It's been nearly two years since
Halo 3 and
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare were released and disappointed the "HD era" by not quite making it up to 720 lines of resolution. Two years later, it appears their sequels due this fall,
Halo 3: ODST and
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, won't be able to do any better. In separate articles, developers confirmed both will match the resolution of the original games (1024x600 for
Call of Duty, 1152x640 for
Halo.) Honestly, we have the same perspective we did then, there's a lot more to image quality than just resolution and a peek at a trailer for either game will reveal plenty of visual tricks to keep the eyes entertained (if you think a measly 120p's will pull Editor Emeritus Ryan Block away from CoD, think again) but, c'mon guys, the so-called HD era is four years deep, if Bizarre could figure out how to squeeze 720p res and better graphics while moving from
Project Gotham Racing 3 to
PGR4, why can't you?
[Via
Evil Avatar &
again]
Read - Halo 3: ODST not 720p admits Bungie
Read - Modern Warfare 2 will render at 600p
posted July 31st 2009 2:40PM
DVD is the issue no? I'm just saying
For video games, the medium the game fits on has nothing to do with display resolution.
Cornelius: I'm not sure that's entirely accurate...
domerdel, drink some more sony kool-aid will ya? the storage medium has NOTHING to do with this.
I guess you think blu-ray is necessary for 1080p video as well...
So does that mean that 1080p video can be recorded onto VHS?
The amount of processing power is the issue. It's either they give programmers more than 2 years to make games or console makers need to give developers more powerful consoles. Since neither seems to be happening anytime a HD game for consoles will be at 720p...
Michael,
Ever heard of D-VHS: recording of 1080i HD (highest resolution at that time) on regular VHS tape?
Kenjix has a valid point. While it may not be the case, the size of the medium definitely can restrict the resolution that the game is able to create because higher resolution usually requires increased polygon count otherwise lose smoothness. More polygons means more disc space.
And if the devs never said anything, no one would have ever noticed, save for some no-lifers that don't know anything about making the games and have nothing better to do than count pixels and cry about it on blogs for a day after the game is released.
Wow, just reading through the comments, there are a lot of dumb people lurking around engadgetHD today. People insisting that 1080p is better than 720p in all cases. Others trying to directly compare a game running on a PC vs. a console and wondering why, if a PC can run CoD in 1080, there's no excuse for it not running at that resolution on a console.
Please people, if you know little to nothing about HD and the difference between all the various aspects of it, or if you don't understand the pros and cons and inherent differences of gaming on a PC vs. a console, just keep your mouth shut. I can go to Best Buy for my mis-information, why do I have to read about it on a tech blog.? But then again, these are just the comments, what else do I expect?
I hate to be the guy hawking PC gaming, this is one thing I never have to worry about. If I have a beefy PC and the game supports 1920x1080, then I can guarantee it'll rendering 1920x1080 on my display. None of this "outputs-720p-but-actually-renders-600p" crap to worry about. As an added bonus, I run COD4 with 4x antialiasing too. Plus I prefer the PC mouse+keyboard controls for FPS games.
Still, disappointing that 99% of games on the PS3 and 360 seem to be 720p-only, and the ones that claim to run at 1080p run at 1440x1080 instead of 1920x1080 (Gran Turismo 5), or don't update every line every frame (WipeoutHD). As an owner of a PS3, I'm really disappointed by the lack of games taking full advantage of my beautiful, crisp 1080p display.
I guess we'll have to wait until the next generation of consoles for trueHD gaming.
PC Dev is different, your graphics card is upscaling it, no?
You can set it to run 1080p in the game settings.
@domerdel
COD4 can be set to render natively at 1920x1080- no upscaling necessary.
TrueHD, you mean FullHD, right? Or is 720p not truely a HD resolution. Or maybe just not up to your HD standards I guess.
The true deal is that most people do not own 50"+ HD displays so making all games support 1080p is sort of ridiculous, no? It is almost if not completely impossible to tell the difference between a 720p and 1080p display of the same model when the display is 40" or smaller. And not everyone can afford a high end or even a $1000 gaming rig every year or two to keep playing the freshest games at full rez.
But you're the lucky one, rich and ignorant.
Somehow I'm rich and ignorant? You do realize you're posting on EngadgetHD, right?
And no, my TV cost a mere $1100 when I bought it. 46" Toshiba RV530u. Hardly rich, considering the number of middle-class buyers on avsforum blowing tens of thousands of dollars just on speakers, but I digress. You can pick up 1080p LCD TVs for less than a grand now. Get over it, cheapskate.
720p is nice- much nicer than 480p, but it's nothing to shake a stick at.
Thank you for mentioning this, and I just wanted to chime in myself. I play the PC version of COD4 on a 30" Monitor at 2560x1600 resolution (turned off anti-aliasing though, i didn't really need it at that res), and it works great.
It's not an issue with disc size or whether the game can support it. It's whether they can reliably sustain 30 (or 60) frames per second with a 360 or PS3 at a given resolution.
@Spiza You can have the PS3 output 1080i or 1080p, but its using software to upscale the games output the same way it upscales a DVD, its not the same as rendering in 1080p. Also you have to muck around with you HDMI settings quite a bit. If you have all output resolutions checked on the PS3 too, it will default output to 1080i, which annoys me because I would rather it output the games at their native resolution.
Remember how the PS3 was supposed to be able to output 1080p to two displays simultaneously. Har har. The one thing this generation did nail though, was Surround Sound. Playing Killzone 2 in 7.1 surround sound at my house would give a veteran flashbacks.
We were talking PC, but great random PS3 stuff.
no, the dvd disk isnt the issue. both ps3 and 360 are having these problems. they aren't powerful enough to do everything. these systems came out pretty early in this hd era. some games can do 1080p but a game like call of duty or halo no, those systems are seriously capaable of pushing both consoles to the limit and barley reach 720. they are upscaled to 720 and 1080 but its not the same as native 1080p
DVD disk may be 1 factor in it.. at least trying to get above 640p.. 360 is the culprate in this case... games are mostly developed for 360 then ported to PS3.. and although PS3 exclusive games are lacking true1080, they're still better than 600-640p
The media doesn't have anything to do with it, it is just for storage. The same way movie dvd's are just for storage. If size and format of the files didn't matter you could play 1080p content off of a dvd as well. Dump a 720p or 1080p mkv file onto a dvd and if your player can decode it it'll work just fine. It is all about processing power and it is as simple as that.
Up to an extent Michael.
Just chiming in here for the sake of discussion.... I do not know how much space is left over on these DVDs when they are done. If there is very limited free space, the DVD may (I said may not does) play a factor in the maximum resolution. And because most PS3 games are just ports of 360 games, they do not go back and rerender the entire game cause it will fit on a blu-ray disc. Or it could be a combination of multiple roadblocks. But to say it is only the graphics chip and that it is ludicris.
I am just throwning it out there because there really is no definitive answer. That is unless you work for one of these gaming companies and you know all this first hand.
@Shenanigans
Either you're trolling, or you have no idea what you're talking about.
Inside consoles, there are special processors called GPUs. Within these GPUs are contained units called "rasterizers". This hardware allows the GPU to quickly project 3D shapes (called polygons) onto a 2D plane- developers refer to this space as a "frame buffer". Given ample video memory for a 1920x1080x32bpp frame buffer, you can render 3D rasterized polygons at FullHD resolution and output the result in 1080p. You can even cleverly downscale the result with a good filtering algorithm to 720p and achieve a good antialiasing effect, so even 720p display owners benefit.
In conclusion, unlike movies, games' rendering resolution is independent on the medium in which they fit. They're rendered in realtime, using specialized 3D hardware. Hence, while PC games still come on DVDs, yet most are perfectly content to render at 1920x1200 or higher (2560x1600 on some displays). No need for fancy discs to store the pixels on- just a frame buffer.
While I agree that the disk space doesn't effect the resolution (a model can be rendered as big as it needs to be in real time), but the flip side to that is the bigger you render that model, the higher quality maps / textures you will need, and this data does pull from the disk.
Battlefield:1943 seems to suffer from this as well.
So no one realizes that there is a different size for a texture that works on a model that's has a higher resolution? Does anyone not use cameras and see that if you take pictures at a higher resolution you store less images? So in order to take 600 pictures you lower the resolution and if you want higher quality images you store less pictures?
So storage size is a factor, how hard of a concept is it for some people to get? Not to mention audio has to fit on those discs as well. Hence why Id's Rage engine will be on a minimum of 3 DVDs on 360. Don't tell me storage has nothing to do with it, that just sound foolish
It's not foolish, as everyone else is right. Ultimately it's the system's horsepower that is limiting the rez it is outputting and not the size of the disk it is stored on. You could, in fact, have a game with crappy textures shoved on an N64 cartridge and render/output it at 1080p if the console was capable of it and the developers thought that was a good idea.
STFU about storage, I can play N64 games at 1080p. Sure it's not the best idea considering low quality textures.
I have an old copy of Halo on a CD for PC and it can run in 1080p
So, according to your logic, PC games can't be 1080p either because no one is publish them in BDs.
The problem primarily lies with the GPU in these consoles. They are just not powerful enough to render 1080p or event 720p in 60fps which sharing the megar 512MB of memory with system processor.
For a PC to run games in 1080p, the graphics card alone would cost more than Xbox 360 and has dedicated 1GB of graphics memory.
@foxb: some PS3 games run higher than 720p and some 1080p (not FullHD)... so in this instance... it maybe 360's GPU limitation???
Rage has HUGE textures, but that's irrelevant to this discussion. You're confusing texture resolution with screen resolution. Still, they're related in that they're both restricted by the amount of video memory available on the system, but the issue at hand is screen resolution.
@domerdel,
360 has 720p and 1080p games as well. But did you ever take a look at those 1080p games? I can put out a pong game as 1080p easily. But would you buy it?
@foxb
Graphics as costly as an $300 Xbox? Try again.
You can run most games at 1080p with a radeon 512MB 4850 which can be had as low as $90 at Newegg right now. This gets even better when you limit it to console ports only, a $60 Radeon 3850 or 4670 can play practically any of these. PC graphics cards' price/performance are advancing too fast for games to keep up especially since the graphics are constrained by 360 and PS3.
@O,
Try again. Your 512MB 4850 can only run most games at or below 30fps when played in 1080p resolution.
Xbox 360 has total of 512MB of memory shared between processor and GPU.
I played cod4 on my pc at 1080 and it looks amazing, im sure mw2 will look even better.
...either way I need to build a new pc to play it at the super high settings!
dvd size doesnt really factor game resolution.The current consoles videocards cant take it.Pc gamers have real videocards that can handle 1080p or higher.
We are at the midpoint of this console cycle. People are going to start getting less and less impressed with graphics on current consoles, which will force the console makers to start anew with another system. My guess is that they're just waiting until 3d has a flat standard and enough of the market has 3d capable TVs, so that the next console generation can render in 3d.
I think you are all right... but let me add the console sense into it. The 360 is not as strong as the PS3, and Halo is an exclusive 360 title. MW2 is on both consoles, but to make life easy and not have to make 2 seperate games, MW2 is constructed for the 360 and then ported over to the PS3. You can really see the power of the PS3 on games like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Killzone 2.
Actually Fred, it's nothing like as clear cut as that.
The 2 consoles are actually about even - with each one slightly more capable than the other in certain matters.
This is hardly surprising seeing as
(a) Microsoft's Xbox design team members connected to IBM got a look at what was going on early on with PS3 and Cell and so had a very good idea of what Sony were up to
http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/more-humiliation-for-sony-ps3-rd-funds-helped-build-the-xbox
and
(b) Sony reputedly originally planned the PS3 to have 2 Cell chips running things and no GPU but later dropped the idea of 2 Cells and added an Nvidia 7800 GPU, this locked them into an odd arrangement of using the GPU for some things and the Cell for others. Not really quite one thing nor the other, hence all the talk that devs find it difficult to get the most out of
Because Sony decided to use their own proprietary system (again) PS3 is very different (to PC and therefore Xbox) but by no means necessarily better.
The awkward to use and small amount of RAM being a prime case in point.
This, coincidentally enough, is being discussed here today -
www.edge-online.com/news/carmack-ps3-performance-lags-behind-360
www.eurogamer.net/articles/grand-theft-auto-iv-ps3-vs-xbox-360-special-article
I see nobody has mentioned Ghostbusters yet.
If the PS3 is so powerful and is always being handicapped by getting mere ports of an inferior Xbox game how comes they had the Xbox version @ 720p yet the PS3 version is actually running at 540p?
(960 by 540 is 518,400 pixels and 1280 by 720 is 921,600 pixels, the PS3 game is actually 56.25% the resolution of the Xbox 360 game)
www.gamezine.co.uk/news/ps3-ghostbusters-56-xbox-resolution-not-75--$1305034.htm
yes, both those game look great. but you need to consider frame rate when you factor in res. what is the frame rate of KZ2 and MGS4? I honestly don't know. also, if MW2 had 4 years of development like both those games, how much better could it look?
MFM, on ghostbusters because it was a port?
The gamecube is by far more capable than the PS2, but you can find games that ran worse on the gamecube.
With all the debate, I thought I would pitch in. It doesnt really matter what the resolution is, as long as it looks good. I have seen lower res games look better than higher res games. Sure in a perfect world it would be max resolution and along with everything else that goes into making a game look and play good. But I was fine with how both Halo 3 and COD4 looked on my box, no maybe not as good as some games on my pc, but my video card is worth more then my box. Given the cost of consoles, these games look great, and I am sure they will both play great.
Thank you, I couldn't agree more. People are all too easily fooled by resolution when it comes to video quality (probably because it's arguably the easiest spec for the common consumer to understand), but in actuality resolution is far from the deciding factor in picture quality.
Furthermore, thank you for bringing up the issue of cost. Consoles are so inexpensive for what they provide that we as 360 and PS3 owners should be happy to get games that look as good as MW2.
As a final note though, if MW2 is as fun as COD4 who gives a damn what the resolution is...
Some truly uninformed posters in this thread.
I'm specing out an HT/gaming PC build right now, one of the requirements is playing Fallout 3 at a steady 60 fps at max settings/1080p. Everything I've found says I'm gonna have to spend about $300US on a video card to get that performance.
An equivalent card to those found in the PS3 or 360 runs about $40US.
I don't care how bad you want it, the PS3 is not the powerhouse you think it is.
Jon, you should try the ATI Radeon HD 4890 or higher. You should be able to find it on newegg in the $200s . As for specs in fallout, you can find what you're looking for here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-cards-charts-2009-high-quality/Fallout-3,1318.html
The 4890 is actually what I've been looking for. I've had trouble finding one with native HDMI out (Kuros don't seem to like DVI->HDMI dongles)
Since I'm waiting for Lynnfield anyway, I think I'm just gonna hope that the 5 series cards embrace HDMI a little better than either ATI or Nvidia has so far.
Thanks for the link though, I hadn't seen that yet. I wish they made it a little easier to find the specs for their test rig. Most gamers aren't using the i7 965's that several benchmarkers put in their rigs.
Halo has always been the flagship game. I'd expect more from this release
Oh, how do I love un-informed people who comment acting like they know whats going on. Lets have a lesson children in "NATIVE RESOLUTION".
NATIVE RESOLUTION means the resolution the game was created in. Yes, Halo 3/ODST and COD4/5 are created at a native resolution less than HD. So to all those fanboys who are saying "my pc is playing it 1080p!" or "my 360/PS3 is playing it at 1080p!" Oh you silly children, your gaming machine/pc is scaling it to that resolution. There is very few games actually NATIVE 1080p, but neither of these two are. Now go play a scaled up version of COD4 and be disappointed. LOL
@kevin,
You're the one that is un-informed. PC games are always rendered at whatever resolution you pick, not scaled up. Don't confuse game resolution with texture map resolution. Two different things.
360 games are usually always scaled. And PS3 depends. Some are scaled and some are not.