why does D&D game on PS3 @ 480i look fairly pleasing on CRT

[chronicdog]

I tried hooking up my PS3 to my KV-20FV300 via component and set it to 480i to play the Dungeons and Dragons arcade game.

Now, the PS3 menu itself looks fairly horrid and flickery, as I would expect.

But when I run the actual game there is only slight flickering near the very top of the screen - and I can adjust screen size in game so flickery part is offscreen... which seems odd.

Once this is done and all smoothing is turned off (in game menu) the game looks pretty great - much better to me than on my 42" plasma in a smaller sized window.

Why is this? Why is there little/no flickering in-game? Is it just the effect of playing it on a 20" screen in native 4:3? Or is there something else going on?

I will try some other PS1/PS2/PS3 games and report back, but Im curious about this.

[Xan]

I think at least some games automatically use better anti-aliasing in 480i, at least that would make sense with the lower fillrate requirements. I recall playing RE5 in 480i on a 360 and it looked pretty good. Or the deflickering could have something to do with it...

Could also be that the game is still rendered in normal resolution and is downscaled for SD output, which would effectively be downsampling. I could only see this scenario for the 360 though as the PS3 GPU doesn't have a fully functional scaler (it's horizontal only, supposedly due to a hardware bug).

[Ed Oscuro]

But I think this "D&D game" is originally 240p anyway, so of course it would look better on a CRT.

I don't think any current-gen consoles have resolution switches to employ better AA. Fallout 3, RE6, etc. all have plenty of resolution to spare for 480i, though when I had to play that way it was heavily spoiled by shimmering text and other discoloration from composite.

[antron]

try putting your face as close to the screen as an arcade monitor would be (if you haven't already).

[LEGENOARYNINLIA]

Try comparing PS1 and PS2 games downloaded from PSN to the PCE games from PSN. PCE stuff looks gorgeous, while PS1/2 stuff doesn't look nearly as nice.

[Xan]

Don't know about the PCE games, but the PS1 emulator on PS3 outputs in 480i minimum. Should be noted that the PSP does a much better job here, I once tested its component out on my PVM and the result was close to a real PS1.