Resistance is 720p, but the PS3 cannot upscale it to 1080i. - Page 5  

"We tested this development on older HDTV sets with games designed for 720p but not 1080i"

So far it is only a problem with games designed for 720p, So why are games being designed for 720p when 1080i is available? Shouldnt game developers catch some blame as well? Not saying this isnt Sony's fault but it seems rather
lazy on developers part for not taking full advantage.

Does anyone know if this problem will affect a Panasonic plasma TV? I think the model number is TX-42PH20. I bought it in January of 2004. I'm really worried that when I pick up my PS3 tomorrow it's not going to work like I think it should. My Xbox 360 looks beautiful on it though!

Thanks a lot!!

javeryh, your good. Your TV is a plasma and not a CRT. But just to make sure does the manual say it can do 720p, if it can you Golden for sure.

Thats true, they couldnt make the kits.

If what you say is true, the PS3 cannot output a 1080i Game then. Ever. Period.

Which means Sony needs to go on the record and state that their PS3 does not support 1080i televisions.

I haven't read the whole thread yet, but I told people this over a month ago that the system didn't automatically scale to different resolutions.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...76#post8727776

I signed up just to ask what on Earth an "Interlaced Buffer" is.

Framebuffers are by definition progressive scan. When you output 1080i, you're actually working with a 1080p framebuffer that gets sent to an interlacer - a specific piece of hardware. Interlacers are pretty much €urocents a piece, and we know the PS3 has one. With the 360 there's an extra piece of kit in between the framebuffer and the interlacer, which is the scaling unit. The scaler can take 720p and turn it into 1080p, or any of the VGA supported resolutions. From what I understand, the scaler is not always used to descale and output 480i/p when selected, but instead the framebuffer is set to 480p by the game. A developer could use the lower resolution to offer better antialiasing, or it could just let the scaler do it for a slight degredation in quality - higher AA is better than regular AA + descale.

Now, by all accounts it seems that the PS3 lacks a scaling chip. Why? Don't know. Perhaps because scalers aren't €urocents a piece. What this means is that games with a 1080p framebuffer can be safely programmed to use any framebuffer size below that before sending it to the interlacer or just passing it through - hell they might even get a framerate boost. HOWEVER, if a game is running at 720p and doesn't have a TONNE of performance to spare, it's not going to be able to render to the framebuffer at 1080p, or scale that 720p image up to 1080p without hitting the game's framerate or reducing graphical quality until the framerate is back to what it was.

All this is of course assuming that there actually isn't a scaler, and Sony haven't been staggeringly stupid and just not let developers use it. Thus there can be no firmware fix that doesn't make the game decide between the two compromises listed above. If that's the case, maybe Sony will include scalers in a later build. Maybe they wont. Who really knows but Krazy Ken Kuturagi and his band of [perhaps now not so] Merry Men?


[Edited to clarify a point]

There is hardware scaling. It's just not allowed to be used right now.

according to their site, though it doesn't specify for gaming or blu-ray movies. It may just be for games and not scaling, if so they need to fix that ASAP. Doesn't affect me but still a major oversight.

http://www.us.playstation.com/PS3/Ab...Specifications

How do you know this? Do you KNOW there's a scaler in there, because I can not think of one single reason why Sony would not allow developers to use it. Not one. Can you? If it's there, they'd be using it. Unless of course Sony have just shown themselves to be utterly, hopelessly poor at basic Q/A...

Oh, and scaling movies and pictures is not the same thing as scaling a game; you won't use 100% of the system to decode a MPEG2 or VC1 stream for the most part.

im confused. if there isnt a scaler to take it from 720p to 1080p then how can it downscale 720p to 480p?


I also have a 65" Hitachi CRT and a 65" Mits CRT running off the same sources and can say that the Hitachi is far and away the better looking TV. I am sure once i get them professionally calibrated, this could change. Hitachi is highly underrated.

For movies it'd do it in software I'd imagine. For games it'd just set the framebuffer to 480p and be done with it. My PC doesn't have a scaler, but games I can run at 1024x768 have no trouble running at 640x480... and faster to boot.

Again, this is all based on the deduction that the PS3 has no scaler. If it does, then this stops being an issue of Sony being overly zealous with the cost cutting, and more an issue of Sony being plain bloody stupid for not letting developers use it.

sounds like a constant cycle of why it can and cant scale. haha. purhaps a hardware modification can be made for those still in production.

I know for a fact there is one there. I know for a fact it's not allowed to be used. I know this the same way that I knew a month ago that games would independently decide on scaling and output resolutions like I linked up above.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to guess whether being able to sell to around 4 million non-720p set owning consumers in the US would outweigh the costs of a quick redesign. Maybe as part of the first hardware revision... but then they'd have to do the software for it too. Again who knows?

To be honest with you, I'm not even remotely interested in the PS3; I'm happy with my 360... but we're all consumers here and information is king.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to guess whether being able to sell to around 4 million non-720p set owning consumers in the US would outweigh the costs of a quick redesign. Maybe as part of the first hardware revision... but then they'd have to do the software for it too. Again who knows?

To be honest with you, I'm not even remotely interested in the PS3; I'm happy with my 360... but we're all consumers here and information is king.


So then Sony's just being incredibly stupid? Why would they stop developers from using it? I mean seriously, how can you possibly explain that? You said you knew a month ago that games would independently decide on scaling and output resolutions... but how can they decide on scaling if Sony doesn't let them use the scaler?

You'll forgive me - and I hope you don't take this as an insult because it's really not - but the scenario you portray just doesn't seem plausible to me.

OK, I only read the first few responses to this thread and saw that people initially reacted to the poster by insulting him. But what he says is absolutely true.

"On Xbox 360, HDTV owners can choose between 720p or 1080i (and now 1080p, if we're talking HD-DVD movies), but as PlayStation 3 owners have started tinkering with their machines, it's become apparent that 1080i is currently unsupported, at least by the machine's many launch games, as 1080i-only HDTV sets are forced to experience the visuals at 480p, rather than scaling to an HD resolution of 720p.

IGN tested the spreading theory, and confirmed the issue with Resistance: Fall of Man, NHL 2K7, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07, and Need for Speed Carbon. 480p is the highest resolution possible on standard-definition television sets running via component cables -- it provides a solid picture, certainly better than composite or S-Video, but far beneath the visuals you'd expect from a HD-capable console.

No one knows whether this is a technical or software issue at this point, or if Sony and software publishers can address it via patch sometime soon. But if Microsoft can add 1080p support a year after launch, we're hopeful. Stay tuned."

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3155303

"The older your HDTV is, the more likely it is to support a subset of the formats currently considered "high definition" by the big guns of the console markets. Many of these sets support 480i, 480p, and 1080i, but are incapable of displaying the 720p signal that many next-generation games render at. While the Xbox 360 is known to upscale to 1080i in the event that a television doesn't support 720p, Sony's entry in the next-generation console war apparently inexplicably does the opposite, downscaling the image to the significantly less desirable 480p mode. It is not yet known if this is a simple oversight than can be corrected with a software update, or something more troublesome.

Of course, this might fall under the category of "problems you want to have," given that getting your hands on a PlayStation 3 amid the current shortages and eBay feeding frenzy could be next to impossible."

http://www.gamepro.com/news.cfm?article_id=86828

Please explain. Why all the mystery?

If you own a 4 or 5 year old HDTV, it's probably worth abut 600 bucks now.

Put it on craigslist... sell it.. and buy another 4 or 5 year old HDTV that DOES take 720p. It'll probably be the same price.

You don't need a new 1080p set for the PS3, but there are other CHEAP options. Hell this would likely be free. Cept you gotta go through some hassle.

if only it were that simple.

Thanks - I hope you are right but I can't find the manual for the Panny TH-42PX20. When I switch my Xbox 360 to 720p in the settings my tv won't display it so I'm a little worried. Maybe I need to change a setting on my TV as well?

Uh, it won't be ISF calibrated like mine, and the ISF calibration will cost as much as the set. Not a reasonable solution. Many of us have expensive TVs that are set up exactly the way we like them. This is the AVS Forum.

Yes you did. Not a problem for me, but a problem for owners of CRT sets from Mitsubishi, Pioneer, Panasonic, Philips, [older] Toshiba, and Samsung.

I don't know why Sony is being so stupid about it. There could be issues with the hardware scale or a visual quality issue with the hardware scaler that made it so Sony required all developers to not use it. Therefore what would need to be done is a software scaler, or some sort of post processing effect in order for it to work properly. Given the launch and what a pain in the ass it was, you can understand why developers didn't put effort for it. It was a pain to begin with to support all the different resolution modes. Games scale if the developers support it on their end, not on the hardware end. It's easy enough to change resolutions if you're downscaling, but to upscale, it becomes a much bigger issue. The scenario I portrayed is definitely fact and is true. It sucks, and it didn't make sense to me either but it's certainly the case for now.

So how did Sony's dev tools make such a huge back-step? The PS2 could upscale to 1080i for titles like GT4

I posted this before, it's still the only explanation that sounds plausible to me.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthre...124597&page=35 post #1745

I have a 42" Mitsubishi CRT Rear Projection Model WT-42413. It will be 3 years old come New Years Day! 3 years is NOT OLD! It has a great picture. I just got the HD-DVD drive for the 360 and WOW do Movies look great. The 360 have no problems Upscaling a 720P game to 1080i. Hell any HD Device you plug into a HDTV will upscale a 720P picture to 1080i, (The 360, HD Cable Box, Series 3 TIVO, etc) so I find this strange that the PS3 and all of it's so call POWER can't do this simple task. Then we have Sony fanboys Blame everyone else. Blame the people with so called old HDTV's. Well there sure are a lot of CRT HDTV's that don't have a clue what to do with a 720P signal. Hell I tried doing it on my 360 to see what would happen. I get a funky looking screen, not any type of picture at all before it goes to Blue Screen.

I'd like to buy a NEW bit larger HDTV, but I don't want to spend my money on a new HDTV at this time. Besides this one looks great, and works just fine with every other piece of hardware I've thrown at it. I will say that I won't spend $600 to buy a HD Game console so that I really end up playing in ED. If I want that, I'll just buy a Wii! I'd get the same Resolution with either one. If Sony thinks it'll get me to buy a NEW HDTV, they're quite wrong on that account. I sure in hell won't buy a SONY HDTV!

Smart move SONY. 1 of a growing list of problems with the PS3. Really, didn't they think the truth would get out once people started getting their hands on the system? MS may have it's own problems, but at least their HD Game Console will play in HD on any HDTV! Having no HDMI cable has no effect on this.
Sony, Sony, Sony, I can only hope you can fix this MAJOR problem with a software update otherwise there's going to be a lot of POed new PS3 owners.

It's not the dev tools. Wow is there a lot of misinformation going on here. What GT4 was essentially take a 540p render buffer and interpolated it to 1080i. There was no hardware scaler in the PS2. The problem here is the easiest way to get 1080i is to have a 1080p render frame buffer. A lot of games don't support that resolution so they would have to do a post processing effect to scale the image to support 1080i. That takes extra work. This has nothing to do with Sony's dev tools. It has to do with the hardware scaler not being allowed for usage and the developer having to come up with a software means to take care of it. There are many ways to do it depending on the game and where you can afford to allow a scaling pass in the rendering. The problem is with time and really any resolution that wasn't 720p was an afterthought in the dev process and you get a situation where developers just opted to not support 1080i. It's a combination of time, and Sony's restriction on using the hardware scaler.

Does the PS3 upscale 720p games to 1080p?