2 questions about RESOLUTION. (1 Viewer)

[eric_shepearl]

Hi, folks.
For instance, a game called Virtua Striker3 on GameCube, it has an option to select screen aspect ratio. - 16x9 wide or 4x3 normal. And yes it does support 480p progressive.
And DOA3 and Gunvalkyrie on XBOX supports 480p as well as 16x9 widescreen aspect ratio.
My questions are....
*** QUESTION NUMBER 1 ***
in 4x3 mode, resolutions of the game is supposed to be 640x480.
If I choose 16x9 mode, does the horizontal resolution goes up to somewhere like 720, resulting in the entire resolution of 720*480 ?
Or is it more like 640 horizontal pixels get stretched to fit in 16x9 aspect ratio, resulting in the same 640*480 resolution, but only change in 16x9 aspect ratio from streched horizontal pixels?
That qestion goes to any x-box, playstion2, GameCube, and DreamCast games which supports 16x9 aspect ratio.
*** QUESTION NUMBER 2 ***
Is XBOX really capable of producing/rendering 720p and 1080i resolutions, or are those 100% complete marketing term from M$ ??
I've a feeling that if XBOX was really capable of producing 720p/1080i images in the first place, Team NINJA of Tecmo would've done the DOA3 in either 720p or 1080i mode. (I get a impression that those guys are tech-freaks who always wants to acheve a high standard specially in terms of graphics department.)
Any comments, opinions would be great.

 

[Rob Lutter]

720p/1080i ARE available on XBOX... BUT I have heard that those modes eat a HELL of alot more CPU cycles than regular 480p.

 

[Gary King]

1. I believe both are options; however, I haven't checked out too many of the resolution options on the Xbox. The game wouldn't just be "stretched", though (that's what widescreen TVs do to 4:3 content).

2. Yes and no. The Xbox doesn't natively support 1280x720P or 1920x1080i; however, it can render at resolutions above 640x480 (the Conexant encoder chip accepts VGA signals up to 1024x768), and can digitally rescale them to 720P or 1080i.

Since the Xbox is bandwidth limited and higher resolutions require more bandwidth, a game developer would need to plan on supporting HD early in a game's development if it is going to happen (and the trade-off would be resolution for extra graphical effects). Team NINJA aren't the best graphics programmers around, and even if they were, it's hard to expect a launch title to be really optimized for the hardware, especially since finished Xbox hardware wasn't available until 5 months before the US launch.

I'm certain at least one developer will want to lay claim to the world's first HD video game this generation; however, it probably won't be a hugely popular path.

 

[Steve Bjorg]

16x9 and 4x3 are the same resolution in 480p. The only difference is the aspect ratio. That's why games like Rallisport have distored 2D bitmaps, but the 3D part is rendered correctly (nothing more than changing FOV).

The operation that acutally happens for 16x9 is the same trick as used by anamorphically encoded DVDs. Without stretching the image, everything appears as stick figures. Thus the graphics don't get stretched, rather they get compressed so that the subsequent stretch operation makes everything look good again.

Probably redundant and confusing, but I hope it helps.

 

[Bill Slack]

The Xbox can output 720p and 1080i but that is supposedly rendered @ 1024x768 and then converted.