Sony, ya' see this is why you should have tried to push out the
PS3 with 1080p
upscaling right off the bat. Instead of people actually enjoying your games, you've got everyone booting up Photoshop to compare the minute differences between the quality of PSOne/PS2 games in their unscaled, original state and at 1080p resolution. It turns out that the differences aren't that astounding, and get even harder discern as you move towards more recent titles like God of War 2: and these are only static shots, not full motion comparisons. The skinny on the upscaling update is that it makes everything look slightly more smooth, but in some cases
too smooth.
IGN even preferred the original 480p setting for certain games, mentioning that it's sharper, more detailed, and well-defined. The argument between upscaling and native rendering is ultimately a matter of taste, so if you prefer cinematic and smooth, go for upscaling; if you prefer detailed but slightly grainy, go native. 'Nuff said.
[Via
I4U News]
posted Jun 3rd 2007 6:06PM
Is this the patch that makes everything fuzzy?
I'm confused by all this "upscaling" BS. If you own a modern HDTV it's going to have its own scaler that will scale any image sent to it to it's native resolution as long as it's a valid signal.
So all these comparison shots are really just comparing Sonys software scaler vs. various TV's onboard scalers?
I would hope not; I'm sure they are both capturing the shot pre-TV input/output. If Engadget doesn't have a dev PS3-unit (which a lot of the top sites seemed to have snagged), there are good A/V capture units that won't break the bank and capture in native 4:2:2 just fine.
- Tony R.
I love all next gen systems, and would have loved to get a PS3, as it does have more raw power (and I am obsessed with blu-ray!). But I did not have enough money :(, so I did the next best thing and got a 360. While I don't prefer the 360 over the ps3, and would gladly trade it for one, the 360 does do nice upscaling/AA, and makes most xbox1 games look like 360, for example halo 2 looks awesome!
BTW, I STILL don't have enough money for a ps3...sigh...maybe next year...
load up jak 3 with no upscaling/smoothing and look at the menu ring and you'll see what im talking about
I don't own a PS3, or a PS2, or a PS, and I don't see that huge a difference here, then again I don't own an HDTV and never have...
Wait, why am I commenting?
Needs some Lanczos sharpening.
Revrant - good question... but i'm on the same boat as yours!
wait, why am I commenting?
GoW2 looks amazing upscaled and smoothed. Metal Slug Anthology only needs the upscaling since its sprite based and doesnt take to smoothing that well.
The DVD upscaling is one of the best available on the market.
I guess that is why it is called upscaling and not upconversion....
What would be more useful is to see comparisons across the board. Sure, 1080p is nice, but a lot of us don't have a 1080p TV and don't plan on getting one in the near future (I can't see the difference between 1080p and 1080i), so let's see what the scaling looks like from 480i to 480p to 720p to 1080i and then to 1080p. That would be more useful to see than 480p compared to 1080p.
That said, I'm happy to see that Sony is finally taking the scaling issue seriously and, if Blu-Ray wins the format war, I might find myself looking seriously at a PS3 in the next year or so.
Ive been enjoying FFXII upscaled for about a week. The unscaled version was already gorgeous but very pixilly. The upscaled version is totally smoothed out. No jaggies. I find it to be far superior to the unscaled.
This comparison is not worth the paper.... uhm pixels it is mado of. If you have a 720p or 1080p native display device, your ps1&2 games are by definition upscaled if they are shown fullscreen. Only a few of the comments here and on IGN reflect that people understand this. If you have a low-end hdtv odds are that the ps3 software scaler is doing a better job than your tv upscaling, but if your tv is high-end and uses a good scaling algorithm it is probably best to let it do the scaling. The funny thing is that most people cant see the difference between 480/720/1080 unless they see it side-by-side (or get up REAL close) anyway.
That's because most people need glasses, or are watching movies. It's hard to spot the difference of a 720P movie vs a 1080P movie, but spotting a 1080P game VS 720P on a 50+" TV is easy. The problem is that unless your sitting less than 3 feet from your screen, you won't be able to notice the difference of 720p vs 1080p on a smaller TV 32" and lower, which is what most people try to campare resolutions with.
I don't understand why anyone cares about upscaling. There's zero actual effect of doing so. Downscaling is the only thing that I can find useful since it is what allows people to play PS3 games in 720P or lower when the game renders at 1080P.
Adding AAx4, and AFx8-16 would be much better than just blurring the whole image, and upscaling is pointless. They should put in a thing where it renders at 720P or 1080P instead of just streatching a low res image.
The upscaling for the PS3 serves a few purposes: games, dvd's and mpegs. While I don't really care about the games, having a scaler would mean that I can finally do away with my upscaling DVD player and free up some space in my entertainment center.
The PS3 scaler actually works very well. Pre-firmware update, a DVD played in the PS3 might produce some of those pixelation boxes especially in fast moving scenes. Post update, those pixelation artifacts are virtually gone. With all upscaling algorithms, the choice is either to go with a sharper or a softer image. Both are fine, and have strength in different areas. Sony decided to go with the softer mask instead.
The big improvement with the scaler is when you play back those mpeg videos that you recorded with your camcorder or digital camera. Before upscaling, those used to look really "boxy". After the upscaling, the same videos look nice and smooth out now.
You can't expect too much from scaling. If you have a 480 image and need to stretch it out to 1080, it's like trying to make dinner for 10 when you have only enough ingredients for 1 person. Try drawing a number "3" in a 10x10 grid paper, and then upscale it yourself to 100x100 and upwards, and then figure out how to make it better. Then think how it is done in hardware, where the whole process is done in real time, keeping the audio and video synced.
In reading the article on IGN, I noticed that upscaling DVDs requires a HDMI connection. Since when is it a copyright issue to send upscaled signals over component? It's not like it's actual HD content.
Why dont they forget about upscaling? You dont need to upscale a 3d game, thats just counterproductive. You upscale video. Theyd get MUCH better results if they improved the emulator to play at any resolution and provide AA and AF. Text would still be blurry but anything with a polygon would be razor sharp.
Yeah, I agree, eh...but why then why isn't Sony doing that? Is it that ultra difficult for them to do? Is it almost impossible to do? I don't know...
Wow just about everyone commenting on how negligible the difference upscaling makes are people who don't own HDTV's and PS3s. If you own both of these things and did a comparison you would see that the difference is huge, PS2/PS games were almost unplayable on an HDTV without upscaling involved, they now look the way they are supposed to (more or less, depending on which upscaling options you enable). And HDTVs do not upscale images on their own, they switch to the resolution of the media that is being displayed. Or at least that's the way it works with my 1080p HDTV and those of everyone I know who owns one. Plug a normal DVD player in and watch it switch to 480p. And as far as comments about how Sony should've had this capability included w/ PS3s on launch, I'd have liked that too, but I'm sure there were factors involved we didn't know aobut that prevented it at the time. They didn't just hold out to make PS3 owners squirm or because they're just that stupid that they didn't think to include it. Remember, they design the hardware and software for Sony and you write for engadget buddy. ~.o
"And HDTVs do not upscale images on their own, they switch to the resolution of the media that is being displayed. Or at least that's the way it works with my 1080p HDTV and those of everyone I know who owns one. Plug a normal DVD player in and watch it switch to 480p."
"Switching" to the resolution of the media IS upscaling. A TV with a native resolution of 1080p has, unsurprisingly, 1080 lines on it. If you plug in a DVD player which outputs at 480p then the TV upscales the image so that the 480 lines input fills the 1080 lines on the screen. Without upscaling the image would only occupy 480 of the 1080 lines, or about 44% of the height of the screen, leaving massive black borders everywhere else. That would just be silly, so as you observe, and certainly every TV I've seen automatically upscales lower res content to fill the screen.
Playstation 3 was a failure, everyone knows it.
Sure, carry on beliving that, and i'm sure you'll do fine..
1,000,000 units sold in Europe in 8 weeks, 3,500,000 units globally since November, is not dying at all, it's quite respectable.
Anyone notice this:
When PS3 did not do Upscaling, it was the most important issue in the universe, and the PS3 was crap because it did not do it.
Now the PS3 CAN do upscaling, then upscaling in general is a waste of time, and it's not important.
What a total bunch of wankers the editors here (and most other gutter press websites) are...
Why don't they simply emulate PSX games? Bleem! already had much better graphics(real 3D upscaling instead of interpolating the entire screen) and ran fine on my AMD K6. I mean, the soooo powerful PS3 with the magical Celz0r processors should be able to run at least 8 PSX games in splitscreen, while emulating the Xbox 360 and the Wii, all at the same time.
"Without upscaling the image would only occupy 480 of the 1080 lines, or about 44% of the height of the screen, leaving massive black borders everywhere else. That would just be silly, so as you observe, and certainly every TV I've seen automatically upscales lower res content to fill the screen."
If that were the case then PS2 games would have taken up 44% of the screen prior to the 1.8 firmware update. An HDTV will stretch a picture, will cannot change the way a device outputs. If that was the case there would be no such thing as an upscaling DVD player and the PS3 wouldn't have included PS2/PS1 and DVD upscaling in the latest update. An HDTV will stretch a picture, a device can upscale one and output it in a higher resolution. I've owned an upscaling DVD player for 2 months and have been playing PS2 games (again) since the update so take my word for it. HDTVs do not upscale an image that is in 480. It will switch it's mode to either 480i or 480p and zoom in.
Unless you have a CRT-based HDTV, your tv is upscaling when it "stretches" or "zooms" the image. It may not do it very well as the quality of the stretch or zoom is dependant on the tv set. The PS3 and some DVD players will "upscale" the content with an algrithm specifically created for the content that it is outputing because it will often give better results than the tv-based based scaler.
Gah! You've missed the point entirely. Of course a PS2 didn't take up only 44% of the screen, because the TV did the upscaling. "Upscaling", "stretching" and "zooming" are all the same thing!
If you connect an "upscaling" DVD player to an HDTV then a little chip in the DVD player stretches the image. If you connect a normal DVD player to an HDTV then a little chip in the TV stretches the image. The process is inherently the same, you're just doing it in a different place.
In some cases the chip in one might be slightly better than the other, or offer more control, like the PS3's "smoothing", but in either case all you're doing is stretching the smaller image to fill the screen, so can never do better than the source resolution.
How do you actually make the screenshots? I mean, surely you would need two systems running to compare, and somehow get the exact same video frame as the previous?
is there any chance nintendo will add an upscale feature to the wii that will play my super nintendo games in HD?
The Wii does not even play Wii games in HD, so I guess the answer to that is um, NO!
just as expected, lousy sony wants to sell ps3 NOT ps2 titles.
this upscaling isn't like how pc games work; ps3 is just interpolating final frames to 1080p resolution not through 3d game engines that it is just like playing dvd movies to 1080p hdtv set
without proper rendering in 1080p resolution, it is more or less like using "digital zoom" features in most digital cameras
how lame
btw, if it is upscaling & you cannot control the upscaling process, i am now sure why ps3 is doing it; it's not like hdtv will not upscaling 480p to 1080p
The only differance if you have a 1080P TV is where the scaling is done. If you send a 720P signal your TV takes it to its native resoution. (that could be 1360X768 on some 720P TVs) IF your TV is 1080P native and you send it 720P it will scale it 1080P. If it is 1080P and you send it 1080P no scaling needed. If a tital is a native 720P and the PS3 scales it it might not look as good as sending a 720P signal to your 1080P. Why you ask? It all comes down to who has a better scaler - the PSP or your TV. If you TV is a $4000 Misu it will do a better job then your PS3 will. if you have the $999 special then the PS3 will likely do a better job.
R O F L.
This is EXACTLY why we should all be skeptical of the upstream upscaling hype. Nice of them to add the feature for those that want it, but really - was it worth all the nerdrage?
Conrad Quilty-Harper missed the point.
The point of upscaling with the Ps3 is so that your TV doesn't have to do it. Therefore decreasing TV lag due to your TV's conversion process.
Ps games like frequency and Amplitude lag so much they are virtually unplayable in 1080. Upscaling in the ps3 helps a lot.
For Movies your TV upscaling process may cause audio sync to suffer (not usually)
Finally some TV's don't upscale at all. In this case your usually out of luck. These people can thank Sony for their help.
Ps3 upscaling wont make games or movies visually look better. It isn't even possible to blow up a picture and retain the full quality of an image. This is why Ps included the "Smoothing" option which blurs out image degradation.
- PlayStation has done more good for the console community than most people realize, Encourage them to continue and we will all reap the rewards.