1080p on the Xbox360

Published
by
Darren/Kain
on October 8, 2006
in Technology and Xbox 360
. Tags: , , .

A little more complicated then one would think…

I’ve been trying to make sense of this for sometime now, and only finally understood it. Microsoft have tried to get one over Sony in the HD (High Definition) war, and to be honest they’re hammering them hilariously. Although MS forgot to mention that 1080p wouldn’t be as simple as most people would have thought. The techy geeks knew it would be a complicated matter, and to be fair - it bloomin is. Depending on the method you’re using to connect the Xbox 360 to your TV set, you’ll obtain various results while watching films and playing games. I’ve been staring at a forum for what felt like hours last night and finally got my head around it. 360 with component cables:

  • Xbox 360 games will be upscaled to 1080p, and games which are 1080p native will run without a hitch.
  • HD-DVDs will run at a maximum of 1080i, which is due to the AACS DRM implemented into HD-DVD’s.
  • DVD’s will only play at 480p, due to the CSS inside DVD’s, which prevents upscaling any higher…bummer.

360 with a VGA cable:

  • DVD’s, games, as well as HD-DVD’s will display in full 1080p. Sweet!

Microsoft has been very quiet about this, and it’s obvious why. They know a lot of people use Component cables to connect the 360 to their HDTV, and to have DVD’s playing at 480p is quite frankly pathetic. However most people will already have separate DVD players anyway, so this situation isn’t that bad. MS were quite foolish not to have seen the HDMI bandwagon coming when they released the 360, and even bumbling giants Sony saw it. I wonder what the video quality will be like on the HD-DVD drive coming next month in November for the 360?

2 Responses to “1080p on the Xbox360”

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  1. 1 Darren/Kain
    October 16, 2006 at 6:35 pm

    Major Nelson, the Xbox 360’s Live Director of Programming has basically cleared up a LOT of questions regarding 1080p on the console. You can find the brilliantly informative podcast for download Here.

    To sum things up:
    - 1080p gaming through component or VGA.

    - 1080p movies through VGA.

    So if you have a hdtv that does 1080p, go ahead and buy a VGA HD AV cable, wait for the 1080p dashboard update, hook it up, change the necessary settings, and you’re all set to play games and watch movies:

    - In native 1080p if the content is natively done in 1080p.

    - Upscaled to 1080p if the content is NOT natively done in 1080p.

  2. 2 Darren/Kain
    October 23, 2006 at 11:11 pm
    Microsoft’s game dev blog Ozymandias has some thoughts and stats on High Definition Game Rendering:
    Many developers, gamers, and journalists are confused by 1080p. They think that 1080p is somehow more challenging for game developers than 1080i, and they forget that 1080 (i or p) requires significant tradeoffs compared to 720p. Some facts to remember:

    • 2.25x: that’s how many more pixels there are in 1920×1080 compared to 1280×720
    • 55.5%: that’s how much less time you have to spend on each pixel when rendering 1920×1080 compared to 1280×720-the point being that at higher resolutions you have more pixels, but they necessarily can’t look as good
    • 1.0x: that’s how much harder it is for a game engine to render a game in 1080p as compared to 1080i-the number of pixels is identical so the cost is identical
      There is no such thing as a 1080p frame buffer. The frame buffer is 1080 pixels tall (and presumably 1920 wide) regardless of whether it is ultimately sent to the TV as an interlaced or as a progressive signal.
    • 1280×720 with 4x AA will generally look better than 1920×1080 with no anti-aliasing (there are more total samples).

    Any game could be made to run at 1920×1080. However, it is a tradeoff. It means that you can show more detail (although you need larger textures and models to really get this benefit) but it means that you have much less time to run complex pixel shaders. Most games can’t justify running at higher than 1280×720-it would actually make them look worse because of the compromises they will have to make in other areas.

    1080p is a higher bandwidth connection from the frame buffer to the TV than 1080i. However the frame buffer itself is identical. 1080p will look better than 1080i-interlaced flicker is not a good thing-but it makes precisely zero difference to the game developer. Just as most Xbox 1 games let users choose 480i or 480p, because it was no extra work, 1080p versus 1080i is no extra work. It’s just different settings on the display chip.

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