Or how smooth the panning looks on the 16:9 mode. People have commented on the static look making the original more creepy, and I can see that, but panning was also certainly present in some games with prerendered backgrounds, like Final Fantasy.
Were any of these 480i-running games doing 60 FPS? I've heard it causes issues when every field belongs to a different frame, as opposed to two consecutive fields showing one frame at 30 FPS.
Resident Evil HD Remaster....any players here?
Re: Resident Evil HD Remaster....any players here?
Trying to be quick - Interlacing issues show up as a telltale interlace tooth-patterned "blur" on moving polygon edges, like moving a scene with the sharp edge of a dark corner against a bright wall. It's called a "combing effect." Onscreen, old and new fields are mixing together, introducing uncertainty about the current position of objects. If you can't guess the direction of onscreen action given your inputs, this can make it actually impossible to tell where something actually is, or where its current boundaries are. Even if you know where something actually is, the phosphor persistence of these displays means that information you know belongs to the previous 60th of a second is still coexisting right alongside, in distracting strips, the positions updated in the last scan. It's also possible to have details disappear entirely if their changing screen location coincides with the unused scanline, or to have details fail to disappear (but I think everybody has known since the old days about these flicker effects and have tried to avoid them; meaning no pixel-wide fences marching down the screen - just like not wearing certain kinds of ties on the news). I realize everybody knows this but it's worth repeating it so we can then think in some detail about why it happens - individual rendering systems. And then - is it popular? Is it good? Well, I think 60fps is actually quite common in ps2-xbox-gc era games, actually.
In the original application for 480i, television broadcast, there was no image buffer so pedants who insist on saying that "two interlaced fields make up one frame" are often missing the point. What you can get, even in simple studio interview footage, is definitely nothing like watching movie frames at the theater where there is one continuous stretch of time captured, rather than the multiple different stretches of time coexisting onscreen in interlaced content, which is what you get when you watch Jack Parr or Ed Sullivan on your 20" Philco or Admiral television.
The original Xbox's nVidia core, so I've read, renders to an internal 640x480 framebuffer. Additionally, the story goes that it makes no sense to try and halve the display resolution to save on performance. If you run up against performance problems on the original Xbox - assuming you're targeting a 480p-ish resolution - then you just drop back the framerate to 30fps and display the frame twice instead of displaying half the resolution. You're right - this incidentally should fix the combing effects regardless of display, but at an awful cost. I have to guess the "legacy free PC" design of the Xbox and nVidia's hardware was still more suited for PC gaming which was starting to switch to full-screen rendering; effects required, I am almost sure, having a full framebuffer. In practice this didn't matter (except in energy use) for probably 95% or more of Xbox gamers. Despite it being the "premium" console, I know that few gamers would have had progressive displays to play with. Even today getting the potential out of the Xbox is an issue for me. Despite the Xbox allowing 480p60, what you get on a 480i TV is 480i60 at best; in other words, half the detail most Xboxen generated was thrown away! If Xbox software is running at 30fps, it seems to me that it should not seem to have the most obvious combing effect on moving things. But Microsoft designed it targeting 480p60 content for the lucky few percent who did have a 480p or better display. And this is what they should have done, really. 30fps across all titles would have been bad.
On the PS2, and possibly the GameCube, things appear different. On the PS2 there's weaker hardware with a different rendering process. Here there's no baked-in assumption that you need to render to 640x480 and rely on the video encoder to cut that down to the appropriate signal - instead you can save by rendering with offsets (as I believe I saw the process described), using just enough rendering power to render one field at a time at 480i.
Even with the combing effects, there's still a benefit to running 480i60. It's still 60fps, and most content won't be badly affected by positioning problems. Even when I do spot the wall problems, they're just that - problems with walls, not a real gameplay problem. Games for these systems already are designed around the assumption that you don't get perfect accuracy given problems with controller precision.
There is a little bit more to this story. Going back to the 50s for a moment, not only are lacking frame buffers (more likely delay lines, at that time) part of the reason that interlacing problems happen. Reducing rolling fullscreen flicker at 60fps was important - you don't see this as obviously if half the fields are "old" (even if pedants consider them to be part of the "current frame," which is certainly untrue for video games and still really untrue for most television content). But it's not a perfect solution. Using 480i, even on a well-made late model CRT, television or monitor, if you turn the brightness down, it's quite possible to notice something like a rolling effect even on totally still menu screens. Alternating fields are refreshed, and the old fields start to dim; lines appear to pulse (and they are, in fact). You still see the combing effect. Tweaked phosphors might reduce or alter this effect, but it's still going to be there in some form or another.
For me, the question is often more like "what games DON'T do 60fps?" In memory, most games I've been interested to play recently, especially third person games, tend to have this issue.
The panning thing really is an issue for me, because the game was designed to be seen with full 4:3 resolution. Thankfully modern screens are typically big enough to display a full 4:3 screen at equivalent or even larger sizes than an older 4:3 aspect television. Even the comparison game, Parasite Eve, was designed with the idea that you'd see only so much of the screen at one time, and therefore there would still be major problems with a panning implementation on the aesthetics of the game. For example - what would you do with single-screen areas, like the hidden Chinese antiques shop? I also think there is at least one screen like this in the Chief's office around the time of the final fight in the police department in the early game.
We all know that panning doesn't work from ports of old shmups, anyways, though those games are more demanding on having aspect ratio right than these games usually are.
In the original application for 480i, television broadcast, there was no image buffer so pedants who insist on saying that "two interlaced fields make up one frame" are often missing the point. What you can get, even in simple studio interview footage, is definitely nothing like watching movie frames at the theater where there is one continuous stretch of time captured, rather than the multiple different stretches of time coexisting onscreen in interlaced content, which is what you get when you watch Jack Parr or Ed Sullivan on your 20" Philco or Admiral television.
The original Xbox's nVidia core, so I've read, renders to an internal 640x480 framebuffer. Additionally, the story goes that it makes no sense to try and halve the display resolution to save on performance. If you run up against performance problems on the original Xbox - assuming you're targeting a 480p-ish resolution - then you just drop back the framerate to 30fps and display the frame twice instead of displaying half the resolution. You're right - this incidentally should fix the combing effects regardless of display, but at an awful cost. I have to guess the "legacy free PC" design of the Xbox and nVidia's hardware was still more suited for PC gaming which was starting to switch to full-screen rendering; effects required, I am almost sure, having a full framebuffer. In practice this didn't matter (except in energy use) for probably 95% or more of Xbox gamers. Despite it being the "premium" console, I know that few gamers would have had progressive displays to play with. Even today getting the potential out of the Xbox is an issue for me. Despite the Xbox allowing 480p60, what you get on a 480i TV is 480i60 at best; in other words, half the detail most Xboxen generated was thrown away! If Xbox software is running at 30fps, it seems to me that it should not seem to have the most obvious combing effect on moving things. But Microsoft designed it targeting 480p60 content for the lucky few percent who did have a 480p or better display. And this is what they should have done, really. 30fps across all titles would have been bad.
On the PS2, and possibly the GameCube, things appear different. On the PS2 there's weaker hardware with a different rendering process. Here there's no baked-in assumption that you need to render to 640x480 and rely on the video encoder to cut that down to the appropriate signal - instead you can save by rendering with offsets (as I believe I saw the process described), using just enough rendering power to render one field at a time at 480i.
Even with the combing effects, there's still a benefit to running 480i60. It's still 60fps, and most content won't be badly affected by positioning problems. Even when I do spot the wall problems, they're just that - problems with walls, not a real gameplay problem. Games for these systems already are designed around the assumption that you don't get perfect accuracy given problems with controller precision.
There is a little bit more to this story. Going back to the 50s for a moment, not only are lacking frame buffers (more likely delay lines, at that time) part of the reason that interlacing problems happen. Reducing rolling fullscreen flicker at 60fps was important - you don't see this as obviously if half the fields are "old" (even if pedants consider them to be part of the "current frame," which is certainly untrue for video games and still really untrue for most television content). But it's not a perfect solution. Using 480i, even on a well-made late model CRT, television or monitor, if you turn the brightness down, it's quite possible to notice something like a rolling effect even on totally still menu screens. Alternating fields are refreshed, and the old fields start to dim; lines appear to pulse (and they are, in fact). You still see the combing effect. Tweaked phosphors might reduce or alter this effect, but it's still going to be there in some form or another.
For me, the question is often more like "what games DON'T do 60fps?" In memory, most games I've been interested to play recently, especially third person games, tend to have this issue.
The panning thing really is an issue for me, because the game was designed to be seen with full 4:3 resolution. Thankfully modern screens are typically big enough to display a full 4:3 screen at equivalent or even larger sizes than an older 4:3 aspect television. Even the comparison game, Parasite Eve, was designed with the idea that you'd see only so much of the screen at one time, and therefore there would still be major problems with a panning implementation on the aesthetics of the game. For example - what would you do with single-screen areas, like the hidden Chinese antiques shop? I also think there is at least one screen like this in the Chief's office around the time of the final fight in the police department in the early game.
We all know that panning doesn't work from ports of old shmups, anyways, though those games are more demanding on having aspect ratio right than these games usually are.
Re: Resident Evil HD Remaster....any players here?
I have almost no experience with the original Xbox, so I only know the situation for the other 6th gen consoles and there I think 30 FPS was the usual case. The visual difference for 3rd person games is mostly visible with fast camera turns, I think, but otherwise doesn't tend to be very detrimental to gameplay control-wise; the analog sticks on controllers are inherently laggier than a keyboard/mouse setup on the PC, so any deficiencies in terms of actual input lag/frame time/VSync (also an old developer favorite on consoles actually) are easier forgiven simply because it's harder to perceive them as an actual bottleneck; at least that's the theory that I've had for a while.
Additionally, another important aspect is that we have flicker filters hardcoded into a lot of 6th gen games, this too should help smoothen out a hypothetical 480i60 signal (at the cost of a bit of perceived vertical resolution, but the tradeoff is well worth it in my opinion - it's just so much easier on the eyes, even more so on 576i50, which is the only format I can attest serious flickering issues on a CRT, unless you count some of the insane and obscure old formats like 1024x768@43 Hz interlaced).
Additionally, another important aspect is that we have flicker filters hardcoded into a lot of 6th gen games, this too should help smoothen out a hypothetical 480i60 signal (at the cost of a bit of perceived vertical resolution, but the tradeoff is well worth it in my opinion - it's just so much easier on the eyes, even more so on 576i50, which is the only format I can attest serious flickering issues on a CRT, unless you count some of the insane and obscure old formats like 1024x768@43 Hz interlaced).
Re: Resident Evil HD Remaster....any players here?
Something else I forgot about.Additionally, another important aspect is that we have flicker filters hardcoded into a lot of 6th gen games,
In well-profiled, stable console games, vsync probably isn't needed most of the time, if at all. It would prevent tears and would manifest slowdown somewhat as we see in many games, though, I expect.
Not sure why you say hypothetical / supposed 480i60 - I am quite sure most, if not all, of the PS2 and other games I've sat down and played are 60fps. Your descriptions of the camera (I edited this out of my post actually) and both of our descriptions of the visual anomalies - all of these comments refer to the same thing. It seems possible to me that you could get interlacing effects at 30fps, but I bet you'd have to do something really strange - and dumb - to get that, since it seems dead simple to just scan into a framebuffer, or do staggered rendering on half of the fields. About 60fps games, you can get some additional comments from this NeoGAF thread, and some of the comments there are pretty enlightening. Elios83's comment about the PS2 having a lot of fill rate and bandwidth makes sense to me. The PS2 seems to have mainly dialed things back in order to not chug on overly complex scenes and effects. It was always a struggle in the multiplatform release arena.
Re: Resident Evil HD Remaster....any players here?
I know about the PS2's problems - personally I never had much of a soft spot for this system, the 4 MB framebuffer poses an issue that developers were never really able to solve in terms of texture quality. The technical talk about having a higher polygonal fillrate, but lower texture size usually translates spot on into existing games if comparing PS2 vs. DC (GC and Xbox are in their own league really, especially if taking GPU featuresets as a basis).
This is also a pretty interesting interview from back in the day - especially noteworthy in this context is the mentioning of "60mhz" movement by Andy Gavin, and the remark about RGB cables by Jason Rubin is questionable too, as interlacing obviously happens as much with composite cables as it does with RGB cables; I think the discussion whether flicker filters were beneficial should be uncoupled from what cables most people used, and of course he ignored the existence of VGA cables on the Dreamcast when making a point about the PS2 having more detail.
This is also a pretty interesting interview from back in the day - especially noteworthy in this context is the mentioning of "60mhz" movement by Andy Gavin, and the remark about RGB cables by Jason Rubin is questionable too, as interlacing obviously happens as much with composite cables as it does with RGB cables; I think the discussion whether flicker filters were beneficial should be uncoupled from what cables most people used, and of course he ignored the existence of VGA cables on the Dreamcast when making a point about the PS2 having more detail.
Re: Resident Evil HD Remaster....any players here?
The RGB cable comment is applicable to YUV too, really - I understand what he's getting at there. It's not "exactly" RGB (as I was just saying while following a herring barrel @ the Hardware subforum) but it has been called that, and it basically gets you there. His point there is that composite or bad TVs mask jaggies - in fact looking around for some more information I find examples of people swearing up and down that particular DC games use sophisticated anti aliasing techniques, when in fact it's just the composhits rubbin' out detail.
But what about the very strange-sounding comment that the Dreamcast does "blend past frames with the current frame to create the blurry effect the Dreamcast" has? I think this guy has the answer in a well-written explanation:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.ph ... stcount=28
Andy Gavin's got better detail but again it's hard to feel this was the most lucid response possible. What does 60MHz blast processing look like? Maybe we'll know after a cuppa. Definitely more understandable than Rubin's commentary though.
But what about the very strange-sounding comment that the Dreamcast does "blend past frames with the current frame to create the blurry effect the Dreamcast" has? I think this guy has the answer in a well-written explanation:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.ph ... stcount=28
Only problem - he's talking about the PS2 there, not the DC. But the DC probably can do something similar. And here's another bunch of interesting random DC programming tidbits.The CRTC could read the frame buffer from two addresses and blend them giving you crude anti aliasing and smoothing out the limited texture color depth
Andy Gavin's got better detail but again it's hard to feel this was the most lucid response possible. What does 60MHz blast processing look like? Maybe we'll know after a cuppa. Definitely more understandable than Rubin's commentary though.
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No_not_like_Quake
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Re: Resident Evil HD Remaster....any players here?
For me, it doesn't matter much, as the game was never 60 fps to begin with. Give me a port of, say, VF 5 at 30 fps, then yeah, I will be pissed.system11 wrote:Leaving this alone since Capcom couldn't be bothered to run it at 60fps on the consoles. As such, I cannot be bothered to give them money for it.
Re: Resident Evil HD Remaster....any players here?
Why does everyone keep saying this is blurry, do you all just have shitty TVs? It looks very nice and sharp on my TV, and it looks significantly better than the GC or Wii versions. I hate me some blur (filtering etc.) so trust me, this port aint blurry.
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iconoclast
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Re: Resident Evil HD Remaster....any players here?
I guess it depends on which version you're playing. PC has better shadows and anti-aliasing than the current gen consoles, and the last gen ones are obviously worse. http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.ph ... count=5717
I'm going to get this eventually since it's an amazing game, but I'm not sure which version to go with. It seems like Capcom didn't put much effort into the port for the Xbone and PS4 (30 fps, worse aliasing, worse shadows), so I'm not sure if I'd be better off getting it on PC. It would be nice if there was a demo or benchmark to see how it would run on my system.
I'm going to get this eventually since it's an amazing game, but I'm not sure which version to go with. It seems like Capcom didn't put much effort into the port for the Xbone and PS4 (30 fps, worse aliasing, worse shadows), so I'm not sure if I'd be better off getting it on PC. It would be nice if there was a demo or benchmark to see how it would run on my system.
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evil_ash_xero
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Re: Resident Evil HD Remaster....any players here?
Yeah, it looks great on my TV as well.ACSeraph wrote:Why does everyone keep saying this is blurry, do you all just have shitty TVs? It looks very nice and sharp on my TV, and it looks significantly better than the GC or Wii versions. I hate me some blur (filtering etc.) so trust me, this port aint blurry.
Certainly a big step up from the GC version.
My Collection: http://www.rfgeneration.com/cgi-bin/col ... Collection