Aug 14 / Ozymandias

1080p Meaningless this Generation

blu-ray, hd-dvd, home-theater, playstation-3

There’s been a lot of interest in the PS3 due to its stated 1080p output for both games and movies (via Blu-ray). What’s interesting is that a lot of folks don’t realize how meaningless 1080p actually is in this generation.

Let’s take games first. The PS3 has roughly the same pixel-pushing capabilities as the Xbox 360. Don’t need to take my word for it, it’ll be obvious soon enough over the next year. Even if this wasn’t the case, consider we now live in a multi-platform development world, and that the current sweet spot developers are targeting is 720p due to the extremely similar system specifications. Simply put, a developer who is planning to release their game for both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 will aim for a common attainable ground. In fact, I’ll stick my neck out and predict that that you won’t see any 1080″x” games for the PS3 this year.

Let’s move on to HD movies. Home Theater Magazine (recommended!) has a sister website, and I wanted to point you to a great blog post by Geoffrey Morrison discussing the topic. To quote:

“Movies and almost all TV shows are shot at 24 frames-per-second (either on film or on 24fps HD cameras). All TVs have a refresh rate of 60Hz. What this means is that the screen refreshes 60 times a second. In order to display something that is 24fps on something that is essentially 60fps, you need to make up, or create new frames. This is done using a method called 3:2 pulldown (or more accurately 2:3 pulldown). The first frame of film is doubled, the second frame of film is tripled, the third frame of film is doubled and so on, creating a 2,3,2,3,2,3,2 sequence. It basically looks like this: 1a,1b,2a,2b,2c,3a,3b,4a… Each number is the original film frame. This lovely piece of math allows the 24fps film to be converted to be displayed on 60Hz products (nearly every TV in the US, ever).
This can be done in a number of places. With DVDs, it was all done in the player. With HD DVD, it is done in the player to output 1080i. With Blu-ray, there are a few options. The first player, the Samsung, added the 3:2 to the signal, interlaced it, and then output that (1080i) or de-interlaced the same signal and output that (1080p). In this case, the only difference between 1080i and 1080p is where the de-interlacing is done. If you send 1080i, the TV de-interlaces it to 1080p. If you send your TV the 1080p signal, the player is de-interlacing the signal. As long as your TV is de-interlacing the 1080i correctly, then there is no difference. Check out this article for more info on that.”

Most modern HD displays (Plasmas, LCD, DLP, etc.) display content progressively, even if they first received an interlaced signal. Let me restate that: when you’re watching a 1080″x” signal on a modern HD display, you’re almost always watching a 1080p signal. The only difference is where the de-interlacing happens – but the displayed output is always 1080p. (Minor caveat is that there are rare TVs that don’t de-interlace correctly, as described in the link above. But this is very rare today.)

This is why I get hung up on the image encoding quality of HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray. That’s where you’re going to see a perceivable difference. As to games, 99% of PS3 titles will natively render at 720p; the few that come out with 1080″x” support are either going to be simple classic arcade ports that don’t need to render complex scenes (think the original Battlezone), or will give up a lot of in-game visual effects and simply won’t look very good (hence the poor showing of Gran Turismo “HD” at this past E3).

To sum up, don’t get sucked into all the 1080p hype. Just make sure you have a recent HDTV that de-interlaces 1080i signals correctly and you’ll be just fine.

Imitations

Ozzy, i love your article and a few people have been enlightened by it, keep the articles coming.
http://www.njiska.com Jason "Njiska" Westhaver

There’s one major problem with the PC fps comparisions and that’s ram. The PS3 has only 256 MB of graphics ram and 256 MB of System RAM. The average gaming PC has considerably more. If you want to do a comparision run F.E.A.R. or HL2 on a pc with only 256 MB of system RAM and a 256 MB graphics card. If you can get 30 or more fps at 1920×1080 at high quality or better, then you’re arguement will carry some weight.
The Swede

Jason:

You really cant make that argument about running HL2 on a PC with 256mb RAM. It would have been ok if the PC doesnt need to run windows, consuming both processing power and vast amounts of RAM, in the background. If you dont have a freshly installed version of windows it can easily eat up to 300MB of RAM when just running background threads.

Last time I checked the PS3 wont run windows in the background while playing games.
Bani

"If people are this lazy, why do most PC games still come on multiple-CDs instead of 1 DVD?"

Do you like play any PC games at all? You install the game, and if there are multiple CDs, you switch them in and out for the install ONLY. And most of us can afford to do full installations nowadays, because there is simply so much HDD space. So once you’re past the installation, you are done with the switching and most likely only need to keep your "Play CD" in.

But still I do agree with Blue-rays being a bad idea. I mean they could prevent piracy to a degree looking at the sheer price of a Blue-ray reader let alone a burner, and the price of the disk itself. I’m sure that the system itself would cost far less if they didn’t include the Blue-ray drive. Oh well, time will tell.
Bruce

Lord, a great next-gen game can certainly be made within the current storage limits of a DVD, no doubt about that, but equally, someone designing a game specifically with the available storage of a Blu-ray disk in mind is going to be able to create a game with a point of difference, and that point of difference is leveraging off what I call "next gen" technology -which is absent from the xbox 360 (out of the box).

The idea of having to swap disks is not an issue of laziness, it’s an issue of gamer-experience. For example, if you are watching a movie and then it stops and tells you to swap the disk, I’m not too lazy to do it, but at the same time it has degraded the movie experience. Even without the idea of disk-swapping, we all know that simply waiting for levels to load degrades the gaming experience, and that developers work hard to find the best compromise on load-times and load-frequencies for this very reason. Along those lines, I’m actually keen to know what the "speed performance" of a blu-ray disk on the PS3 is compared to a DVD on the 360. Actually, I have no idea where the bottle neck typcially lies during media load times but I would have thought it is an I/O issue rather than a CPU issue.

Although I argue the techinal superiority of the PS3 over the 360, I only do so because I believe it to be a rational fact. It’s also a fact that a system that is techincally superior will produce (all things being equal) a techinally better game. But this is far from the only factor involved, it also comes down to talent. A very obvious example is Halo. No matter how great the PS3 is, it won’t be running Halo 3.

I do fear (on the part of Sony) that they might have priced themself into a different market from their legions of PS2 fans, but gamers are a very dedicated bunch, and I suspect a large base of existing PS2 owners will stay loyal to Sony. If this is so, we can expect the game-makers to respond to that market penetration with games that the XBox 360 will struggle to compete with, at a purely techincal level (IMHO). Time will tell.
Bruce

I’ve just found a very interesting and seemingly well-informed article about blu-ray vs HD-DVD

By the sounds of it, if the xbox 360 had included a HD-DVD player as standard, they would have been in a very strong position:

http://www.projectorcentral.com/blu-ray_2.htm

Of special interest (to me) was the discussion that seems to suggest the encoding method (1080p vs 1080i) is vastly more important to picture quality then whether you are using a 1080i or 1080p enabled player.
David Doel

Lair for PS3 (from Factor 5) will be native 1080p, and its looking incredible. Explain that one.

http://blogs.ign.com/Matt-IGN/2006/08/15/
Simon

I don’t care about the 1080p argument any more because my 42" TV can accept a 1080p50/60 input and display it unfettered so whether or not I can tell the difference is no longer an issue for me.

What is important is the option to connect a PC up to this screen at this resolution and that DOES makes a huge difference. That alone makes it worth buying a 1080p television today.
Jesus

"No matter how great the PS3 is, it won’t be running Halo 3."

Too true, Bruce. Conversely you won’t see hardly any Japanese developed games on 360. It’s the same as PS2 vs. XBox, only the 360′s J-market penetration is even worse. I’ve said this many times over and over again, on numerous sites, but here goes again: Fans of Japanese-styled games are going to get a PS3. Fans of western-styled games(read FPS’s) are going to get a 360. Two totally different audiences for each system(of course Sony and MS won’t say this). Devil May Cry and Final Fantasy-esque games were a dime-a-dozen on PS2, just like Halos are a dime-a-dozen on Xbox.

To sum it up:

MS = Sam Fisher

Sony = Solid Snake

Note: I know Splinter Cell is multi-platform, but the analagy is meant to show the stylistice differences between two games of the same genre; one done with a western approach, the other with an eastern.
Truthteller

I think the constant FUD (and thats what it is) by Major Nelson and other MS employees is backfiring.

Its quite sad that MS employees have to resort to badmouthing competing products that they clearly know NOTHING about. Talk about desperate.
Trav

Sony supports its consoles for upwards of 10 years. You don’t think 1080p might be beneficial in 2016?

Microsoft, on the other hand, supported its console for 5 years and then totally dumped it for its new platform. This gives Microsoft the benefit of revamping its hardware significantly to reflect current technology adoption conditions, but it doesn’t mean that the approach is inherently better than Sony’s planning for the long haul.
Sion

I noticed some quite serious misunderstanding in your article and I feel I should point a few things out to you.

Quote:

[Movies and almost all TV shows are shot at 24 frames-per-second (either on film or on 24fps HD cameras). All TVs have a refresh rate of 60Hz. What this means is that the screen refreshes 60 times a second. In order to display something that is 24fps on something that is essentially 60fps, you need to make up, or create new frames. This is done using a method called 3:2 pulldown]

Actually, only film uses 24 frames per second. American black and white used 30fps and American colour televisions runs at 29.97fps.

European television runs at 25 frames per second.

European television sets refresh the screen 50 times per second, or more recently 100 times per second (100Hz scan).

I presume (although I am not certain) that American televisions refresh at 60 and 120Hz.

Bear in mind that European mains supply frequency is 50Hz, and that American mains supply runs at 60Hz.

3:2 pulldown has absolutely nothing to do with showing a 30fps or 25fps image on a 60/120Hz or 50/100Hz screen respectively.

It is actually the name given to the process of transferring 24fps Film into 29.97 fields (video frames) per second for transmission on American NTSC television.

The name comes from the process of (simplified for space) reducing the film speed by 0.1% (pulldown) and putting the first frame of the film on two fields of video, the second frame of film across three fields of video, the third frame across 2 fields etc etc.

I may not be exactly precise in the details, but I’m not a video engineer, I’m an audio engineer. However, sources such as video/audiophiles are almost always unreliable.

These are the kind of people who used to argue blind that colouring the edges of a CD with green marker pen made it sound “crisper”, and that the image from a blu-ray disc is somehow inferior to HD-DVD, irrespective of encoding method.

I would advise you to research your subject more thoroughly before posting quotes from dodgy sources in future, lest the internet become (even more) full of miss-information
Jesus

Pwned
Pedro

The only thing that’s meaningless is you’re dumb comments about 1080p, good thing I didn’t read the whole thing. Why would you say that a higher resolution is meaningless, beacause your lowly 360 doesn’t offer it. Do your comments make you feel better about the rushed piece of *** 360?

You have no idea what your talking about, go back and play with your lowly 720p 360.
sublime78

OMG, you can’t get through to the Sony fanboys. They are just gonna have to finally get a PS3 and be disapointed before they realize this isn’t all smoke and mirrors on the part of microsoft. Then again, Sony fanboys usually seem so GD stupid that no matter what the system looks like in action they will praise it as the best thing ever. I however can easily see that Sony has developed an expensive DVD player that has game capabilities, instead of being like Microsoft and making a GAME MACHINE that is meant for that purpose. Just the fact that 360 ram can be allocated any way it sees fit means more than anything else, especially compared to the "muddy" looking texture lacking PS3 games I’ve seen so far.

I mean seriously, use your freaking eyes people, Metal Gear Solid 4 looked okay, but just that… okay. So did every other game they showed. Killzone was nowhere to be seen, in other words they LIED to everyone by showing pre-rendered video to steal MS’s thunder and show that the "PS3 is superior". Well, mark my words, the PS3 is NOT superior, the only things making it promising are the fact that they have ripped off MS’s online service and Nintendo’s motion controller. Aside from that its a pathetic attempt to stay alive in a growing trend of american gamer’s choosing an american system and actual quality games. You fan boys can keep stroking sony’s wooha all you want but at the end of the day Blue Ray will die like the UMD did for movies and like Beta Max before it, the PS3 may sell tons of games but I promise you Wii and 360 owners will be playing BETTER GAMES and that’s what really matters. But keep hyping your damn PS3, you people killed jesus.

And for the record, I happily choose a Mac computer over a Windows PC ANY day of the week, and I LOVE my PSP. So I’m not either a fanboy or biased, I just know that the first Xbox gave us the best games of the generation and the 360 is well on its way to keep doing that. If games matter get a 360, if playing a soon to die DVD format means more… get a PS3.
Bruce

The fan-boy posts are definately a waste of time, and not worth reading except for the gross sort of novelty factor they provide. Somewhat like watching a car-crash in slow motion: Too horrible to bear but you just can’t take your eyes off of it.

But really, any claim that the PS3 is crap or lacks credibility as a games machine demonstrates unreasonable bias against the PS3, if nothing else.

I mean, you can’t say the PS3 won’t play good games, it hasn’t even been released yet!

What I will say is that it sounds like Blu-ray is seriously on the back-foot, which is bad news for Sony. They must be putting big hopes on the PS3 to help push the Blu-ray cause. It is certainly true to say the PS3 isn’t just a gaming machine.

BTW, I’m intrigued with the hand-controller which apparently can detect pitch and yaw (at the cost of having lost force-feed-back). I suspect this may add a whole new dimension to the gaming experience.
lemetre

bullshit to truth dictionary:

S-O-N-Y actual meaning: L-I-E-S

PS3 actual meaning: George Forman Grill + Bluray

nuff said!
philantr0py

Just taking note of what Brucesaid earlier: "For example, if you are watching a movie and then it stops and tells you to swap the disk, I’m not too lazy to do it, but at the same time it has degraded the movie experience."

How did the Goodfellas experience degrade because of flipping the disc?

If gears of war came on 4 discs I’ll happily buy it nonetheless, as disc-swapping or not, the fact still remains it’s a great game.
sharan

well i think that ps3 is about to lose its control of the industry not because, it has chose to back the wrong type of disk, but because of its price and timing. remember the xbox, it came out late, 2 powerful and far to expensive. everone who had waited for the xbox gave up hope and went and bought the ps2 (me for one of them), sales figures explain for themselves 80 million ps2 owners, 20 million xbox owners. but this time around xbox has looked at the strategy ps2 took and followed it, and it seems as if sony has followed what xbox did the first time around (expensive powerful and late. i am no fan boy of anyone i have skipped from nintendo (64) to the ps2 and now an xbox 360, i dont care about power, i just want something that i can play on once in a while that can keep me amused for a couple of hours, and paying £425 for that is just too much
PS3 Supporter

All I can say is, What a load of crap…
Geek Boy

> What a load of crap…

Powerful rhetoric.

The facts remain that if you have a 1080 TV that can deinterlace properly then a 1080p signal is just a really inefficient way to transmit data from a movie. Transmitting each entire frame two or three times is wasteful, and if your TV can deinterlace properly, unnecessary. Of course, transmitting each frame at 30 fps when 24 fps would be adequate is also wasteful, albeit not as much. More importantly, on a good TV the result is identical.

As for games, 1080p (as opposed to 1080i) is a genuine advantage if-and-only-if the game can run at 60 fps. Not bloody likely. Remember that the PS3 GPU is roughly as powerful as the Xbox 360 GPU*, so if a PS3 game tries to push 124 million pixels per second (1920x1080x60) then it will have to spend less time on each pixel, so they will not have as many details and effects. That’s the simple reality. That’s why Xbox 360 games target 720p. Fewer pixels than 1080, yes, but great looking pixels. Gran Turismo at E3 looked like a high-res PS2 game. Yippee.

* The PS3 GPU is estimated to have roughly the same calculation power, but because it lacks EDRAM it can easily become memory bandwidth bound, especially at high resolutions or when doing many layers of rendering.
Geek Boy

> Actually, only film uses 24 frames per second.

> American black and white used 30fps and American

> colour televisions runs at 29.97fps.

You are correct that these are the refresh rates for TV. However, the reality is that almost all TV is actually shot at 24 fps, then broadcast at the appropriate rate. Do some research and you will see that this is true.

Given that most people never notice that their favorite TV programs are running at 24 fps I think you have just proved Ozymandias’ point!

See chapter five of this article for one reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinematography

There are more references out there proving that most TV is shot on film at 24 fps–take a look.
Sion

In reply to geekboy

Quote:

"You are correct that these are the refresh rates for TV. However, the reality is that almost all TV is actually shot at 24 fps, then broadcast at the appropriate rate. Do some research and you will see that this is true."

No, unfortunately you are mistaken. The refresh rate, as I stated is 50Hz or 100Hz european, 60Hz (or possibly 120Hz) American

I know for a fact that television shows in the UK are shot at 25fps, because part of my job is post production audio for television. I also know for a fact that most american TV is shot at 30fps.

It is true that most people don’t notice that there are only 24, 25, or 30 frames (fields) per second on their television, but try playing a computer game at those same frame rates and you would readily notice the (comparatively) low frame rate. The reason for this is that on the vast majority of television shows, there is very little movement in between frames, the majority of the image is static. Couple this with the motion blur inherent in filmed tv shows, and you can easily fool the eye.

in a computer game however, most of the image is moving all the time, and there is usually no motion blur, which makes low frame rrates much easier to spot.

Now, by the same analogy, if a television set’s screen was only refreshed 24, 25, or 30 times per second, the eye would VERY easily spot the whole screen flickering. this is because the entire image would be changing.

If you don’t believe me, try setting your computer monitor to a low refresh rate, anything below 60Hz becomes instantly noticeable. Even at 60Hz, eye strain starts becoming a problem.
http://o01armageddon10o@yahoo.com Darkfie1d

listen dude, like it or not, you even don’t have the NA’s market in next-gen war, just w8 till PS3 launch day, and your jaw will drop to your knees..

blah blah blah…
lollercoaster

I think your point about the two consoles having approximately the same horsepower is the only one grounded: the rest is just pure spin.

As the article you linked demonstrates, the quality of the de-interleaving process is essential and if in your opinione 48% of the tv sets tested (the ones failing to do this properly) are "rare TVs that don’t de-interlace correctly" we have very different judgement standards.

On a side note, I relly don’t understand why they decided to keep interleaving in hdtv standards, increasing complexity, now that bandwith to the display is no longer a limiting factor. (Now that they were at it they could have mandated a 60hz standard and then have Hollywood shoot footage at 30fps)

Now, before being labeled as a ps3 fanboy let me clarify a couple of points: in my opinion the 360 looks better overall, on thechnical ground, than the ps3, even though I am more likely to buy the latter, given the zero chance of ever getting Final Fantasy/Kingdom Herats/Most Jrpgs on the 360.
Joseph

lollercoaster, etal.

The reason that ther interlaced format was kept in the HD standards was compatability with television and video studios. The previous ntsc standards were all made using interlaced video.

To support HD video without interlace you would need to rewire and refit almost the entire broadcat infastructure; thus the need for an interlaced format.

A good place to find information on some basic HD video issues is the book

" Digital Video And HDTV" by Charles Poynton

isbn 1-55860-792-7

It’s not detailed enough to implement any interfaces but it gives a good overview of analgue transmission of digital signals, digigital encoding of video 4:4:4, 4:2:2, 0:0:2, progressive vs interlaced and 3:2 cadience.

Ozymandias

It’s a little worrying that someone who has a part in shaping the direction of the gaming platform stragety of the xbox and windows platform has some pretty fundimental problems with basic HD technology. From your background it’s obvious you come from the design and side of gaming as opposed to the technology side.

Leave the technial details to the A/V geeks. Just crank out the games.
Someguy

I wish the person who wrote this article can read what he wrote. The article he posted clearly said that the HDTV must deinterlace the signal from regular 1080 to 1080p. What this means is that, only 1080p HDTVs can deinterlace the signal properly and that the signal going into the HDTV is just plain 1080i. You must have a 1080p HDTV to deinterlace the signal. "The current top HDTV broadcast resolution is 1080i (interlaced)…Does it take the full 1,080 lines of transmitted resolution, change the signal from interlaced to progressive (called deinterlacing)." This means that the HDTV processes the 1080i signal and only 1080p HDTVs can deinterlace the signal.
http://www.jinhochoi.com jc

The simple fact of the matter is that not even 0.01% of TVs out there can natively display 1080p. So, therefore, it’s absolutely and utterly useless to develope any games @ 1080P resolution.

It’s as simple as that..
anonymous

What is it with all you people, all you ever do is criticise the PS3, to be honest with you i dont see anything thats wrong with it i think it is a brilliant console and for goodness sake could you all please stop compareing the PS3 to the worst so called next gen console ever made, the XCRAP 360 of course. The PS3 is much much better than the XCRAP 360 and if you dont believe me look for the specifications on the net and try and tell me otherwise cos if you guys really don’t like the PS3 that much then i suggest you try and get a life cos this is just rediculous. You know what you guys are sad, i don’t think i’m ever coming on this website again, you just lost your best veiwer. You sad, sad, people
http://ashley.binating.info/furniture.html?uid=53667 Daniel

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http://gold.cranzati.info/rings.html?uid=694333 Joseph

RE: 1080p Meaningless this Generation

"One world, one web, one program" — Microsoft promotional ad "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer" — Adolf Hitler

1080p Meaningless this Generation

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