Isn't the whole point of AA so that lower resolution screens look better by blending some colors to eliminate the "jaggies". By that definition, higher resolution screens shouldn't have "jaggies"...

If anything needs 16xAA it's the Wii.

If things are jagged on a 720p or 1080p screen then it must mean that the render target is at a lower resolution and some scaler sucks and that is where the AA is needed.

I don't know the details of how gpu's work but it seems it makes sense that if you are going to have a hardware scaler, then after that you could have a hardware AA unit as well because it's only the final frame that needs the effect applied, not the original render at a lower resolution.

So if this is not the case and AA is applied before scaling and you are seeing jaggies on a 1080p or even 720p screen, then the joke is on 360 and PS3 owners for buying into the "HD era" marketing that MS and Sony have spun.

If there are (which I believe there are) HDTV's that do image filtering properly and apply AA and smart-stretching, then it's conceivable that a Wii title done in 540p could look better on a 1080p HDTV than a 360/PS3 title targeted at 1024x600 and poorly scaled to 1080p by the 360/PS3...not considering polygon counts ofcourse...but the Wii image could look less jagged... Unbelievable!

Last edited by Lou on 06-Apr-2007 at 04:39 PM.

@MikeB

Thanks for the stats. But doesn't change anything on my comment that Blu Ray player sales are huge over HD DVD but their impact on media doesn't track this ratio. As the total sales of both combined are less then 1% of DVD sales I think we have a few more years before a true winner is proven out.

@Lou
Try playing a game on your native LCD resolution for example on a pc. It will look pretty jaggy, even though there is no downscaling or upscaling that has to be done. It is of course worse in lower resolutions though.

You cannot compare current generation graphics with lets say a photo or a video. Anti alias is used because CGI is not yet perfect and anti alias is a function to make some cgi artifacts less apparent.

@MikeB

Quote:

A while ago on my request you promised me to scan (together with others) the PS3 threads (as you banned me initially for week, more so than anyone ever received for his first abuse report, although IMO it was fake as my message was within a PS3 thread regarding the PS3 and the staff stated they wanted to keep the amount of PS3 threads to a minimum, so my message wasn't off topic like you claimed) and provide me examples on what you had trouble with in my messages. After a week or so I received nothing, you again promising me to send the quotes/messages in question to me, time passed, times passed, nothing. And now I have to get those messages from you in public, idiotic why did you not PM me like you promised?

I have not forgotten, I said that it would take time to scan through all these PS3-threads.
(They are quite huge).

I'm sorry for keeping you waiting, sometimes things takes time, and as it is, I am involved in three different websites, try to divide my time equally amongst them, and sometimes there just isn't enough time to do everything fast enough .

_________________
Site admins are people too..pooff!

@Lou

Quote:

Isn't the whole point of AA so that lower resolution screens look better by blending some colors to eliminate the "jaggies". By that definition, higher resolution screens shouldn't have "jaggies"...

Yes and no. AA will always make graphics look "smoother" regardless of resolution (at least the ones in use currently). As for the resolution drop it's only a relatively small drop from 720p, which is probably why they tried both and decided 600p with AA looked better than 720p - especially because the 360's scaler is quite good.

Quote:

If things are jagged on a 720p or 1080p screen then it must mean that the render target is at a lower resolution and some scaler sucks and that is where the AA is needed.

Not really. You can still see jaggies on a hi-def TV in 720p and 1080p in those resolutions. Of course as the resolution goes up, jaggies become less apparent, but they are still there.

Quote:

So if this is not the case and AA is applied before scaling and you are seeing jaggies on a 1080p or even 720p screen, then the joke is on 360 and PS3 owners for buying into the "HD era" marketing that MS and Sony have spun.

Actually it's just that jaggies are far more apparent on hi-def TVs, which is why AA is a good thing. I've played the 360 on an SDTV and while it looks fine, I just wouldn't want to swap.

Quote:

If there are (which I believe there are) HDTV's that do image filtering properly and apply AA and smart-stretching, then it's conceivable that a Wii title done in 540p could look better on a 1080p HDTV

Why do you think that a 480/576p Wii game would look better than a higher resolution 360/PS3 game from a technical perspective? Even if a non-AAed 1024*600 image is scaled it is still a higher resolution than the Wii game and thus less likely to be jagged.

Furthermore it's currently only the 360 that can do scaling as the PS3 is unable to scale games from e.g. 720p to 1080p.

Btw. I doubt many (if any) TVs do AA although they do lots of other clever stuff.

@tomazkid

Thanks and sorry that I mixed you up with Zerohero earlier within this thread, it has been a while and suddenly it's the same all over again with the same people involved as back then. The effort is much appreciated though, but considering your other efforts it may be better for AMiGR and Zerohero to seek out my most "damning" statements from those other threads, I am hopeful this won't reflect badly on me but if it does I am very interested if it does.

Though I know I can be persistant when I feel confident, I know I can be pushed to respond without mercy if constantly insulted, I know it may be hard for many people if I post counter evidences and / or perspectives completely the opposite of theirs, but I do think it helps put things into balance.

@BrianK

Quote:

Thanks for the stats.

You're welcome.

Quote:

As the total sales of both combined are less then 1% of DVD sales I think we have a few more years before a true winner is proven out.

I don't know exact percentages, but it does seem Blu-Ray enjoys faster consumer adoption than DVD had. Also Casino Royale (Blu-Ray) apparently did hit the Top10 general DVD ranks some while ago, currently it's the best sold high definition movie release with well over 100,000 copies sold in North America!

@MikeB
DVD players was even more expensive than blueray and hd-dvd when they came out from what i recall.

@MikeB

Yeah things currently look like they are somewhat in Blu-Ray's favor when it comes to HD movie formats. I did find one thing interesting though (and this may just be an anomaly, but the best-selling Blu-Ray and HD-DVD title on Amazon is currently BBC's Planet Earth Complete Series. The HD-DVD is placed 30th and the Blu-Ray is placed 49th.

This may just be a case of demographics, but I did find it odd in the midst of other things in BluRay's favor.

@Trezzer

Quote:

Lou Wrote Quote: If there are (which I believe there are) HDTV's that do image filtering properly and apply AA and smart-stretching, then it's conceivable that a Wii title done in 540p could look better on a 1080p HDTV Why do you think that a 480/576p Wii game would look better than a higher resolution 360/PS3 game from a technical perspective? Even if a non-AAed 1024*600 image is scaled it is still a higher resolution than the Wii game and thus less likely to be jagged. Furthermore it's currently only the 360 that can do scaling as the PS3 is unable to scale games from e.g. 720p to 1080p. Btw. I doubt many (if any) TVs do AA although they do lots of other clever stuff.

Here I was basing a TV's ability to easily scale a specific (540p) image to 1080p because that is an even multiple to go from 540p to 1080p vs. a poorly pre-scaled image from a 360/ps3 that was stretched from a 1024x600 render.

What I am saying is that some TV's do do these jobs for you and that it's more difficult when the scaling is not an even number.

There is a Wiki on this sort of scaling discussion. TV scaling technology causes these variances. Some 720p HDTV's are actually 1024x768 widescreen ratio instead of 1280x720 yet they advertise 720p/1080i. TV's have a mind of their own these days and if you can send it an image in it's native resolution or some whole-number divisible of it, then you will get the best results possible. This is why I say a 540p (x2) image will look better than a 600p (x1.8) image on a 1080p-capable HDTV...again assuming the HDTV has the right algorithms to enhance an image of a lower resolution.

@Lou
1024x768 is not a wide screen resolution.

@MikeB


Blu-Ray players surpassed HD DVD Players in sales via the PS3. Casino Royale did hit the top 10 for a week I believe. It seems that the majority of PS3 owners aren't buying Blu-Ray. Else we'd see 20:1 rates on the media as we do on the players. No doubt that the PS3 is having an impact.

This fall brings changes to BR and HDD. We'll start seeing lower priced players and player/recorders in computers starting to be more popular and press into the market making 2008 an even more interesting year in respect to the DVD replacement formats.

The other issue is HDTV inception rates. They are sure to grow but in the USA it's still the minority, a growing one, of the market that has a HD set which would make use of HD content. As the FCC pushes out analog signals for digital people will be further encouraged to buy a new HD set and will of course start eyeing up more HD media players. 2008 and 2009 will be interesting.

@Lou

Quote:

Here I was basing a TV's ability to easily scale a specific (540p) image to 1080p because that is an even multiple to go from 540p to 1080p vs. a poorly pre-scaled image from a 360/ps3 that was stretched from a 1024x600 render.

Ah, gotcha. The thing is, though, that it would only scale nicely to 1080p and not to 720p.

Another thing worth noting is that the built-in scaler in the 360 is not bad at all. If a game is rendered at 1024x600 it is only scaled internally in the console. The picture that is output is e.g. 1080p or 720p - it doesn't really matter.

You are of course right that multiples will always scale more nicely, but since this specific case was a launch title issue (and you'll see games rendered in either full 720p or 1080p with anti-aliasing today), the point is kind of moot.

I suspect, though, that if you were to see a game rendered at 540p and scaled on a 1080p display next to a 720p game scaled to run on a 1080p display (or scaled on a 1080p display) you'd walk away thinking that the 720p game looked better. Part of the reason is that while scaling in some ways deteriorate picture quality, it also adds a sort of anti-aliasing. When I tried my 360 on my mother's display I could not see the jaggies that were in some launch titles on it. The reason is that while the 360 output a 720p resolution (and her tv is sold as a 720p resolution that is 1080i capable) the actual display is 1366*768, so the tv scales too and in the process removes any jaggies that might otherwise be present.

Phantasy Star Universe, which was developed with PS2 as lowest common denominator, has an odd use of anti-aliasing, where things that are in the far distance are almost blurred going to anti-aliased in the medium distance and non-AAed close up. Here I could see a very distinct difference when I switched between 720p and 1080i - 1080i had less jaggies but they were still visible, so in the grand scheme of things the high resolutions do not fix these things by themselves although they do make jaggies less of an issue. When you don't use AA at all, however, it is still painfully obvious at times. This is less of an issue with "busy" visuals where things change around a lot, as you are less likely to notice, but it is noticeable with a lot of static imagery.

In other words... it's quite complex and while you may be right in some cases with the perfect combination of TVs, resolution and so on (although this is currently moot as the Wii is limited to 480p at the moment) this would only be the case with launch titles anyway. And often scaling will in fact improve rather than detract from the overall impression - less sharpness but less jaggies. Kind of like real life in a way (and in that sense you get additional detail on an HDTV while still getting the effect of the soft picture on SDTVs).

Last edited by Trezzer on 06-Apr-2007 at 06:47 PM.
Last edited by Trezzer on 06-Apr-2007 at 06:46 PM.

@Tomas

Quote:

1024x768 is not a wide screen resolution.

It is none the less true though - it's a fairly common resolution in smaller widescreen plasma tvs.

@Trezzer
The native res?

@Tomas

Yeah. I know it's weird but look at some plasma TV ads.

@Tomas

yeah, here's one:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2988015&CatId=386

@Lou
720p native?
Sounds like false advertising to me

@Lou

Quote:

yeah, here's one:

The specs are questionable in this case though.

If you look at the specs list it says 1024*768, but it also says: "HD-Grade 1366 (H) x 768 (V) pixel resolution" which after all is more normal and the supported resolutions are pretty normal for that kind of display. I tend to think it's actually 1366*768 and the 1024*768 is an error in this case.

@Trezzer

Quote:

Trezzer wrote: @Lou Quote: yeah, here's one: The specs are questionable in this case though. If you look at the specs list it says 1024*768, but it also says: "HD-Grade 1366 (H) x 768 (V) pixel resolution" which after all is more normal and the supported resolutions are pretty normal for that kind of display. I tend to think it's actually 1366*768 and the 1024*768 is an error in this case.

perhaps in the case but the "hd-grade" notation when referring to 1366x768 is questionalble as well...

1024x768 HDTV's are rarer now than 6 months ago. There were quite a few back then...