Anybody Here Bother Upscaling 720p (PS3 basically) to 1080p?

[Lawfer]

720p on a 1080p TV might look good or bad depending on your TV, however on my TV unless it's 1080p well it doesn't look so hot in most cases, though it varies depending on the games some PS3 games will output in 1080p such as the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy, Steins;Gate, Time and Eternity, Metal Gear 4: Guns of the Patriots to name a few, but overall the PS3 is an all around 720p console as most games will only output as high as 720p only, while the Xbox 360, Wii U will output in 1080p and of course the PS4 will do that as well.

How bad or how acceptable a 720p game varies depending on the game (how good it's anti-aliasing is for example), but overall in most cases the resulting picture is visibly less sharp as characters models are quite jaggy, a good example is Resonance of Fate (which I have on both 360 and PS3), during game play when you walk around town on PS3 in 720p I have a hard time distinguishing the features of their faces (too jaggy/blocky/aliased/pixelated or whatever it is) while on Xbox 360 in 1080p I don't have this issue and the overall picture and colors are more fuzzy compared to the picture I get in 1080p.

From the PS3 720p titles that I have played recently, most don't look good:

Folklore (good)

Siren: Blood Curse (good)

Resonance of Fate (bad)

NIER (bad)

Tales of Graces f (bad)

Tales of Xillia (awful)

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (awful)

Add to make matters worse there is the fact that for the multi-platform titles, the PS3 versions had lesser or even no anti-aliasing compared to the other console versions.

So I was wondering if anyone here does this and what are your results?

[gray117]

Are you talking about games that render at 720p natively and then generally upscale themselves to 1080p if the console is set to that? But instead you are setting the console to 720p to match the game's native res and trying to let the tv do the upscaling... and then whether or not a scaler may then be introduced to achieve better results?

Personally I just let the console do the the 1080p picture however it arrives at it. Reasoning:

- There's a chance you tv will handle 1080p native quicker than if it has to scale content.
- The tv will likely be worse than the console at scaling.
- Some games incorporate framebuffer features that take this scaled rendering into account.
- Any additional scaler will add lag for likely minimal gains.
- As you've noted the sampling and picture quality on most such console games is unlikely to be stellar to begin with, and thus not worth fussing over. Console is for convenience, the 720p render is a concession that will likely be encapsulating all kinds of other concessions. You'd likely be best using a pc, or next gen port, where possible to improve picture quality (and performance).

Finally, the ps3 was typically slightly worse off when it came to alphas specifically, and often not the lead platform (at least in NA), so it is likely that you'll often notice a compromise or two more on that platform than 360. But there will be no set rules, all kinds of quality considerations will have been in the hands of the developer. It will vary from game to game, platform to platform, depending on choices made. But again - it's probably not worth obsessing over even if you have both a ps3 and 360... in terms of overall feel you'd probably be best looking for significant bugs/fps differences (if any) - bethesda/fallout games come to mind...

[Guspaz]

overall the PS3 is an all around 720p console as most games will only output as high as 720p only, while the Xbox 360, Wii U will output in 1080p

Both the PS3 and the 360 output 1080p at all times (scaling to 1080p if the game is rendering at less than that), and the additional performance of the PS3 means that games generally run at a higher resolution on the PS3 than on the 360. There are more than a few 360 games that run below 720p, such as some of the Halo games. Halo 3 runs at 640p, Halo Reach ran at 1152x720, and Halo 4 was the only one that ran at full 1280x720.

Many games run at resolutions other than native 720p or 1080p, so setting your display to 720p doesn't make sense: there is a good chance that the console will need to upscale to 720p, so better to set the console to 1080p and get from the render resolution to the display resolution in a single shot.

[Thomago]

Both the PS3 and the 360 output 1080p at all times (scaling to 1080p if the game is rendering at less than that)

Eh? PS3 doesn't do that.

and the additional performance of the PS3 means that games generally run at a higher resolution on the PS3 than on the 360

Seems like you are talking about the PS4/Xbone.

[Xyga]

- There's a chance you tv will handle 1080p native quicker than if it has to scale content.

[sorry will sound like a broken record here] unless the display's built-in scaler has been arranged/designed to delay while upscaling, whether it's on purpose or by negligence, upscaling doesn't increase lag. It's true that it does happen (we've seen it on some 4K sets lately), but the general rule is that it doesn't.

- The tv will likely be worse than the console at scaling.

At least speaking for the 360 here; a TV with a good built-in scaler (Sony) can beat the really rough scaling the console does with some games (and I'm not talking about just handful!)

- Any additional scaler will add lag for likely minimal gains.

Yes, but good ones like the DVDO will only add 6ms, and in some cases beat both the console and the TV in doing a quality upscaling job. 2D games from a '720p console' upscaled through a DVDO look the best, it's a killer addon for the shmups and retro library...(for the 360 of course *cough* sorry)

EDIT: although well yes, it's not simple heh? Really depends on the game at times.

[Lawfer]

Are you talking about games that render at 720p natively and then generally upscale themselves to 1080p if the console is set to that?

I am talking about the PS3 which even when set to 1080p will switch to 720p as soon as the game boots up, which is what the PS3 does in most cases. Very few games on PS3 will support 1080p output (which I did name a few, such as the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy, Metal Gear 4, Time and Eternity, Steins;Gate and a few others). If you look behind most PS3 back cover cases "1080p" won't even be mentioned in almost all cases the highest resolution that it will list is "720p".

But instead you are setting the console to 720p to match the game's native res and trying to let the tv do the upscaling...

Huh? No I am not, my PS3 is set to 1080p, but in most cases the games will only go as high up as 720p. On Xbox 360 and Wii U, all games will output in 1080p if your console is set to 1080p. So I am interested in getting these PS3 games that only do as high as 720p (which involves almost all of the PS3 library) upscaled to 1080p with a processor to output pn my TV in 1080p and I was wondering if anyone here does that?

Personally I just let the console do the the 1080p picture however it arrives at it.

Yeah, but we are talking about the PS3 here...

At least speaking for the 360 here; a TV with a good built-in scaler (Sony) can beat the really rough scaling the console does with some games (and I'm not talking about just handful!)

In my case I just let both the 360 and Wii U output the games in 1080p and the quality is superb, quite a bit of difference between that and the 720p only from the PS3 titles.

[BONKERS]

overall the PS3 is an all around 720p console as most games will only output as high as 720p only, while the Xbox 360, Wii U will output in 1080p

Both the PS3 and the 360 output 1080p at all times (scaling to 1080p if the game is rendering at less than that), and the additional performance of the PS3 means that games generally run at a higher resolution on the PS3 than on the 360. There are more than a few 360 games that run below 720p, such as some of the Halo games. Halo 3 runs at 640p, Halo Reach ran at 1152x720, and Halo 4 was the only one that ran at full 1280x720.

Many games run at resolutions other than native 720p or 1080p, so setting your display to 720p doesn't make sense: there is a good chance that the console will need to upscale to 720p, so better to set the console to 1080p and get from the render resolution to the display resolution in a single shot.

No. You have that mixed up. The PS3 switches to 720p if the game isn't specifically made to software scale to 1080p. Most games are still 720p or sub 720p.

The 360 has a hardware scaler (It's ok in quality) that allows it to output everything upsampled to 1080p. Again everything still 720p or sub 720p.

With the 360 you should see whether your TV looks better or the hardware scaler. With the PS3, some games have poorer performance in 1080p mode (the few that support it) due to the overhead of the scaling. (It's not free like on 360). Some games do output native 1080p or higher than 720p in 1080p mode. But not many

[Xyga]

In my case I just let both the 360 and Wii U output the games in 1080p and the quality is superb, quite a bit of difference between that and the 720p only from the PS3 titles.

My point is that really on the 360 I can see the objects that haven't been designed for a 1080p output when they're upscaled, the clean scaling the console does reveals those and with some games makes the resulting picture overall worse.

It's really a multiple-factors thing, the game itself and how it was designed graphically speaking, the selected console output resolution, and the quality of the display's (or external scaler's) upscaling. I don't think there's a 'single best scenario', unfortunately.

[ZellSF]

I want my setup as convenient as possible so I don't bother. I also want to minimize lag, though that's not a huge factor in my decision.

I set my Xbox 360 and Wii U to scale everything to 1080p. Otherwise I would have to keep changing them between 720p (for 720p native games) and 1080p (for non-720p native games) all the time.

It's less of an issue with the PS3 since it has a lot of 720p native titles due to the lack of any scaling (whereas on the 360 all sort of weird resolutions made sense because of the internal scaler), but over time it got a few titles with builtin scaling and some 1080p smaller scale games.

I would perhaps bother if there was a very low lag solution with post-processing antialiasing available. When I played some games on my BlackMagic capture card using PtBI I used to go through the effort of changing the resolution since well, some antialiasing made some games look a lot better. But it was pretty laggy.