Resolution sharpness PC vs console..

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maxiedaniels

Gawd
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May 25, 2005
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Someone explained this once before to me, but I've forgotten. I have a 50" 1080p (1920x1080) screen. If I run my PC games on it, it is extremely sharp and looks amazing. If I run 360/PS3 on it, it looks... not. Aliasing is obvious, plus it just seems like it isn't sharp enough... blurry almost.

What causes this difference if both systems are running in 1080p? Will the new generation of consoles solve this?
 
Because 360/PS3 has a weak hardware which mostly renders games in 480p or 576, and only rarely in 720p, 1080p is super rare.

PC on other side renders it really at 1080p, most times even with antialiasing.
 
It's because your PC is actually rendering games at 1080p. Most ps3 and 360 games render at 720p. Your console might be outputting 1080p, but the game is still rendering in 720p then scaling it to 1080p. Think of your consoles as an upscaling dvd player.
 
dingobiatch said:
Someone explained this once before to me, but I've forgotten. I have a 50" 1080p (1920x1080) screen. If I run my PC games on it, it is extremely sharp and looks amazing. If I run 360/PS3 on it, it looks... not. Aliasing is obvious, plus it just seems like it isn't sharp enough... blurry almost.

What causes this difference if both systems are running in 1080p? Will the new generation of consoles solve this?
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Upscaling. 1080p on current consoles is a lie.

The new consoles will do most of their rendering at 720p and 1080p, for now.
 
LeviathanZERO said:
Both systems are not running in 1080p.
Nope, BF4 is already confirmed 720p for both consoles.
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Shame its BF4 and not something good.

Consoles also use piles of blur to hide poor textures or use under-saturated color pallets to keep you focused on one area and not others.
 
dingobiatch said:
Someone explained this once before to me, but I've forgotten. I have a 50" 1080p (1920x1080) screen. If I run my PC games on it, it is extremely sharp and looks amazing. If I run 360/PS3 on it, it looks... not. Aliasing is obvious, plus it just seems like it isn't sharp enough... blurry almost.

What causes this difference if both systems are running in 1080p? Will the new generation of consoles solve this?
Click to expand...

Yeah, everything is scaled on the console. Internally it's rendering at God knows what, while everything's scaled to 1080p. As others have stated, I don't even think next generation consoles will run at 1080p all the time. Maybe launch titles might, because the Radeon HD-7870 (Sony's GPU counterpart) can run any title out there today at 1920x1080 with the details cranked (as long as you're okay with 30 fps being the target instead of 60). We'll just have to see.
 
LeviathanZERO said:
Both systems are not running in 1080p.
Nope, BF4 is already confirmed 720p for both consoles.
Click to expand...

That sucks, but is understandable. My question now is, what makes the Wii-U so different? Does it not feature a similar GCN graphics unit? How does its GPU horsepower compare to the other consoles?

EDIT: Nevermind - it seems that it's based on the HD-5000 series and is rumored to have only 400 (probably 480) shaders. Scratch that.
Double - edit: Nevermind again... According to Wikipedia - 320 shaders, 16 TMU's and 8 ROPs. Basically, less than half the power of the Radeon HD-7750...
 
jbltecnicspro said:
Yeah, everything is scaled on the console. Internally it's rendering at God knows what, while everything's scaled to 1080p.
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A good example of this is Dark Souls for the PC - like its console versions, the game renders at 1024x720, no matter what resolution your monitor is. The DSFix mod (now at version 2.01, here's the changelog) allows the game to render at any resolution, even those much greater than native resolution to allow for downsampling, and adds other high-end graphics options not available to consoles.
 
That sucks that the newer consoles won't be able to do it. The past 10 years were all about full hd 1080p (which is now an old tech) and no consoles could run it. Now the newer ones can't either? That's a huge disappointment with 4k around the corner.
 
That is what you get for $400-500. What did you expect ? Miracles to happen with that hardware ? Even a $2000 highend PC can't render everything at 1080@60FPS@max details.
 
faugusztin said:
That is what you get for $400-500. What did you expect ? Miracles to happen with that hardware ? Even a $2000 highend PC can't render everything at 1080@60FPS@max details.
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For $2000 you could build a beastly socket 2011 system with 32gb ram and a titan for graphics. I'm pretty sure that could run anything maxed out at 1920x1080, and run circles around any console. Hell my 2500k system with a 680gtx can max out anything I play at 1920x1080 with zero issues, and it was $1000.
 
Yea I was highly disappointed to find out most ps4 games will be 720p
 
xLokiX said:
Hell my 2500k system with a 680gtx can max out anything I play at 1920x1080 with zero issues, and it was $1000.
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So you say your PC can run let's say Crysis 3 @ Ultra @ 1080p @ 4xAA @ 60 FPS all the time ? It doesn't look like that to me. Ok, Titan probably can, but how much of us have such card ?

Still, it is simply about the hardware, a very powerfull IGP in PS4/XBOX is still just nowhere near highend graphics cards on PC.
 
I only use 2x aa at 1080p because aliasing doesn't really bother me, and don't really give two shits about Crysis, so there's that too. I said games I play: BF3, BL2, CS:S, Metro, not every game.
 
Ruoh said:
It's all about the texture size.
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Texel density really doesn't make much difference at sub-720p resolution in most cases. Still important when you jam your face up to surfaces; not so important otherwise. What hurts most significantly is not having enough pixels on what's ordinarily a very large output to display any dramatic amount of detail. You don't usually get much in the way of anisotropic filtering on the consoles either, so whatever texel density you spend on oblique surfaces just gets wasted.

On displays where you're dealing with much greater pixel density, texel density becomes pretty important.
 
In the case of the PS3 you're not even getting a 1080p upscaled signal. Upscaling to 1080p never really worked on the PS3 so it just pushes out a 720p signal for all games unless they natively render at 1080p. On sub 720p games it will upscale to 720p, however.
 
The next gen consoles should be able to handle proper 1080p upscaling but that's also up to the OS & software implementations MS & Sony will be using. Would it be correct that the GPU built-in into the APU used by both has a good amount of power to do so?
 
Droc said:
Consoles also use piles of blur to hide poor textures or use under-saturated color pallets to keep you focused on one area and not others.
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That's the one thing I always focus on - poor textures. I don't know if it's just me (I know there are others), but when I'm out walking around, I notice the low resolution textures and the blurry stuff. Even in the heat of battle, I'm thinking "wow, the texture on that building looks like shit" or in some cases (Last of Us), I'm thinking "Damn, that looks really good for the PS3".
 
mobusta1 said:
That sucks that the newer consoles won't be able to do it. The past 10 years were all about full hd 1080p (which is now an old tech) and no consoles could run it. Now the newer ones can't either? That's a huge disappointment with 4k around the corner.
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They will run 1080p at 30fps or 720p at 60fps. Tough choice hmm?
 
Graphical fidelity < gameplay.

But im seriously surprised people are saying most games won't be 1080p. I find that shockingly unlikely.

Could see it maybe on the Wii-U but the specs that the XOne and PS4 are pushing should easily be able to accomplish this, especially with all the little tricks and tweaks these game developers use.
 
xLokiX said:
For $2000 you could build a beastly socket 2011 system with 32gb ram and a titan for graphics...QUOTE]

That's a bit misleading as to hit that budget with the parts mentioned you need to be reusing everything else. You've got about $1750 or so just for the parts you mentioned there (ram/spu/board/gpu) and that's the bargain basement 2011 chip.
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