Xbox HD-DVD comes at a heavy price?

[Asher]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


How would you get better quality rendering at 720p and scaling down to 480p than just rendering at 480p? You have the same amount of information either way...

It reduces aliasing.

It's effectively a form of supersample antialiasing when you render at a high resolution and shrink it to a smaller one.

[Asher]

From gamespot's review of Call of Duty 3, showcasing the more powerful PS3 hardware.

http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/action/callofduty3/review.html?page=1

Twenty-four people can play online, but whereas four players per Xbox 360 could go online, just one person can play on a single PS3, and there's no ranked play.

Call of Duty 3's visuals are great, though a problematic frame rate leaves the game looking decidedly less impressive than it does on the Xbox 360. There are a couple of visual issues that mar the otherwise great graphics. Key amongst these is the erratic frame rate. It was fast and mostly smooth on the 360, but the game's extremely choppy on the PlayStation 3. This problem isn't limited to hectic battle sequences either--it'll chug in rooms that are completely empty.

[DanS]

Originally posted by Asher
Games are only output in their native resolution: 480i, 720p, etc...

Even if not the ideal way to do it, this is not much of a problem, considering that today's output devices all have scalers built-in. On some output devices you might take a quality hit, of course. But that will depend on the output device.

The only big problem that I see with this is blending of content of different resolutions. Maybe Sony didn't contemplate much blending on the PS3.

I would be interested in seeing a knowledgeable review of the new scaling in the 360. Something from AVS Forum or whatever.

[Asher]

There are other implications -- eg, not downscaling 1080p/720p to 480i/p for SDTV users, which make up a sizable chunk of users these days.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Asher
From gamespot's review of Call of Duty 3, showcasing the more powerful PS3 hardware.

http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/action/callofduty3/review.html?page=1

Twenty-four people can play online, but whereas four players per Xbox 360 could go online, just one person can play on a single PS3, and there's no ranked play.

Call of Duty 3's visuals are great, though a problematic frame rate leaves the game looking decidedly less impressive than it does on the Xbox 360. There are a couple of visual issues that mar the otherwise great graphics. Key amongst these is the erratic frame rate. It was fast and mostly smooth on the 360, but the game's extremely choppy on the PlayStation 3. This problem isn't limited to hectic battle sequences either--it'll chug in rooms that are completely empty.

Interesting.

This whole thread has been highly informative.

I just got back from seeing a PS 3 in action at a store. I was more than impressed with the visual quality of the console. The video quality was the best I have ever seen, anywhere, at any time.

The game being played was a car race game. The game had no framerate issues whatsoever as the cars raced over the landscape. But the quoted post from Asher does suggest that the XBOX 360 - HD might actually outperform the PS 3 while looking just as good due to the use of the same codecs.

As to HD-DVD vs. Blu Ray, when they use the same codecs, they must look the same. It is just that Blu Ray has 66% more capacity. That capacity difference, I predict, will eventually result in HD-DVD's death as the capacity difference will lead features, content and quality that HD-DVD cannot match.

[Ned]

I can also see the advantages of 1920x1080p resolution on a relatively small screen. Makes me wanto to go out and buy a new monitor today.

[Ned]

Ugh, just checked out the prices of full 1080p monitors - around $1000 and up!

[korn469]

Originally posted by Ned

As to HD-DVD vs. Blu Ray, when they use the same codecs, they must look the same. It is just that Blu Ray has 66% more capacity. That capacity difference, I predict, will eventually result in HD-DVD's death as the capacity difference will lead features, content and quality that HD-DVD cannot match.

While that seems true on the surface, Sony wanted to extend Mpeg 2 to the HD market, so it needed more storage space. Here's a quote from wikipedia.

In terms of audio/video compression, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD are similar on the surface: both support MPEG-2, VC-1, and H.264 for video compression, and Dolby Digital (AC-3), PCM, and DTS for audio compression. The first generation of Blu-ray Disc movies released used MPEG-2 (the standard currently used in DVDs, although encoded at a much higher video resolution and a much higher bit rate than those used on conventional DVDs), while initial HD DVDs releases used the more efficient VC-1 codec.

AFAIK Sony gets a cut from Mpeg2 and Microsoft gets a cut from VC-1. I don't know about Mpeg4. It looks like Bluray is finally ditching Mpeg2 and moving towards Mpeg4 and VC-1, but we'll have to see what the future holds.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Ned
Ugh, just checked out the prices of full 1080p monitors - around $1000 and up!

I know I was looking at them earlier.

[Asher]

For what it's worth, MS has announced that in the next 360 Update, the audio output of the HD-DVD addon will be improved.

Right now it can decode Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, and DTS, but this is always output as a 680Kbps Dolby Digital stream (max DD supports). The next 360 update will add a DTS encoder and a Dolby TrueHD decoder, so all output can be sent as a 1500Kbps DTS stream now instead for improved quality.

[Q Classic]

Originally posted by Ned


Interesting.

This whole thread has been highly informative.

I just got back from seeing a PS 3 in action at a store. I was more than impressed with the visual quality of the console. The video quality was the best I have ever seen, anywhere, at any time.

I think the display you were seeing might have been ventilated better. I've watched two PS3 kiosks, and one of them didn't have any framerate issues with that racing game, but the other would occasionally chug a bit turning corners.

To be honest, though, the graphics didn't impress me that much, but then again, I was happily playing SMAC, Civ2, and UT for years, and my current games of choice are Katamari and Okami.

[Asher]

The game being played was a car race game. The game had no framerate issues whatsoever as the cars raced over the landscape. But the quoted post from Asher does suggest that the XBOX 360 - HD might actually outperform the PS 3 while looking just as good due to the use of the same codecs.

Game performance has absolutely nothing to do with codecs. Only video is affected by video codecs.

The game performance has more to do with the PS3's inadequate video memory bandwidth and it's difficult CPU to work with.

As to HD-DVD vs. Blu Ray, when they use the same codecs, they must look the same. It is just that Blu Ray has 66% more capacity. That capacity difference, I predict, will eventually result in HD-DVD's death as the capacity difference will lead features, content and quality that HD-DVD cannot match.

I really don't agree. It costs a lot for studios to add lots of content, they won't just add TONS of bonus material content because they have the space. It's the same thing with Bluray games -- Sony was hyping up 25-50GB disc capacities, but not a single PS3 game cannot fit on a DVD-9. In fact, they've been lying about Resistance. They initially told everyone it was 22GB.

People have dumped the images of the disc to read them, and lo and behold, all but 6.7GB of it is padding to inflate the size/spread the data out across the disc.

A tri-layer HD-DVD offers 45GB, which is loads for a movie.

And let's not forget HD-DVD's huge cost benefit -- it's way cheaper to manufacture and purchase for consumers.

[Asher]

On a relate note, PS3 vs Xbox 360 in pictures and videos: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3155393

It's a shame there wasn't a "Xbox 360 is better" option, as it applies to some of these even though the PS3 versions had 1 year longer in development. Ridge Racer 7, for instance, doesn't have any kind of dynamic lighting (eg, headlights? Duh?)

[DanS]

Originally posted by Asher
For what it's worth, MS has announced that in the next 360 Update, the audio output of the HD-DVD addon will be improved.

Right now it can decode Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, and DTS, but this is always output as a 680Kbps Dolby Digital stream (max DD supports). The next 360 update will add a DTS encoder and a Dolby TrueHD decoder, so all output can be sent as a 1500Kbps DTS stream now instead for improved quality.

This information is interesting. As I understand it, there are two tracks on HD-DVD disks. One is a TrueHD track and the other is a DD 5.1 track. The DD 5.1 track is downmixed from the TrueHD track by the disk producers. Because of this, the DD 5.1 track on HD-DVDs is better than the DD 5.1 tracks on DVDs.

Decoding TrueHD on the fly and re-encoding it to DTS -- rather than simply outputting the DD 5.1 track -- should work well because of the higher bitrate. However, this is not guaranteed. It will depend on the quality of M$'s implementation of the encoding/decoding.

Overall, I think that most people won't hear much of a difference between TrueHD downmixed to DD 5.1 and TrueHD.

[Asher]

The encoder sourcecode is provided by DTS and Dolby -- MS just optimizes it to run well on the CPU. Sony did the same thing with the PS3.