@minator
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That's only true if you blur everything, with AA you only need to blur edges, 3D chips have been capable of this for some time.

That was exactly my point! And blurring everything is definitely not a good option, since that decreases the quality of the image overall. This is why AA should be used IMO.

@Tomas

Good questions. The problem is where the resolution reduction is taking place (this is relative to the human eye). With a DVD film, even a much lower broadcast picture, the resolution is reduced (from real eye resolution) by the camera and the recording media.

With a DVD this is done with already filmed motion, the reduction blurs the colours and tones and then it is digitized (the same holds when the whole thing is digitized) effectively they are AA in the process of production. what you lose in this is detail, jaggies just don't come into it, there are no jaggies in reality to be filmed in the first place.

Digitally generated material is a different thing. Here the actual resolution is not infinite, but defined by the output mode. 1900x1200 is enough for it to seem infinite as far as the eye is concerned, but 480p does not give us a lot to play with.

Objects don't actually blend together in the real world, they are distinct. Computer generated objects have to be rendered likewise distinct and then placed one above the other.

A theoretical shape of a circle has to be made to fit the given resolution, it has to be jaggie no matter how high the resolution, it has to be painted within its borders that are made up of resolution pixels a given single unit. Jaggies are a by product of creating digital pictures. CGI deals with this by AA for a seamless blend between generated images and real film. This is also done because film (35mm) records such a great deal of detail that pixels can be seen if the projector is sharply focussed and someone gets close to the screen, blur and AA is quality assurance.

The question has always been a trade-off, how much resolution can be used and still produce other features like motion, shadows etc, etc, It can't be infinite as in real life, it is always a number.

The other element is the monitors themselves, over the years they have got better and better. However, only when around 1900x1200 has been achieved (plus steady pixel activation) does the problem of jaggies disappear - they are still there, unlike in a BlurRay film for instance - its just at the optimum viewing position they cannot be seen.

If we were generating CGI then we would AA it, but the processing is the price, getting real time, realistically render, high definition game play is just a little beyond current processes n- the very best CGI setups cannot render real time in the final resolution, rather they render at a much lower resolution and when it comes to integrating with film the rendering really takes its time, even with the very fast processors and huge amount of RAM available.

I don't know but maybe if you have enough money you can render real time CGI at final resolution now, but the thing would have to be a beast.

In game play you trade resolution for speed, or drop unnecessary processing like AA.

Whether PS3 has or does not have problems with processing 1080p games I do not know directly, I have no 1080p games and my so-called HDTV can't handle above a fairly poor 1080i.

You can't upscale properly a low res game without AA. The jaggies would become much more obvious. You need to be able to generate 3D at 1080p for any of this to be true, and of course it would rely on how well the game was designed to do this well anyhow.

I don't know if there is a design flaw in the PS3 that would stop high frame rates at 1080p pure generated images. If the thing works, there should be no jaggies that can be seen, it is pointless having AA for games at 1080p.

I can't talk beyond my knowledge and was careful not to attribute these abilities to the PS3, it is what it claims to be able to do, zoomed jaggies prove nothing, a 1900x1200 picture is a different thing (but how the hell you view this without zooming the picture would be complex (a precise zoom based on your monitors resolution to present it in its correct aspect ratio as a portion of the original resolution fitted to the screen you are looking at, provided you are sitting the correct distance from it - ie not too close - you should sit so that only the screen is visible to you), the edges just beyond vision - your brain compensates for black, so a little further back hardly interferes with visual immersion) .

If AA is not done then there will be jaggies, but the point is that at 1080p at least these will be invisible to game players. All I can say given the motion of games I have not been offended by the 720p games I have played on it, but I cannot vouch for how much blur may be part of the CR unit I have.

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Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

@Tomas

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The only way you can rid of the jaggies, is by blurring the image, which will impact other details negatively

For instance playing with the contrast levels of the HDTV may help considerably.

@MikeB

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For instance playing with the contrast levels of the HDTV may help considerably.

The reverse holds true as well, you can create the effect of jaggies even in analogue film by making the contrast go through the roof (if the monitor supports such excess). The analogue equivalent is not jaggies, but ill defined sludging of visual objects together.

Contrast can also make apparent jaggies in well AAed frames. Contrast effects the tonal value of pixels, AA works by mixing both tonal and colour values.

The advice you have given is fundamental as the wrong contrast values have a big effect on picture quality.

The other is beware of HDTV - the label does not always support what the HW can do.

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Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

@GregS
But anyways, i still think that AA is mainly used because CGI is just nowhere near photo realistic yet. A way to make a jagged figure appear more smoother because of blurring the edges that is jagged due to lack of polygons and so on. At least that is how i heard it works.
So afaik, it is not just the resolution it is about.

Last edited by Tomas on 07-Apr-2007 at 03:27 PM.

@Tomas
True enough, but some of things I have seen do amazing polygon generations.

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Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

@Tomas

Well, basically, a perfect edge does not exist in nature and CGI is all perfect edges sampled through a set matrix.

Last edited by AMiGR on 07-Apr-2007 at 03:33 PM.

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I have a 50" Smasung DLP screen. I sit 10 feet back.

If I can see jaggies in a 720p or 1080i screen within a game, it's because:

1) developers are lazy
2) even the PS3 and 360 don't have the muscle (be it storage and/or cpu/gpu power) to have every graphical element rendered in HD-level detail
3) lots of scaling is done upwards on the fly rather than down from a higher resolution

if a car on, let's use RR6/7 for example, looks great when it's just ahead for the player, because that's it's original base render, it may still look somewhat pixelated as the player's car passes it because not it's being displayed at a larger than ideal size

remember, textures are stretched over surfaces
all this bump-mapping, normal-mapping yadda yadda yadda is just attempts at making the stretching look less apparent and mostly only around the edges of the polygons...

when systems are powerful enough to not require textures, or do natural procedual synthesis in realtime then you will have life-like pictures...and this doesn't even take into account pure natural reflective light.

too much emphasis is going into textures and not enough into increasing polygon counts... more polygons = less jaggies with smaller textures but more textures over all...

the fact that these 1080p 360 and PS3 games have to support that resolution means that perhaps they didn't fully apply all the effects capable on a 720p display when most people won't see the difference in detail between 1080 and 720.

In the end, this hole debate is stupid. There is less than a 5% difference in total power between the PS3 and the 360. Visually, the difference is even MUCH less than that.

I have a question. Is Ridge Racer X and less fun or playable in 480i?

@MikeB

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According to the Consumer Electronics Association an estimated 12.5 million HDTVs were sold to U.S. consumers in 2006 (currently around 31 million HDTV households in total).

US population is ~300M. There is more then 1 TV per person the average US home has more TVs then people. At this rate HDTV currently makes up around 10% of all TVs. Again that'll grow.

@Lou

No. Without FSAA, jaggies *will* be visible at 1080p. On my PC I play games at 1680x1050 and that's on a smaller panel than those stupidly big HDTVs and without FSAA jaggies are there. I usually have 4x FSAA enabled. I can assure you that the engines I'm talking about all render at the target resolution, there's no scaling involved.

Quote:

all this bump-mapping, normal-mapping yadda yadda yadda is just attempts at making the stretching look less apparent and mostly only around the edges of the polygons...

Huh? Normal mapping makes surfaces appear to have far more polygons than they really have by replacing the normals of a surface with the normals of another far more complex one, what the hell does it have to do with hiding stretching? Also, on many modern games the textures are stupidly large and get scaled *down* not stretched up when wrapping a surface.

Last edited by AMiGR on 07-Apr-2007 at 04:44 PM.
Last edited by AMiGR on 07-Apr-2007 at 04:42 PM.

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@GregS

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So jaggies and no AA, may present some transitional problems, but it is the best possible solution for the midterm. Nothing is more processor intensive than AA (well that is an exaggeration but you know what I mean - why waste the processing on something that is not part of the future).

I agree that AA should be optional. But, no game on the PS3 has yet to use all of it's godlike processing power. Why not use AA and use some of that untapped potential? If a game is using 50% of the console it makes little sense to me not use 75% and remove jaggies w/ AA. It's not a waste if it wasn't going to be used anyway.

@BrianK

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US population is ~300M. There is more then 1 TV per person the average US home has more TVs then people. At this rate HDTV currently makes up around 10% of all TVs. Again that'll grow.

Note regarding HDTV usage in the US, HDTV has a higher penetration than that due to the average houshold consisting of more than one person (for instance husband, wife and children). About 1/4 of the people living in the US is living alone. We can assume no baby will own his or her own HDTV set, so I think such people and there are other minority examples which should be deducted from the US population figure with regard to HDTV usage.

Note that with the 31 million figure I metioned earlier, I already deducted double counts for households which own more than 1 HDTV set, else the figure would be up to 34 million.

@MikeB

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Note regarding HDTV usage in the US, HDTV has a higher penetration than that due to the average houshold consisting of more than one person (for instance husband, wife and children). About 1/4 of the people living in the US is living alone. We can assume no baby will own his or her own HDTV set, so I think such people and there are other minority examples which should be deducted from the US population figure with regard to HDTV usage

I'd have to find the exact figures but in the US I believe the numbers are about 4 people per household and about 5 TVs in a home. The TV # worked out to be about 1 TV count greater then the number of people in the home. Again that is averaged I have some friends with 0 TVs and some friends with a TV in every room including a screen built into the vanity and one in the garage, they're nuts.

While you may not think a baby would have their own HDTV set I agree but they likely would have their own SDTV. Heck my baby has his own A500 w/ Amiga monitor where his 8 month old face smiles w/ keybang.

@AMiGR

The whole point of HDTV 1900x1200 was to replace 35mm film based on the threshold of human perception of detail. A one pixel difference difference at this resolution is not physically visible.

Whatever you are seeing, at this resolution, is above a single pixel difference. Any form of rendering that claims to be rendering at this level should not produce more than a pixel difference between one object and another. You are looking at resolutions below the threshold, but not enough to make a major difference - it has to be the rendering if these things are obvious, I suggest the software is rendering at relatively low levels and then enlarging for display - then AA would make a really big difference.

I am not claiming that true 1:1 rendering for any console, or any game. 1900x1200 is just a biological threshold translated to an absolute number of dots arranged in a 16:9 ratio, that dissolves single pixel difference into a natural blur.

Having TVs and monitors at this level of resolution is the biggest step forward the electronic industry can make. It pins down an absolute limit beyond which further resolution is pointless. Having HW and SW that produces this level of resolution fidelity is another thing.

What can be squeezed out of fixed architectures like PS3 or Xbox by improved software to take full advantage of this resolution is beyond the limits of my knowledge. If I was a betting man however, my bet would be on a Cell processor hitting closer to the mark, but the overall difference would not be great.

Perhaps we will have to wait for a new box, but that won't be far off now. One thing is for certain, however the games look, a good robust OS running on either box will have no great trouble generating crisp and readable screens to a true HDTV monitor.

It has to be realized that being able to comfortably read newspaper print from a screen, reliably no matter what its actual dimensions is a foundation for the next technical revolution.

Getting OS4 onto PS3 is an open invitation to be on the beginning of this second (or third wave depending on how you count it) wave of development. The Xbox may be as good, but I see no foreign OS invitation there, only a hack.

The more true HDTVs are established in homes around the world, the more scope there is for electronic expansion and convergence. BrainK says 10% in the USA, 10% is huge (true HDTV will only be a fraction of that figure), its starting to happen folks.

We definitely need true 1080p games, that won't happen through our OS, but through the major console makers' models, that is the difference, I don't care at the moment what the games look like, it is what the next generation of games look like that matters, those that are going to be designed to exploit the HDTV advantage.

My view is that the HW difference between the Xbox and PS3 is minor, but that the HW flexibility to exploit the HDTV advantage to the max, between the two, is weighted to the PS3, only because of the yet to fully tapped Cell CPU.

Future dual or quadruple cores not withstanding, it is the internal division of labour that has the advantage, the division between a core and SPEs. Put in two Cells , or three. The unitization counts for more in the end.

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Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

@BrianK
You point is sound
Quote:

I agree that AA should be optional. But, no game on the PS3 has yet to use all of it's godlike processing power. Why not use AA and use some of that untapped potential? If a game is using 50% of the console it makes little sense to me not use 75% and remove jaggies w/ AA. It's not a waste if it wasn't going to be used anyway.

I kinda like the idea of forcing things along by removing a crutch. Force game makers to better exploit the HW potential - it's either brave or stupid.

I won't expect anything much to change for at least a year, but if the HW is actually capable and the software can really get it moving - that would be good - very good.

Sony has enough money to weather the storm (or rather outlast any calms). If they do it right, another if, PS Home is more than enough to get things moving sales-wise - that was a very smart move (the only smarter one would have had this fully functional by launch day - but my feeling is that everything about the HW was only nailed done fully in the production run that led to the launch.

I tend to believe that a one to one comparison at this stage advantages the more established brand. It is not just the PS3 is late and with a lot of quickly adapted titles, but the whole issue of exploiting Cell is hardly begun - only game developers can really push that to extremes, but they need time, hence it is my belief that some really improved games are yet to be seen on this platform, while on the Xbox we have seen just about all it can be expected to produce.

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Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

@GregS

Quote:

The whole point of HDTV 1900x1200 was to replace 35mm film based on the threshold of human perception of detail. A one pixel difference difference at this resolution is not physically visible.

Quote:

I am not claiming that true 1:1 rendering for any console, or any game. 1900x1200 is just a biological threshold translated to an absolute number of dots arranged in a 16:9 ratio, that dissolves single pixel difference into a natural blur.

Sorry, but that's very inaccurate. There is no "biological threshold" for the perception of pixels vs. natural blur that can be made solely based on x*y resolution. On sufficiently large screens, you would have no problems to spot single pixels. So you need to look at dpi instead and factor in viewing distance.
Personally, I really like jaggies (term is believed to come from Rescue on Fractalus btw.) I prefer 192x160 on a 15 year old 20" PAL TV.

@GregS

Quote:

The whole point of HDTV 1900x1200 was to replace 35mm film based on the threshold of human perception of detail. A one pixel difference difference at this resolution is not physically visible. Whatever you are seeing, at this resolution, is above a single pixel difference. Any form of rendering that claims to be rendering at this level should not produce more than a pixel difference between one object and another. You are looking at resolutions below the threshold, but not enough to make a major difference - it has to be the rendering if these things are obvious, I suggest the software is rendering at relatively low levels and then enlarging for display - then AA would make a really big difference.

A single pixel isn't but if you draw a line at this resolution, with no anti-aliasing, you will notice the steps, even there. That's precisely why all OSes nowadays have sub-pixel AA for fonts and why pretty much all GUI elements are anti-aliased.

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@hatschi

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I prefer 192x160 on a 15 year old 20" PAL TV.

If you were referring to Antic mode 15, wouldn't that be 160x192?

Quote from your wiki link:
Quote:

Apparently the aliens in the videogame were called Jaggis because the characters in the game environment, due to lower graphic resolutions of the Atari, were blocky and jagged.

I disagree.
I believe the aliens were done with player missle graphics, what we now call "sprites". They could have been done in higher resolution, but design of game elements based on the # of Atari color registers, was prolly the issue, forcing them to use the lower resolution pm graphics in that case.

#6

Last edited by number6 on 07-Apr-2007 at 07:31 PM.

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This posting, in its entirety, represents solely the perspective of the author.
*Secrecy has served us so well*

@Hatschi

Quote:

No Antic in the 2600, only Stella (must be one hell of a job to code for it!). Haven't upgraded to any "next generation" Atari computers/consoles yet. ;)

Argh, pressed edit instead of reply! Hatschi, please put your post back...


-AMIGR

Last edited by AMiGR on 07-Apr-2007 at 09:44 PM.
Last edited by AMiGR on 07-Apr-2007 at 09:44 PM.
Last edited by AMiGR on 07-Apr-2007 at 09:43 PM.

@GregS

Quote:

but the whole issue of exploiting Cell is hardly begun - only game developers can really push that to extremes, but they need time, hence it is my belief that some really improved games are yet to be seen on this platform, while on the Xbox we have seen just about all it can be expected to produce.

I agree that Cell utilisation has hardly begun but I don't agree that the 360 has hit it's limit. Getting something to run on the 360 is easier but in order to get the best out of it will be just as difficult - if not more so - than the PS3, that's going to take quite some time.

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Whyzzat?