Why Doesn't The Game Display Just Fill The Screen?

[gray117]

There's no way in enemy zero's case it's going to be covered... it's 100% performance in cases like that.

It's performance combined with the knowledge that overscan is going to compensate for a lot of the black bars. 5% of the screen being black bars is more acceptable than 15% of the screen being black bars.

Reducing rendering size for performance and overscan considerations are not 100% separate like you seem to imply.

Absolutely true in principle and it certainly helps reduce a border should you have one. But I can't remember a 16bit onwards game where in practice it looks like the this played into decision making to the extent it may have legitimately stood a chance of eliminating an otherwise apparent border around the screen ...Though it does look like sonic on sms just fcked off the left side of the screen, and priortised the largely forward scrolling right side of the screen...

... given all this... it was also the period for at least the majority of the 90s where many not great pal pictures were considered acceptable...

[telemetry]

ZellSF, you're correct that render performance is based on resolution, but it's the *internal rendering resolution*, not whether the output signal takes up the full span of a 720x480p signal scanline.

For example, GameCube games all utilize a fixed output video size near 640x480, even if the games themselves are widescreen (Eternal Darkness).

Even Resident Evil 4's fake letterboxing (which IS for performance) is scaling to 640x480 output signal.

You're confusing three different things, the viewport size for performance (Resident Evil & Enemy Zero use smaller ones), the internal render resolution (also performance), and how much of the output signal resolution is actually used (overscan).

[Lawfer]

I have been using a Sony BVM-20F1U for retro gaming for a while now.

Only some original Xbox games are in-game full screen without any underscan, here are a few examples of full screen Xbox games:

Crimson Sea

Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders

Dead or Alive 2

I have yet to see a GameCube, Wii, PS2, PS1, Saturn game which has in-game full screen.

[Ikaruga11]

ZellSF, you're correct that render performance is based on resolution, but it's the *internal rendering resolution*, not whether the output signal takes up the full span of a 720x480p signal scanline.

For example, GameCube games all utilize a fixed output video size near 640x480, even if the games themselves are widescreen (Eternal Darkness).

Even Resident Evil 4's fake letterboxing (which IS for performance) is scaling to 640x480 output signal.

You're confusing three different things, the viewport size for performance (Resident Evil & Enemy Zero use smaller ones), the internal render resolution (also performance), and how much of the output signal resolution is actually used (overscan).

So the reason Resident Evil 4 (GameCube version) uses fake letterboxing (4:3 only; fake letterboxing that is essentially denying a full 4:3 picture) is to improve performance? Makes sense. It seems like Resident Evil 4 is a resource-hogging game and having it display a full 4:3 picture with no letterboxing may have caused severe framerate drops or even crashed the game.

[bobrocks95]

Didn't Shinji Mikami's The Evil Within also use letterboxing? I doubt it was for performance there- I think he just likes the look. I'm sure the performance boost was a nice bonus in RE4 though.

[telemetry]

So the reason Resident Evil 4 (GameCube version) uses fake letterboxing (4:3 only; fake letterboxing that is essentially denying a full 4:3 picture) is to improve performance? Makes sense. It seems like Resident Evil 4 is a resource-hogging game and having it display a full 4:3 picture with no letterboxing may have caused severe framerate drops or even crashed the game.

My understanding is that the PS2 & Wii versions are still in fact running at the reduced viewport size — the difference is that the PS2 and Wii versions scale the "fake letterbox" to the output resoution, which means it has a real "widescreen" aspect, but without extra rendering effort.

Just my speculation: it was considered a marvel at the time that RE4 launched on GameCube in 2005 and then later launched on PS2 that same year, despite all the concerns of "how could the PS2 handle everything?" In retrospect it seems like it was designed cross-platform from the start with decent PS2 performance, since Capcom went back on Nintendo's "exclusivity" deal immediately after RE4 hit shelves.

It's also worth noting that the GC/PS2/DirectX-9 Xbox generation probably marked where consoles shifted from "unit limits" (ex. sprites/triangles per second) to being limited by GPU fill-rates (pixel drawing), due to their real GPU-style (IBM, ATI etc). shader-compatible architectures. So target resolution mattered more here.

Saturn & PSX weren't really true 3D since they had special sprite-style coprocessors (the Saturn's VDP1 and PSX's GTE), which rasterized triangles directly without z-buffers or perspective-based rendering, so they were probably more limited by "how many triangle-style sprites can be rendered at a time" (quads in the Saturn's case), similar to how old 2D consoles were sprite-limited (512 onscreen at once, etc).

Hence the internal resolution/viewport render limits for performance probably weren't relevant until the specialized 2D-sprite-derived 3D hardware was abandoned completely for newer standalone GPU-style architectures.

[Lawfer]

Didn't Shinji Mikami's The Evil Within also use letterboxing? I doubt it was for performance there- I think he just likes the look. I'm sure the performance boost was a nice bonus in RE4 though.

Indeed, it's for the "cinematic 30fps" feel of Hollywood movies. As for The Evil Within, a patch was released that let the game run full screen though.