Be Excellent To Each Other

Yes, but having the same details and effects at a lower resolution is worse than having them at a higher resolution.

Which makes things like shooters ultra realistic, but almost unplayable...
I spent most of my time in whizzo-graphics-BF3 in a haze of confusion, wondering what the fuck was going on, and then dying.

Why would the details and effects be the same? I firmly believe that if this generation hadn't been chasing after pixels like they did, games would look much better for it right now.

What we've come to accept as "realistic" on a computer game is nothing like what real things actually look like, though.

Good point. Ultra-psuedo-realistic then

"Nothing like" is a hell of a stretch. I'm not going to go Googling for screenshots from stuff like Crysis and Battlefield but there's a lot of high-end games that can render genuinely realistic looking, say, jungle and desert scenes with enough grunt behind them.

Agreed. People are nowhere near though.

People are always going to be a challenge because aside from making them 'look' realistic you need to capture the subtle movement of faces which could consume shitloads of computing power on it's own. Motion capture of body movement has made things a lot better in that respect, and some of the stuff Rockstar and Quantic Dream have done are interesting ideas, but the uncanney valley is very likely to be the final frontier in terms of creating 'realistic' computer generated stuff.

Some of the architectural stuff made in the Cyengine is gorgeous.

Quick example

And dropping this obsession with resolution would free up a shiload of computing power.

Also screenshots of jungles are all well and good, but real jungles move.

I don't really have an argument for you (especially without any access to YouTube at work) except to say that I think you're purposely ignoring genuinely impressive looking games in order to better make your argument here. Also that regardless of how well animated something was, or how full of 'stuff' a given scene was, it would still look like ass at lower resolutions despite your apples to oranges comparison with DVD video.

The cutscenes for Diablo 3 are the most realistic-looking depictions of people I've ever seen. My jaw was dropping when watching those on the PS3.

Even if the argument "resolution doesn't matter much" is true, isn't 1080 pretty much the standard nowadays?

We all know how everything looks much worse when isn't being displayed with the monitor/tv native resolution. Making the games display at that resolution should be one of the top priorities for Microsoft and for the developers.

I'd suggest 'perhaps a tiny bit' rather than 'much' in that sentence.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present "the problem".

Can you honestly say that games played on the 360 look better than DVDs on the 360?

Better is always relative, but i'm sure that the image of a game running at 1080p is sharper.

Prettiness aside I much prefer playing games at higher resolution. You can see things to shoot further away or see further down the road. Just makes the whole thing more fun. Resolution matters less with films because the relevant parts aren't typically small and in the distance, but even so some films look much better on the big screen when you can see more.

the DVD looks more *real* though. There's an awful lot more to realism than resolution which is why AA, transparency, lighting and shadowing, physics and ragdolls and volumetrics, texture art, filtering and higher but more importantly _constant_ framerate have seen so much emphasis since the first geforce.

raw pixel count has next to nothing to do with it, it's attacking the wrong part of the brain and eye. Or the right part in the wrong way.

DVDs looking "better" has much to do with the natural anti-aliasing and motion blur inherent in the filming process. Upping the res in games is one way of solving the problem of "jaggies" which is arguably cheaper and better than artificial anti-aliasing. Similarly for frame rates vs motion blur.

I really don't understand this whole DVD comparision thing. How can i compare a movie to a game? And how being more "real" has anything to do with looking better?? And to be honest, i prefer to look at games that are very "unreal" in my monitor native resolution, like Spelunky, Deadlight or Limbo than to look at almost every movie. Reality is boring anyway.

You can compare a movie to a game by looking at it with your eyes.

This doesn't have to be about realism, it just was because it started with idiots deciding the Xbone was dooooooomed because COD wouldn't have as many dots on the screen as it should have.

But it's a big issue, 720p is an abominable resolution for an alleged 'next-gen' title to be running at, and will look pretty gash on a big 1080p telly.

This is current-gen performance out of a premium priced alleged 'next-gen' console, XBone is coming in seriously underpowered, and that most certainly isn't reflected in the price.

Still, everyone enjoy that mandatory price-inflating Kinect now....

But with everything else being equal, having a higher resolution is preferable. Have you seen the PS4 v XBO Digital Foundry comparison? The difference is night and day.

As an addendum to your point, yes, you can compare them, but it isn't going to be favourable in any games favour. Even now, with digital technology, "film" is frequently shot at quite slow exposures, which will not freeze the action in every frame of the film running through the cameras gate, particularly if there is continuous movement in the scenes being shot. The brain naturally compensates for this as we can't freeze images of moving stuff either. That's at what? 24fps. So the blurry single frames are seen as a moving image whole and not at a frame by frame level.

I'm prepared to be wrong about this, but do games render blurred or sharp images per frame? They still don't need mega resolution, but they do need the grunt to compensate with effects for the fact that they're essentially rendering rapid static images, which will look hard and artificial to us. Ergo, effects and frame rate are probably more important than absolute resolution. If anything, super high resolution is an assault on the eyes and needs even more effects laid over them to make them appear natural.

Sure, higher res is better if everything else is the same. But the sacrifices that are made to hit the magic 1080p aren't worth it, in my opinion.

@myp and AE.

I honestly have no real idea what anyone's actually talking about in this thread any more and I strongly suspect there are about four separate conversations going on where everyone thinks they're responding to everyone else but in actual fact are all talking about totally different things.

I'm mainly agreeing with Grim...

I play games in 1800p anyway, so this whole argument is moot.

can't argue, feign confusion. Check.

Wuh?

I still maintain that art direction is way way more important than resolution, polygon counts and whatever, and actually having a decent game under that matters more than anything.

Who's disagreeing with you? Everyone here surely wants well designed games that also take advantage of the grunt a new hardware generation brings to the party.

I remember thinking at the time I wouldn't care if graphics never got any better after the PS2/Xbox generation. I was obviously an idiot.

Obviously gameplay is king, but looking at a PS2 game now makes my eyes bleed.

I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority here but I still look at some N64 games and think they look good.

Heh, I think the only time I ever looked at a game and though, "Welp, we can pretty much just stop here!" was playing the original Splinter Cell on the PC; the lighting and general 'slickness' of the look of it blew my mind at the time.

And I'm not like a total graphics whore or anything but yeah, games from previous generations are a bit hard to take now. It was part of the reason I never got on with the Wii, we bought House of the Dead: Overkill and it just looked so much like a PC game from 1990 that I couldn't take it.

You need to get Typing of the Dead: Overkill. Same game but in 1080p.

Plus I'm so much better at typing than with light guns.

It's on The List. I'll probably only buy it when it drops right down in price though as it's the kind of game I might well play, enjoy, then never go back to (like the Wii version in fact) because I'm weird. I seem to need games with a genuine and proper 'end' to them to keep me playing; anything score attack-y will lose my interest pretty quickly. I mean I know HOTD:O has actual levels and stuff to progress through but it's more about getting a better score than playing through a story or whatever.

SoulCalibur 2 still looks fantastic, especially running in progressive scan through component. The super smooth 60 fps are a big part of that. It really is a crying shame that developers don't aim for that more often.

Was?

Being an idiot in the past does not exclude me from being/not being an idiot in the presentfuture.

I put this in the CoD thread but I think it is just as deserving here.



It's really good, but skip to the bottom half if you don't care about CoD.

That was embarassing to read. But yes, like the journalist said, it can be read between the lines that the PS4 is better.

Typing of the Dead: Overkill is actually running in 720p, upscaled.

*smashes copy*

LOL.

Framerate and Resolution stuff has actually made it onto the BBC's website

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24834842

It's pretty harsh on the PS4 up top, with the box image and the initial frame-rate complaint. The comments about Xbox resolution are only really gone into at the end of the article.

It would be most amusing if the PS4 gets scaled down too

I've heard rumblings that it has similar framerate problems on Xbox One and PC. It's seemingly poorly optimised all round.

There are quite a few reviews slamming the PC version and its 30 gig download , the Xbox One stuff is all rumors as Microsoft have prevented any reviews of Xbox one stuff going live before next week (but given its basically the same system I'd expect it to be as bad on any system) - theres also a lot of talk about the 'poor' quality and depth of game modes for Ghost-doggies being related to them having to produce a tested and released version for the PC / 360 / PS3 / Wii-U / XBox-One and PS4 all at the same time.