The Long Road To High-Def Gaming

[Attebery]

Please join us in welcoming Wayne Santos as a columnist here at
High-Def Digest. A dedicated gamer from the infancy of the medium,
Wayne is a contributor at IGN and associate editor of Southeast Asian
gaming publication GameAxis. In this new semi-regular column, Wayne
will be discussing a broad range of topics related to High-Def Gaming.
First up: an overview of on the current state of HD gaming, and how we
got here.

Read it here:
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/1590

[LokeSTL]

Welcome Wayne! Can't wait to see what you've got lined up.

[reaper200]

Yeah, greetings Wayne.

I think this new addition is cool although i am annoyed you totally failed to mention the PC considering it's been HD capable for years.

[DLM1POINT5]

Welcome Wayne,
Nice informing article there, keep'em coming. I hope this takes off on here, it'd be nice to have one site i can come to for all my HD needs instead of having to surf around. All we need now is for HDD to change that red tab at the top from HD DVD to HD GAMES!!

[bluetoast]

Welcome Wayne! I look forward to reading your articles.

[Kenshiro]

Welcome to HDD Wayne! You may want to register on the forums to further discuss your article.

I know this is not smackdown material, but the game room here is like a ghost town. Posting in the gaming smackdown gets a lot more traffic.

[vaca]

Nice to see some article on games. Though GT5P is undeniably pretty, I consider this iteration of the iconic racing series to be controversial. Releasing part of a game for 2/3 the price of the full game, only to sell you the full game later leaves a bad taste in the mouths of many.

And of course, I am in the camp that wonders if Polyphony Digital will even do enough with GT5 to put it in another league beyond Forza 2. Regardless of how pretty GT5 is and that it runs at 1080p, content is still king.

In terms of 1080p games, it is true that PS3 has more of them. Yet just because a game's resolution is 1080p does not mean it is graphically superior. A well-made 720p game could be a lot better looking than a poor 1080p game. I don't know off-hand what res Uncharted runs at, but this is an example of quality graphics. Another great example would be Gears of War--not 1080p, but a graphically superior title. Resolution, after all, is not everything. I have always harbored a greater admiration for artistic triumphs such as the PS2 classic Ico or the late great Shenmue on the beloved Dreamcast.

[HT Guru]

Will GT5P have damage on car models? Sony used to say they couldn't have damage because the manufactures would not allow them to. If you look at Forza 2 they have damage and alot of the same cars, it also looks fantastic graphic wise. Has Sony been lying to us all this time or can they just not produce realistic damage? A complete game should feel like you're in the race not just watching it. Hopefully GT5P has better online features than the previous GT4 also.

[Kenshiro]

Originally Posted by HT Guru

If you look at Forza 2 they have damage and alot of the same cars, it also looks fantastic graphic wise.

Forza 2 does NOT have fantastic graphics. Gameplay is great, graphics are very weak.

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/792/792572p3.html

7.0 Graphics
Jaggies, jaggies, and more jaggies. At times, it appears this is LEGO Forza Motorsport 2. The drab colors and weak art design don't help. 60fps is welcome, though.

[bplewis24]

Originally Posted by vaca

Though GT5P is undeniably pretty, I consider this iteration of the iconic racing series to be controversial. Releasing part of a game for 2/3 the price of the full game, only to sell you the full game later leaves a bad taste in the mouths of many.

Did it leave a bad taste in the mouth of gamers for GT4?

And of course, I am in the camp that wonders if Polyphony Digital will even do enough with GT5 to put it in another league beyond Forza 2. Regardless of how pretty GT5 is and that it runs at 1080p, content is still king.

I didn't know such a camp existed that though Forza was on par with Gran Turismo.

Originally Posted by HT Guru

If you look at Forza 2 they have damage and alot of the same cars, it also looks fantastic graphic wise.

Sometimes I wonder if you guys have ever played both franchises to be able to say such things. Forza looks fantastic?

Brandon

[twonunpackmule]

The article has some "mistakes".

Most Dreamcast games were Progressive or "Enhanced". The PS2 was not the first to offer progressive games on a home console.

Also, the SNES actually offered "3D Graphics" with Star Fox being a huge pioneer.

A few other little tidbits....

Other then that it was an interesting read.

[everythingornothing]

Others have pointed out some of the errors, but two things that should have received a mention.
1)Many titles on the 360 that say "1080i" support actually support "1080p" because most of the time there is no difference to the game code (hint:a framebuffer for 1080i is the same size as the one for 1080p). These games were made before the 1080p software patch and before there was a back of the box logo that said "1080p", so there are a lot more games than 3 on that support 1080p on the 360. This somewhat leads into...
2) The biggest problem with HD on the PS3 is that the PS3 has no real hardware video scaler (despite what Sony says) so the PS3 can't output every game at a fixed resolution. This is a problem for many people with certain setups. For instance, older HDTV owners with CRTs have sets that accept a 1080i signal but not 720p. Most PS3 games only support 720p, so those games can only be run at 480p (like Resistance Fall of Man) because that is the only other resolution the games support. The 360 has a hardware scaler, so no matter what the game generates (480p, 720p, 1080p, VGA, etc) it will be output at whatever resolution the console is set to (DVD over component restrictions aside). Constantly switching resolutions can be a huge problem with HDMI on some combinations of TV, receivers, and switches. PS3 titles can only fix the problem one title at a time because of a fundamental design limitation in the PS3. Given that Sony themselves can't get proper HD support in first party titles like Resistance or even the Blu-ray player (which wouldn't output at 720p until a firmware patch arrived six months after launch), there is little hope that third parties will be able support all HD setups with their titles.

[Seegs108]

Originally Posted by reaper200

Yeah, greetings Wayne.

I think this new addition is cool although i am annoyed you totally failed to mention the PC considering it's been HD capable for years.

Yes, I was gonna comment on this as well. The title of the article is misleading. PC games should a whole other part of the article. PC games were years ahead of thier console counterparts. As they are at the moment graphics wise and CPU wise.

[Z22_Z33]

Originally Posted by twonunpackmule

The article has some "mistakes".

Most Dreamcast games were Progressive or "Enhanced". The PS2 was not the first to offer progressive games on a home console.

Also, the SNES actually offered "3D Graphics" with Star Fox being a huge pioneer.

A few other little tidbits....

Other then that it was an interesting read.

Yeah I have to agree with you there.
How about an old Atari game that ran off a laser disc. Actually I think it was Dragons lair, the cut scenes were actual cartoons.

Looking on wiki, it appears that the first 3D game came out a long, long time ago. Somewhere around 1980, a little game called Battlezone.

Originally Posted by everythingornothing

HDMI

Yup, I agree with you on what you said.
Secondly,
Last I checked you don't need HDMI to get 1080p. Component cables along with VGA are more then capable of outputting that resolution. On top of that there is no hand-shake needed to display a picture. I don't know where people got the idea that you need HDMI to have an HD picture.
The only real advantage is it carries sound, that's it, nothing else.
Then again if you look at monster cables you can buy a lot of analog/spdif cables for that same price and get the exact same thing.



At least he nailed the hammer on the head. It's about how fun or not the games is, instead of what resolution, number of pixels, frames per second, processing power, so on and so on that really counts.

[SpongeBad]

Originally Posted by twonunpackmule

Also, the SNES actually offered "3D Graphics" with Star Fox being a huge pioneer.

The SNES didn't do "3D Graphics", it had Mode 7, which allowed developers to set up a fake plane that could sort of "look" 3D, but it wasn't any more "3D" than Zaxxon.

The Playstation was the first console to be designed around polygonal graphics, with the game space being represented in three dimensions.