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1080p is overrated! (for games)
Emrah \| 2:33 PM on 12.05.2009	8 comments

I'm going to pull a 640k-ought-to-be-enough-for-everybody, but hear me out:

720p 4xAA is pretty much sufficient for mind-blowing visuals. Why stress the hardware unnecessarily?

Would you be bothered if your game looked as good as a high def (720p) movie? Would you be bothered if your game didn't run at 1080p, but with real-time caustics, global illumination, radiosity, sub surface scattering, motion blur, realistic DOF, sub-pixel displacement mapping, fur / hair rendering, voxel particles, skeletal / muscle simulation, gas / liquid simulation at 720p 60fps?

As if we got all of these running together at 720p, we want our visuals to run at 1080p..

So why the 1080p madness? The games don't look all that different at 1080p from 720p.. It's the rendering, stupid..

Also:
This looks more realistic:

Than:

Although the first picture effectively has quarter the amount of pixels of the second, and upscaled with the simplest scaling algorithm, not even with the fancy methods most quarter-decent tv sets use, it looks more realistic than the second picture. Mind you that pixel count difference between 720p and 1080p is not even this dramatic.

I hope I made sense.

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5 comments | showing # 1 to 5

Lockgar

There is also the fact that 1080p vs 720p is almost indistinguishable if your farther away then 5 feet. And that's with a big screen tv.

I actually bought a 1080p hdtv during black friday. It was actually cheaper then their cheapest 720p hdtv of the same size... My first HDTV, WHOooo!

Anyhow, another problem is the fact that, although everyone says something "uses" 1080p, in most cases its just unscaled 720p as well. Actual 3d rendering will always tromp just a better resolution.

Although I understand the point you made with the images, its not really a fair test in that regard. Of course an image of an actual woman will look better then an in game model of a character. We haven't gotten through the uncanny valley just yet.

Emrah

You're right about the unfairness of the comparison, but I just wanted to emphasize that if a game looked as good as the real thing, I wouldn't mind it having less resolution.

e.g. I'd rather Gran Turismo 5 had real tree geometry in 720p instead of billboarded trees at 1080p. Not that reduction in resolution would guarantee such a thing but I am sure they could stuff more things into the screen if they had gone for a lower res.

marxistforlife

Your confusion between in game qualities (texture resolution, model quality, in game "real time" rendering) and pixel depth/native resolution of a game makes your argument hard to follow. The comparison between the two images it also flawed in that the realistic quality of a game has nothing to do with resolution. If you want to make a real comparison take a 480p image and upscale it to 1080p, because that's whats happening with almost every video game console game right now. I'm not disagreeing with you, and I understand what you're trying to say, but stick to your main argument, don't try to make that type of comparison. Also, did you know that MGS4 is rendered at 1024x768, then upscaled to your set PS3 output res? (which is still technically 720p) Crazy shit.

Aurain

Of course it looks more realistic than the second picture.
The first picture is a photo.

Shoop

I love my 1080 TV 'cause it's my main computer monitor and the extra pixels are definitely needed for that. Otherwise it's not like game consoles really run anything in 1080.

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