360 = 1080p

lestat · Post by **lestat** » 21 Sep 2006 12:47 am

Talez wrote:It is disabled for gaming. If HDCP isn't enabled it falls back to an unencrypted link. If ICT is enabled then it'll downsample a BD movie.

That's what I'm hoping will be the case Talez, if so i can still use my current dell and won't bother upgrading since i won't be watching movies on it. I'll save the bucks for my next big screen 60+ inch 1080p panel purchase.

Peppermint Lounge · Post by **Peppermint Lounge** » 21 Sep 2006 09:22 am

So funny that something as innocuous as 1080p is fanboy fodder at messageboards everywhere because it's in one console's specs and not the other. It's just a technical specification that will gradually build in relevance during this hardware cycle. Reading fanboys at Eurogamer harp on about noone having 1080p capable sets therefore it's irrelevant, unwanted and over-priced is mind-boggling. These people can't be reasoned with, they can't be bargained with, they don't feel pity or remore or fear and they absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

Please excuse me that quote just spilled out as I was typing. It seemed to fit pretty well so I went with it.

mech · Post by **mech** » 21 Sep 2006 09:30 am

lestat wrote:Well my dell 2405(1200p monitor) can accept 1080-1200p over vga. So i'm really curious to see if the internal scaler is better than one inside the dell. I'm guessing the internal scaler should be better than the dell. Unfortunately the dell doesn't do HDCP via it's dvi port so vga is more useful to me than 1080p over hdmi, if they enable encryption over the hdmi link.

My plasma has dvi(hdcp) but it's only 1024x768 in native res so 1080p is useless for that panel. It only accepts up to 1080i over the dvi link too.

Oh really? Shit yeah, I'm hooking my PS3 up to my 2405

Does it support 1080p through the DVI port? HDCP doesn't matter there.

Heh, didn't realise I actually had a 1080p capable monitor, awesome

Kabal · Post by **Kabal** » 21 Sep 2006 09:37 am

I still think most games will prefer to be 720p and use the extra fill rate for you know.. better graphics.

1080p on either of the consoles seriously limits the amount of overdraw you can do while still getting an acceptable framerate. My guess is it'll be like 720p and 1080i on the old xbox.. sure it can do it and the couple of games that do it look great, but theyre hardly pushing the xbox graphically in other ways.

Talez · Post by **Talez** » 21 Sep 2006 09:54 am

Kabal wrote:1080p on either of the consoles seriously limits the amount of overdraw you can do while still getting an acceptable framerate.

1999 called. They want their graphics chip debate back.

PS3 has an absolutely stupid amount of shading and rasterising power and won't be limited by fill rate at 1080p, Xbox 360 has deferred tile based rendering (now where have I heard that rendering technique before?

) which strips redundant geometry before rendering it.

Hell, your biggest problem with 1080p on a 360 is that a 1080p frame won't fit into the 10MB eDRAM without AA, little alone with 2xAA turned on.

GreyWizzard · Post by **GreyWizzard** » 21 Sep 2006 09:57 am

So basically it won't make the gameplay any better. Just look cleaner and crisper. Okay cool, I'm going back to my ascii based nethack games. Man I wish they would release that at 1080p, could you imagine how sharp the ascii characters would be...

Kabal · Post by **Kabal** » 21 Sep 2006 10:09 am

Talez wrote:PS3 has an absolutely stupid amount of shading and rasterising power and won't be limited by fill rate at 1080p, Xbox 360 has deferred tile based rendering (now where have I heard that rendering technique before? ) which strips redundant geometry before rendering it.

Shows how much i've been paying attention to whats in these things.

Deferred tile based rendering? Dreamcast, is that you!?

lestat · Post by **lestat** » 21 Sep 2006 10:26 am

mech wrote: Oh really? Shit yeah, I'm hooking my PS3 up to my 2405

Does it support 1080p through the DVI port? HDCP doesn't matter there.

Heh, didn't realise I actually had a 1080p capable monitor, awesome

Yeah i've been able to run 1920x1080p via dvi no problems on the dell. I'm gonna try 1080p over vga tonight, the specs say it can handle up to 1920x1200p over vga. But yeah the dell is an awesome monitor, it's my permanent gaming monitor.

Talez wrote: Hell, your biggest problem with 1080p on a 360 is that a 1080p frame won't fit into the 10MB eDRAM without AA, little alone with 2xAA turned on.

That's why you'll need to use predicated tiling. But one thing the 360 has an advantage over the ps3 is raw framebuffer bandwidth. 32gb vs 20.8gb. Also Talez i can't believe you think that using AA @ 1080p is an option for these gpu's. If they get top shelf games with all effects actually running at 1080p that will be just be an amazing feat within itself, Asking for AA on top of that is just crazy.

mech · Post by **mech** » 21 Sep 2006 10:46 am

Pffft, Xbox has 32gb/s to its 10meg of eDRAM, which is only big enough to store a single 1080p framebuffer, no Z-Buffer, and no second framebuffer. Excluding the eDRAM on the 360, the PS3 has heaps more memory bandwidth to play with because of the split memory architecture - the graphics chip can read and write to both its memory and main memory if it wants to, giving it up to 40gb/s of bandwidth (with 512mb of memory available to play with as it wants).

I'm not entirely convinced about the 10 meg of eDRAM and what difference it makes, I'd need more info. Sounds like it wouldn't be much use in speeding things up at 1080p, but I could be wrong...

mech · Post by **mech** » 21 Sep 2006 10:54 am

Joystiq spoke briefly with Shane Kim, General Manager of Microsoft Game Studios, about their announcements in Tokyo today. First off, Kim clarified that, while the software patch would upscale all content to resolutions as high as 1080p, Microsoft themselves had no plans to produce gaming content taking advantage of this ability. He was similarly convinced that very few other developers would see the value in producing 1080p games, with the singular exception of Sony's first-party studios, eager to validate the value of the capability.

GreyWizzard · Post by **GreyWizzard** » 21 Sep 2006 10:56 am

I can totally understand what he is saying. I think the only 1080p games you are going to see on the PS3 will be big name first party games, and big 3rd party devs. So probably 80% of the games will be made for 720p.

mech · Post by **mech** » 21 Sep 2006 10:58 am

Probably. I won't be surprised if it'll be like how Xbox supported 720p, but very few games actually ran it.

Talez · Post by **Talez** » 21 Sep 2006 11:10 am

lestat wrote:That's why you'll need to use predicated tiling. But one thing the 360 has an advantage over the ps3 is raw framebuffer bandwidth. 32gb vs 20.8gb.

Actually it has 32GB/sec to the eDRAM where the back buffer is normally rendered. The front buffer will actually be in the UMA area so you're also going to need to blit every frame from the eDRAM to the UMA. I'm not sure why you need 32GB/sec to the framebuffer though since a 720p60 stream is only 211MB/sec.

Also, both have a raw transfer rate of 22.4GB/sec to their respective graphic storage areas since they both use 700MHz memory @ 256-bit wide.

Also Talez i can't believe you think that using AA @ 1080p is an option for these gpu's. If they get top shelf games with all effects actually running at 1080p that will be just be an amazing feat within itself, Asking for AA on top of that is just crazy.

A man can dream

lestat · Post by **lestat** » 21 Sep 2006 11:24 am

Talez wrote:
lestat wrote:That's why you'll need to use predicated tiling. But one thing the 360 has an advantage over the ps3 is raw framebuffer bandwidth. 32gb vs 20.8gb.
Actually it has 32GB/sec to the eDRAM where the back buffer is normally rendered. The front buffer will actually be in the UMA area so you're also going to need to blit every frame from the eDRAM to the UMA. I'm not sure why you need 32GB/sec to the framebuffer though since a 720p60 stream is only 211MB/sec.

Guys I was talking with respect to real actual rendering bandwidth available. That’s why I said 32gb on 360, because All rendering is done in the edram module which has 32gb from the gpu core to the edram on the 360. The 20.8gb number I’m using for RSX is there because when it comes to rendering the RSX can only render to it’s GDDR3 vram pool. So at most it has 20.8gb available for rendering. If you totally source all your textures from the cell memory pool and don’t touch vram for texturing, (which means wasted texture space).

Also 360 has always had to put it’s front buffer in system ram, the video out chip can only read from system ram to output video. So tiling just makes that output of the front buffer a multi step process instead of in 1 hit.

Also, both have a raw transfer rate of 22.4GB/sec to their respective graphic storage areas since they both use 700MHz memory @ 256-bit wide.

RSX got downgraded recently to 500 core / 650 memory remember, it’s actually 20.8gb now.

mech · Post by **mech** » 21 Sep 2006 11:54 am

Overall PS3 has more memory bandwidth available and with clever programming, I'm sure that will come to light later on. 360 is quite limited in some ways with the shared 22Gig/s main memory.

The 20.8gb number I’m using for RSX is there because when it comes to rendering the RSX can only render to it’s GDDR3 vram pool.

Are you sure about that? I was reading that it could read and write to both memory pools, which makes it a pretty flexible setup.

I do agree with what you wrote elsewhere though, the 360 and the PS3 are so similar it's not funny. I think the PS3 might be slightly more powerful (perhaps quite a bit if people get a grip on the SPEs), but whether we'll see a noticeable difference is another matter.

Talez · Post by **Talez** » 21 Sep 2006 12:04 pm

lestat wrote:RSX got downgraded recently to 500 core / 650 memory remember, it’s actually 20.8gb now.

You're still treating that unconfirmed rumour from that Sony hater on the inquirer website backed up only by random message board users throughout the net as FACT!?

lestat · Post by **lestat** » 21 Sep 2006 02:02 pm

B3D members in the know broke the triangle setup and ROP downgrades. I see no reason why not to believe those people considering they were right 2 times before. But if you makes you happy you can have that extra 50mhz back and pretend all is fine.

mech · Post by **mech** » 21 Sep 2006 03:37 pm

Yeah had a look at B3D and it looks fairly legit that the RSX has been downgraded (but not Cell as some people have mentioned in the past).

You didn't address my post before lestat

Also on Beyond3D - internal PSU for the PS3. W00t!

mech · Post by **mech** » 21 Sep 2006 04:41 pm

ffs lestat.

General Chaos · Post by **General Chaos** » 21 Sep 2006 04:57 pm

I think he's in shock at the pre alpha microtransaction PS3 Diode/free online play subsidy system...

lestat · Post by **lestat** » 21 Sep 2006 05:06 pm

mech wrote:Yeah had a look at B3D and it looks fairly legit that the RSX has been downgraded (but not Cell as some people have mentioned in the past).

Yeah there were some recent FCC test documents leaked that showed the final shipping box was tested at 3.2ghz for the cell. So cell hasn't got a downgrade. Although i recently heard of talk another spe might of bitten the dust with regards to the os sucking up another one, but i doubt it's true.

Mech wrote: Also on Beyond3D - internal PSU for the PS3. W00t!

Yeah it looked apparent from the recent vids of final units the power supply was internal. Although I'm not sure if that's a good thing or bad thing. Internal power supply means more heat and external power supplies are easier to replace if they die. But it is tidier not having a powerbrick hanging around.

Talez · Post by **Talez** » 21 Sep 2006 05:13 pm

I hate internal PSUs personally. Internal PSU means more heat which means more fans which means more noise.

Give me a power brick like the 360's any day of the week.

mech · Post by **mech** » 21 Sep 2006 05:16 pm

So cell hasn't got a downgrade. Although i recently heard of talk another spe might of bitten the dust with regards to the os sucking up another one, but i doubt it's true.

Nah, O/S can request a second SPE apparently, so you have to do a context switch, but this happens on PSP and 360 already apparently, and is no big deal.

Anyway, how about the whole RSX framebuffer thing?

flipswitch · Post by **flipswitch** » 21 Sep 2006 05:45 pm

Talez wrote:I hate internal PSUs personally. Internal PSU means more heat which means more fans which means more noise.

Give me a power brick like the 360's any day of the week.

Um, you obviously havn't heard how loud the x360 is even without an internal PSU .It's a bit like a jet taking off and you're on the run way.

Cletus · Post by **Cletus** » 21 Sep 2006 05:53 pm

Mine sounds like it has gravel in the engine.