, more geometry, more assets to fill up the screen, etc to compete. On a handheld this isn't an issue, because games are expected to have low-medium budgets. 



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Teddy on 07 March 2015
sc94597 said:
Teddy said:
sc94597 said:

How does it make the programming easier and faster? If I programmed a game and ran it at 480p on one platform and 720p on another, the cost of development doesn't change. In fact, we see this on open-platforms like Android, and IOS all the time. The games run at the resolution native to your screen (in fact you need third party apps to make them run less if you want.)  In fact, in many cases a higher resolution might LOWER development costs, because you don't have to think of ways to make up for low image quality, such as say text-scaling or showing a feature in a game that would otherwise be obscured by the low image quality.  The only thing a higher resolution output would affect is what GPU you need to put into the console to run the visuals you want to run at said resolution. That is a hardware cost, not a software one. The reason why development costs increased is that games became more complex to produce and software technique had to be discovered. This has only so much to do with resolution in as much that resolution was a burden before and limited how complex games could be and now it is large enough that it isn't. 


Because less pixels means design of graphics easier, when you used more pixels it makes design longer and you put in more detail, you woild know this if you have designed and programed a game, if you did then the 720p would just be a scale up by the hardware and therefore be blurry and blocky. Scale up an 8 bit game 320x200 pixel graphics to 1080p and see what I mean. Like if you make a standard television SD and display it on HD 1080p scaled up looks like rubbish. Anyway you would know this if you programmed games and graphics so I am calling BS on you. 8 bit games on Commodore 64 were often made by one person, today you need a team of people as big as any film and often a lot longer in developement. Design of graphics is a lot more and a team is needed of artists, it is not a case of doing an 8bit graphics and just allowing the hardware to somehow magically transform that 8bit pixel block into a fully rendered quality to be displayed in 1080p. I know this is an extreme example but that's how you will understand how wrong you are.

I don't develop games, but I do program a lot (computational physics) and understand how it works. I call bullshit on you. Unless the texture resolution is very low, you  don't have to touch the original game, and all you have to do is put a line of code that increases the render resolution, if your engine doesn't already have that setting, not upscale it. Otherwise you would have to develop the same game for different resoution displays, if what you say were true. Or things like emulators that render games at higher resolutions would not exist. The only thing a higher resolution (by itself) makes harder is optimization, because more pixels <=> more hardware power. It isn't the pixel count that has made dev teams explode in size. It is the plethora of other advancements that come with a less limiting resolution. The higher the resolution, the more likely a developer needs better textures, more geometry, more assets to fill up the screen, etc to compete. On a handheld this isn't an issue, because games are expected to have low-medium budgets. 

You have no idea, you can scale down a game and it will look good if you designed it at high resolution but the other way around it will look rubbish, like if  you played a old game for an old console through virtual console. If you designed game at 420p it is not going to magically look good at 1080p. I am experience programmer since Commodore Vic20 and 64 days and PCs .You also masively contradicted youself on this post compared to your last lime you have no idea what you are talking about and even echoed some of my opinions about that in your own way while still maintaining your original premise. Games now take longer to develope and costs are higher costs. Your computational physics experience will not help you understand it thats why I called BS on your programming skills,   you'll have to accept that I and others you were arguing with are right with this. I doubt any of this will get through to you and be like talking to the brick wall so I'll call it quits believe what  you want. The only way I can explain this if you have a low resolution image of say the night sky with stars etc you are going to be able to put more detail in there beyond the pixel image ,you can use filters and algorithms etc to help but it is not going to put in more detailed resolution to your low res image sure the resolution of the image goes up as scaled but there is not any more detail, you can smooth with aa and stuff but no more detail.




sc94597 on 07 March 2015
Teddy said:

You have no idea, you can scale down a game and it will look good if you designed it at high resolution but the other way around it will look rubbish, like if  you played a old game for an old console through virtual console. If you designed game at 420p it is not going to magically look good at 1080p. I am experience programmer since Commodore Vic20 and 64 days and PCs .You also masively contradicted youself on this post compared to your last lime you have no idea what you are talking about. Games now take longer to develope and costs are higher costs. Your computational physics experience will not help you understand it thats why I called BS on your programming skills,   you'll have to accept that I and others you were arguing with are right with this.

No, when you play the game through virtual console it is upscaled. It isn't rendered at the higher resolution. You can still render the game at a higher resolution though : see emulation. You obviously don't know what you are talking about, Mr. Experienced Programmer, if you can't distinguish upscaling a game and rendering it at a different resolution. 

This is rendering a game designed for 480p at 1080p. It looks fine to me with its original assets. 

This is "stretching" or upscaling that game from 480p to 1080p.



Teddy on 07 March 2015
sc94597 said:
Teddy said:

You have no idea, you can scale down a game and it will look good if you designed it at high resolution but the other way around it will look rubbish, like if  you played a old game for an old console through virtual console. If you designed game at 420p it is not going to magically look good at 1080p. I am experience programmer since Commodore Vic20 and 64 days and PCs .You also masively contradicted youself on this post compared to your last lime you have no idea what you are talking about. Games now take longer to develope and costs are higher costs. Your computational physics experience will not help you understand it thats why I called BS on your programming skills,   you'll have to accept that I and others you were arguing with are right with this.

No, when you play the game through virtual console it is upscaled. It isn't rendered at the higher resolution. You can still render the game at a higher resolution though : see emulation. You obviously don't know what you are talking about, Mr. Experienced Programmer, if you can't distinguish upscaling a game and rendering it at a different resolution. 

This is rendering a game designed for 480p at 1080p. It looks fine to me with its original assets. 

This is "stretching" or upscaling that game from 480p to 1080p.

Neither of those are acceptable today well apart from  a few  and you edited my  post, they both still look rubbish. The top one is better but thats not the point we were getting and you shifted the goal post to make this point. The graphics are primitive but just sharper on the rendered 1080p. You'd have to design game with higher resolution textures and more detail today. There is very little detail. Take a picture of your city using lower resolution camera if you don't have the detail then you don't have much to work with.



sc94597 on 07 March 2015
Teddy said:

You'd have to design game with higher resolution textures and more detail today.

Which was the point I was making from the start. It isn't the higher pixel denisity that makes games more expensive, but the additional assets. If Nintendo chose to, they can use the same assets that they would've used on the 480p screen on a 720p screen, and just put in a better GPU that is capable. Handheld games don't require the same budgets as console games, and that is why you see games with a variety of budgets and differentiating asset levels on handhelds, whereas on a console they would lose to the competition for doing this. But, no, it isn't the higher pixel density which increases costs, it is the more expensive assets which that higher pixel density allows to be produced. 



Teddy on 07 March 2015
sc94597 said:
Teddy said:

You'd have to design game with higher resolution textures and more detail today.

Which was the point I was making from the start. It isn't the higher pixel denisity that makes games more expensive, but the additional assets. If Nintendo chose to, they can use the same assets that they would've used on the 480p screen on a 720p screen, and just put in a better GPU that is capable. Handheld games don't require the same budgets as console games, and that is why you see games with a variety of budgets and differentiating asset levels on handhelds, whereas on a console they would lose to the competition for doing this. But, no, it isn't the higher pixel density which increases costs, it is the more expensive assets which that higher pixel density allows to be produced. 

You said costs were the same, you clearly now have changed your mind and echoed what we were saying in the first place. The higher pixel resolution does make it more expensive because of designing the higher pixel textures. You are talking about pixel density as a just an output display not one which was designed for a game with a higher resolution. Understand my night sky analogy with many stars resolved you cant put in more detail if you don't have it in the first place by uppering the resolution display, you have to have the detail, this is why games have to be totally redesigned.