PS3 and it's hardware scaler - Page 8

what's the problem with the GPU ? My understanding that it's as fast as a 7900 GT, which should be sufficient for 1080p resolutions with reasonable frame rate (altough maybe without full effects such as AA/AF/HDR).

It seems as if Darknight is rather persistent in his assertion that there is indeed has a scalar and his past posts have been rather accurate; so perhaps it would be more fruitful to just focus on why it might not be allowed for use by developers. It would seem as if there are two lines of thought on this, again operating under the assumption a scalar is present. Below is some speculation which is indebted to many uncited posters. I apologize for not giving where credit where credit is due, my only excuse was that I was too lazy to go back and find every contribution to this forum of relevance.

The first set of ideas could be labeled Conspiracy Theories. The purpose of this label is not to delegitimize the view, but just to note that the absence of the use of the scalar is not for some technical reason, but rather for some ulterior motive. People arguing for this view have noted that the scaling function is not allowed because: (a) it might cannibalize other higher end Blu-ray player sales; (b) cannibalization of sales would hurt the Blu-ray partnership; or (c) the HDMI 1.3 standards in general serve the interests of new HD disc formats and prohibit scaling functions in an effort to increase overall HD player/disc sales.

Whereas all these issues may or may not be true, they are all potential explanations for limiting the functionality of the scaling of video media; however, they are insufficient for explaining the failure of Sony to enable game developers the ability to scale game content.

With game content in mind, a second set of conspiracy theories focusing solely on games typically hold the view that: (a) Sony wanted to have developers develop games at 1080p and (b) scaling was not allowed as an incentive to ensure the development of games at their maximum resolution.

If we look at the first set of conspiracy theories they don't go well with what Darknight has said as all these reasons strictly pertain to video playback features beyond the scope of what video game developers are doing. The second set of conspiracy theories do pertain to developers and may have merit, but we must recall that Darknight said there was access to the scalar in initial development kits and that games using the scalar would not be certified. This seems to indicate another reason to forbid the use of the scalar which maybe more technical - that is pragmatic.

The more technical reasons for the not being able to use the scalar may vary, but also may reflect issues pertaining to conspiracy theories. First, there is the possibility that Sony's desire to have everyone program games for 1080p and not use the scalar had the unintended consequence of making developer use 720p with the inability to scale it to 1080i/p. Sony may have also not fully implemented the scaling feature since they originally thought all games would be at 1080p and it would be easy to downscale the game. Thus, they may have simply slacked on full implementation of the scalar as they thought games would only need to be downscaled and they had other more pressing issues before launch. This lack of full implementation also seems to be present in video playback as has been noted.

A second potential technical issue is that there could have been scalar support in the SDK, but there was some sort of scalar production problem in which not all scalars work properly and a software solution is needed for those scalars that are not up to specification (many have speculated this). Developers may have been able to use the scalar, but Sony would not certify the game because it would not run properly on all systems. This could be why there are software/limited scalar solutions being presented as this maybe the only solution that works universally.

Lastly, one last technical issue may simply have been that Sony simply wasn't done with the System Software and hadn't fully implemented the use of the scalar for both video and games. They may have wanted a common solution and weren't there yet as of launch. We've heard a lot about DVD scaling in the future release of the March software update, perhaps Sony was afraid that there maybe some sort of conflict if games were handling scaling individually and a later update changed the way in which the system software accessed the scalar. The absence of full support for the scalar in games could reflect that Sony is still unsure of precisely how they are going to implement system wide support for scaling function in both video and games or the degree to which they even can -whether this be for some technical issue pertaining to the hardware or some technical issue pertaining to the HDMI specification.

This, off course is pure conjecture as I have no knowledge beyond what has been posted in the forum. Since Darknight is unable to disclose much for legal reasons, perhaps he has a cold and could cough once if it is conspiracy theory oriented, cough twice if it is purely technical, or cough three times if it is some combination of the two? I'll even provide the glass of water to help sooth his throat afterwards.



W. Sylvan

Oh, the Xbots think the unified shader model makes it SOOOOO much better than the RSX. Not true. It makes it a little more flexible, maybe. Otherwise they are very very similar in terms of performance, with the PS3 coming out way ahead in the CPU dept, assuming all SPEs are used fully (and they aren't even close to doing that yet).

USM IS better than RSX. There's a reason why the new Nvidia cards use it.

I've been here for the whole thing since the beginning and I've read and respect your thoughts long before I bothered to post that out of a weak moment of frustration. Unfortunately, this is such a stupid and non-sensical situation to be in at this point with the proposed post-launch solution being more convoluted than "here is the scaler, now do it" that I'm just not willing to believe anymore. Call it their poor handling of marketing communications or whatever you want, but bottom line, when I see something similar happening in life with everything that's gone on around this issue 99% of the time it's less than accurate, sidestepping, and butt covering. 1% of the time it turns out to be some rediculous issue and poor communication which brought about a given set of circumstances.

Thinking this over, I simply can't believe that Sony would be in this position at this point in time over the same stupid issue which plagued Xbox1 HD games since they started popping up what 5 years ago now. I also don't understand their communications and handling of the issue nor the solution proposed if hardware scaling in the traditional sense of the word was available and free to use. That's just my opinion but I've seen too much BS in life to bite on the 1%. I'll alter my opinion as more info is released, it's not anti-Sony or PS3, any company, person or product would face the same doubt from me under similar circumstances (I know I'm not the only skeptic seeing how this has gone). I just happened to rehash it all in my head as someone bumped the thread and realized how rediculous it is and how many times I've seen similar handling of issues before.

The problem is there is A LOT that goes on in the game industry that the public never really finds out about that would blow peoples minds to see how screwed up or how funny situations can be. I would say probably 75% of the stuff that happens behind closed doors never gets out to the general public but often are told amongst friends in the industry. So it's hard to sit here sometimes and read forums like this about the wild speculation which often is way off the mark and not be able to comment on it.

Sony and most other companies are not going to sit here and try to baby the Internet and dispell every single mistruth or misinformation that is spread. It's a waste of their time and their resources. The Internet gaming community may all be up in arms about the scaler issue but the average person probably isn't and that is their main focus when it comes to damage control.

There are always going to be clueless people who cry foul over everything and even if Sony came out and claimed we have a hardware scaler, there still would be doubt and conspiracy theories so why even bother? If anything to try to dispell it now would be almost admitting publically that there was a problem.

Look at their OS/firmware updates. Notice there are some things that get fixed but are never mentioned? Notice how 1.5 never addresses the backward compatibility issue people were complaining about yet we all know it's fixed now. Again, the same thing applies here. It's about picking your battles and focusing your efforts on it.

I wish I could disclose concrete info, but I can't. There is a hardware scaler, there is a logical reason to why the situation happen, and now developers can use it in some form to bypass the issues that non 720p compatible owners had. Based on this, shouldn't some of you just accept it and move on? Developers know what they can do now and the issue is now pretty much a non issue. Other than me taking a digital picture of myself holding a printout of the sdk documentation next to a PS3 devkit, even if I did disclose everything, people still would cast doubt. Even with the picture I bet there still would be doubt....

I agree with you to the extent that Sony is not going to address every single negative comment raised about the PS3 on the Internet because it would be counter productive and would probably backfire. Although, I disagree with you on the actions Sony took after Microsoft performed a dog and pony show to show off their ANA scaler when Microsoft got wind of the potential for a quick PR win. This is further proof that Sony's PR department is not connected to its head. I have never seen a PR department do more dis-service to the company it's supposed to be promoting. Whenever Sony is challenged by Microsoft and they know internally they have an answer that will shut them up then they need to step up to the plate and swing back. The biggest problem with the PS3 is not the technology or the price point, but rather the mis-steps of the PR department and the contentious and bewildering remarks by Sony executives.

As for the dissemination of developer information to the general public in regards to this matter I find it hard to believe that you cannot even disclose the location of the hardware scaler due to the NDA. Yes, you know more about the constraints of the Sony NDA then I, but I really doubt that you would be violating the NDA by simply verifying the location of the hardware scalers to prove beyond a doubt that they do indeed exist. So, with that said, what chip on the motherboard are they located?

No one is denying that the USM architecture is more advantageous than fixed pipelines, but the advantage is minimal when you compare the pro's and con's of the Xenos and RSX. And whatever short comings the RSX has can easily be filled by allocating a spare SPE to aid the RSX. In this scenario, the union of SPE's and the RSX can achieve results that surpass what is capable on the Xenos.

As for the notion of the Xenos being DX10 compliant because of the UMD architecture - well we all know how that turned out. In the end, the Xenos is just another DX9 chip regardless of the lame MEMEXPORT spin placed on it.

If we only cared about how fun the games are this topic would never have happened!

Because it adds value to the system and people do pay attention. How can you read this whole thread and still think no one cares? Like truespeed said, Microsoft made sure they showed off their scaler to everyone and there is a reason for that.

I've seen developers say they hate when gamers ask technical questions. Well thats just too bad because this is the state of gaming and with all the competition, people want to know what they are getting. If your hardware is missing functionality that the competitor has, gamers will find out and it will sell poorly as a result.

Furthermore, you cannot send out a beta product like the PS3 without any communication on the issues. Thats just ridiculous. I could maybe see if they sent out a fully functional, packaged product but they didn't. Anyone who thinks they can sell a $600 product with bugs and limited functionality, then update the firmware without any communication is totally out of touch and their sales will suffer because of it.

I hear you. I just can't imagine that at this point they wouldn't be "allowed" to use a scaler within the machine for a known common problem (you'd want to address this and have it figured before dev kits I'd think) and when they do allow it's use it winds up being partial or 'in some form'. Not that it can't be the case but it sets off every BS alarm in the book and it makes you wonder what they are hiding. By the way this is common in all industries, no one really does it right consistently that I've seen at least outside of small companies.

Like I said, it's just an opinion and due to the 1000's of other times I've seen smoke and mirrors, I have to hold it until there's more info. Better disclosure from SNE or otherwise could change it in an instant, but this situation, it's timing, the murkyness, the proposed solution, and it's handling doesn't warrant trust.

What I was suggesting was that the scaler might not be legally compatible with with HDMI 1.3. Seeing that the 1.3 rev was finalized in DEC 2006, Sony may not wish to risk decertification so the work around was produced. It has nothing to do with increasing HD player / disc sales.

So here is a question. If developers will be able to access the scaler now, will I be able to play R:FOM or Fight Night at a higher resolution with some sort of patch from SONY? or will this need to come from individual developers for their own games? or are games already out stuck where they reside?

I am sorry if I went beyond what you said; however, many have elaborated on this in forming their theories as to why scaling was not implemented as part of some grander Blu-ray conspiracy led by Cancer Man.

Personally, I think your notion is far too simple and it must be an Illuminati conspiracy of the highest order.

I think Darknight has a point in terms of a fix is a fix and we really have no idea on our end. Notice the system update 1.51 provides enhancements for PS 3 game. Seems vague enough, doesn't it? On the consumers end, does it matter if the scaling is happening through the use of a hardware scaler or whether a magical PS 3 Fairy is enchanting the video output? Hell, we could call her ANA. What matters is that one way or another the games look the best they can given a particular consumer's HDTV unit.

What is apparent throughout this is that this generation of consoles is far more competitive than the last one - especially considering the success of the Wii. If Sony were to let everyone know with each update that the scaler was "getting" there but not yet ready for prime time then every announcement could be used by Microsoft as a marketing tool to say that the PS 3 wasn't ready and for the "true" HD video game experience the Xbox 360 is the answer.

Look at what happens every time some mere mention of a scaler is posted from an apparent "official" source who supposedly has access to privileged information - the discussion boards light up like crazy with all sorts of conjecture and people also use it as an opportunity to attack Sony. When Sony didn't provide any additional comment in early December after their retraction of an easy firmware fix, things in the forums cooled down a bit conveniently for the holiday season. Also notice that it is not Sony that has been saying anything about scaling as of late.

The sad thing about all this is that we don't all have the functionality we'd like out of our PS 3's, we don't know how soon we'll have it, and all our discussion about it helps Microsoft more than it does us because in the end we don't know anything more about the scaler than we did with the first post.

W. Sylvan

Oh, I'm not saying Sony does everything right or the ir PR is the best. Everyone has their misteps and they make several misteps so it's not like Sony is the only company here in the industry that does questionable PR moves. Like how about the stupid things that Bernie Stolar says all the time. How about the "under promise and over deliver" comment MS made about backward compatibility? Sometimes the best course of action is to simply to ignore the situation when you're egged on. It's like being picked on in school, you don't fight everytime someone calls you a name.

As for pointing out where the scaler is on the motherboard, I don't even know where it is in the hardware. We don't get that type of info that disects the motherboard. We get block diagrams that show memory busses and an understanding of what the registers do on the chip, but not an actual tear down of what the design of the board is. That's irrelevent to a developer. We just need to know what the hardware can do, how things are organized and how to do it. There's no need for a developer to know where on the motherboard a hardware scaler is. If you search around, you may be able to find PS2 SDK documentation floating on the net to get a better idea of what SDK documentation is like for a console hardware.

I wanna know this too.. anyone have any idea?

Developers will need to patch their own games.

Does this mean that Motorstorm can be patched before its released?

I hope that is one of the reasons behind the lag in US realese (online being the big one) and I've been thinking about Motorstorm in particular since they announced a solution. That's a killer game and it would be a damn shame to have another A Game title that can't handle 1080i. Sony needs its A title exclusives to start differentiating itself and they don't need any more grief to accompany them or to potentially send a message than alienates a segment of the US market where the battle will be fierce.

Thanks for the quick reply.
So the patches must be written by the original developers, which is fine with me, as long as they can be written for games already out.
I would imagine that the developers of R:FOM might choose to do this and thereby sell even more games before all the competition arrives.
Sadly I think they would rather work on the new version, but if they were planning on having new levels available, either for free or for purchase in the SONY store, would it be possible/feasable to include a patch with these new levels?

Is Sonic the first game to take advantage of this scaler? I found this thread in the official Playstation forums:

http://boardsus.playstation.com/play...cending&page=1

Now I am scared.... Does this mean VF5 will be 'rendered' at 720P, but they are upscaling it to 1080P? Same for Tekken?

I certainly hope not. The texture quality is night and day different when rendered at 1080P.....

Any more insight on this?

Is the horizontal scaling/stretching the limit on hardware scaling?
Is the hardware scaler part of the toshiba parted IO chip or RSX? If it's the later does it introduce any performance hindrance?

I'm curious, because it seems most of the 720p games supporting upscaling are doing it on an independent basis via the cell to varying degrees of success. The main benefit of a hardware scaler being having all games capable of using it, it seems to be more of a misnomer in this sense.


opinions? insight? anyone?

The PS3 has been out close to 18 months now and we are still having the same problem. I have a couple of questions. Most importantly why has this thread all but died out? There was one post in october 07', but before that everything ended a year ago this time.

In post 216 Darknight stated in the last paragraph:
"Developers know what they can do now and the issue is now pretty much a non issue."

In the year long hiatus of this threads activity, no real progress has been made. Yes, there are games that support 1080 such as ratchet, uncharted, ut3 etc... but there are also many games that still do not support 1080.

There is a thread on the official playstation boards that still has a good deal of life and has new posts daily. it is

//boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=ps3&message.id=1543693#M1543693

This brings to to the start of a 300 page thread with 3000 replies on this topic and gamers frustrations. As of this writing the final page of the thread is as follows:
//boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=ps3&thread.id=1543693&view=by_date_ascending&page=300

What i dont understand is how dvd's can be upscaled, ps1 games can be upscaled, ps2 games can be upscaled but ps3 games cannot.

recently, people have been discussing this issue on criterions forum thread because of the lack of 1080 compatibility in burnout paradise on the ps3. the thread is at

criteriongames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=127&st=0&sk=t&sd=a


A employee at criterion had this to say on the subject:


by HamishY@Criterion on Mon Feb 25, 2008 12:32 pm

We are dedicated to providing players with the best game possible within our means. We chose 720p because it gave the best performance and results for the majority of people. I presume you were wanting to improve the quality of the experience by going to 1080i, but in reality it would significantly affect it and not in a good way. Both the memory constraints and the performance cost mean that for our particular game the trade-off is not beneficial either to frame-rate or graphical quality. We will continue to look at ways we can achieve 1080i without serious compromise, but as it stands right now it is not looking likely. Even an extra 1-2% rendering cost would start causing significant framerate problems.

I hope you understand.

HamishHamishY@Criterion

Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Jan 23, 2008 10:49 am

After further posting Hamish posted again stating this

by HamishY@Criterion on Wed Feb 27, 2008 3:16 pm

Hi tibbar110,

To clarify, the way that X360 does the upscale is part of the video interface / DAC, so essentially the upscale is free to the extent that the developer has no control over it - the OS will just resize to what the output needs. On PS3, you can upscale, but only as part of the conversion from the "rendering buffer" to the back buffer. The back / front buffers have to be correctly configured for the output mode, which for 1080i/p is a bigger memory footprint than for 720p. In addition, the scale is not free as it goes via the GPU. This is not to say it is particularly expensive, but it is NOT free. So essentially we have to pay a rendering and a memory cost. In our case, both of these costs are critical so we would have to gimp other parts of the game to achieve 1080i. The question is whether doing this to get to 1080i would actually end up looking better than what you have now with super anti-aliased 480i/p or even better with anti-aliased 720p. In our eyes, the compromise is not worth it as things stand now.

In response to others in this thread,

1) There is no magic bullet that just takes 5 minutes to turn on if we had only read the manual e.g. some super HW scaling chip. It does not exist.
2) If we find a way to make the game look better, we will.
3) Because other games have enough spare rendering time / memory to support 1080i doesn't automatically mean we do. We have different constraints than those games and we are pushing the hardware pretty hard.
4) The back of the box of ALL PS3 games clearly state which HD modes they support and we comply with all the Sony TRCs on this matter.

If we DO manage to find a way to do this in the future, be in no doubt that we will gladly update the game to make it better.

I hope this answers everyone's questions.

HamishHamishY@Criterion

Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Jan 23, 2008 10:49 am


This is still a huge issue, and everyday a ps3 is bought a early adopter of an hd tv is affected and did not know they would be. Lets get this thread going again.

Sorry for not being able to put in actual url, but site would not allow until atleast 3 posts were written, I am in a hurry to get somewhere so could not.

I guess this thread has died down because poeple with the issue [me] have decided to accept it and live with it until a new TV set supporting 720 inputs is purchased (I play Motorstomr at 480p on my 1080i set and still have lots of fun). With the explosion of sales in HDTV sets in the last couple of years, as time passes on, us with 1080i only TVs will become more and more insignificant in the eyes of developers and Sony.

Or people have just bought another HDTV set to go around this issue.

It's pretty pointless to discuss this anymore. It's obvious by now that the PS3 doesn't have a scaler in the same sense that the 360 does. Hardware or software, whatever they have is not very flexible and probably cannot be fixed without a new hardware revision at a minimum. So unless you consider a good solution to be you shelling out for a brand new PS3 someday, you'll probably just have to learn to live with the PS3 as it is.

Darknight insisted the whole time that there was indeed a hardware scaler and that Devs simply were not allowed to use it for some reason. Maybe that's the case (no one ever identified the chip) but obviously it's a non-issue. The Devs can make use of software scaling that goes along a single axis if they use a prescribed resolution - and that scaling has a performance hit.




Easy, everything is done in software with enough margin for scaling. PS3 games are the most taxing and many can't spare the margin (I want to say 12% is the difference between 720p and the 1080i scalable dev resolution). 1080p is a much bigger hit so they offer the 12% premium to 720p to make it more achievable. We've all accepted that 1080 rendered games being ubiquitous is a next-next gen thing despite all the hype that was made about it.



This is what I was talking about from the Dev and the 12%.


They've done all they can. With more displays supporting 720p this issue gets smaller and smaller for them. For whatever reason Sony didn't include a scaling chip. My own theory is that their design changed part way through with this as part of the fallout or the Cell wasn't able to do what they thought and they just kept their mouth shut (i.e. the original was no GPU and two Cells from what I recall and I do remember when they were talking about 1080p on two separate monitors with 2 HDMI outs, maybe they never realized they might not get 1080p at all on many games). Never buy the hype in this industry, there's always something shady behind it or just a lie in this case as the claim obviously didn't resemble the truth in any way.

I still have a 2003 Mits which doesn't accept 720p, neither did Pioneer or Hitachi at the time so top 3 and Sony didn't accept 720p shortly before that, and from a picture quality standpoint (which is the whole reason for a display) I'll put it up against anything on display floors today. Sony goofed and this is the result. Oh well. Everyone bitched already (myself included) and the horizontal software scaling was the solution. The problem is that there really is no solution outside a hardware scaler and they aren't going to redesign. There is always the option of purchasing one for yourself but good ones aren't cheap (think multiple PS3s in price). Much easier to integrate a cheap hardware chip with the most compatible HD resolution there is. Too late though so this is what's left.

Thanks all for the info...i still find this hard to believe however....especially since turok released without 1080 support, but was patched within the first week to support 1080...so much for "HD DNA HD is in our DNA" SONY just wants to screw early adopters...every other hd cable box and such upscales. CHRIS fb I totally hear you about putting your tv up against todays show room models and your having a better picture...thats the same way i feel about my panasonic. later all.. and if you want to find a list of all 1080 capable games head to the thread on the ps3 boards I mentioned in 1st post

From what I've read on the issue the 360 doesn't have a dedicated scaler like the ANA that was one suggested. It is all done internally via the ATi GPU.

It wouldn't actually surprise me if it were done via the overlay video layer which all graphic cards have. That's why 360s have that milky smooth look, whereas PS3 tend to look more like a PC very sharp very crisp (but also unforgiving)

For the record, I don't credit that at all. MSFT came out on the record and clearly made that statement about Hana/Ana when going after the PS3. That's easy as all hell to check and people have examined the physical chip. Obviously it's not a high end chip (maybe what you are seeing), but coming out in public and making that kind of statement is far too easy to disprove and have thrown right back in your face to serious credibility harm i.e. they aren't that dumb. MSFT is sly, talks in circles and puts its best foot forward but an outright lie that's easy to peg isn't generally their style. The hardware is prolific so its not exactly rocket science to get one, crack open the case and examine the chip, plus scalers have been around forever so the technology is reasonably well known.