Early 3D Games On PS3 Feature Downgraded Graphics


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So, the PS3 is now ready for 3D gaming. But are PS3 games ready? It appears, hrm, maybe, with the first batch of 3D-capable titles needing to have their graphics scaled back a touch.First example: WipeEout HD, which normally runs in glorious 1080p (ie "full" high definition), but which has had to be pegged back to 720p in order to get it running in the third dimension.

Second example: MotorStorm, whose top resolution was 720p, and which has now had to be scaled back to a sub-HD resolution (and which will now have to employ the PS3's excellent upscaling abilities).

Might sound nitpicky to anyone but videophiles, but then, the only people who will be playing 3D games in 2010 will be exactly those types.

Don't freak out that 3D will somehow compromise the quality of all your games, though; it's important to note these titles are not only being "retrofitted" to display in 3D, they're also the first games to get the treatment. As developers get experience at adapting older titles, and new games are built with the technology in mind, things will surely improve!

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They should release a PS3? or something that has a way better GPU to be able to handle 1080p+3D+AA on all games. Especially the lack of AA on PS3 games annoys me terribly much.

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They should release a PS3? or something that has a way better GPU to be able to handle 1080p+3D+AA on all games.

I don't think you're aware of the PC requirement of running Bad Company 2 in 3D at that resolution! It's a monster rig.

That and 10 YEAR CYCLE BRO. :laugh:

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They should release a PS3² or something that has a way better GPU to be able to handle 1080p+3D+AA on all games. Especially the lack of AA on PS3 games annoys me terribly much.

To be fair, aliasing is more annoying for PCs where you're much closer to the screen and can see finer details. Plus antialiasing won't help much for console games on HDTVs if the game you're playing is being upscaled to begin with.

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They should release a PS3? or something that has a way better GPU to be able to handle 1080p+3D+AA on all games. Especially the lack of AA on PS3 games annoys me terribly much.

YEAH! Because they're banking off the current PS3 and wanna re-release a partially new system that will be way too expensive for the average consumer!

Good luck :whistle:

/sarcasm

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YEAH! Because they're banking off the current PS3 and wanna re-release a partially new system that will be way too expensive for the average consumer!

Good luck :whistle:

/sarcasm

Well I know it's VERY unrealistic and I know we won't get consoles to do stuff like that for another X years, but in theory it would be pretty nice...

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It should be optional, like a "3D functionality" patch. 3D TV is a hopefully a passing fad.

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That was pretty much a given, as it basically have to display everything twice now - So can't blame them :)

Wasn't I saying this already way back when 3D on the PS3 was announced though, that except for games with simple graphics like redone classics such as Wipeout, they'd have to seriously dongrade the graphics to render twice as much and then some... yes it was. despite some people claiming the PS3 would magically be able to pull twice the horsepower :p

But yeah, pretty much as expected.

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I thought originally the PS3 was slated for dual 1080p HDMI output, which is essentially double.

It was also not originally slated to have a GPU....

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I thought originally the PS3 was slated for dual 1080p HDMI output, which is essentially double.

It also had 3 ethernet ports and 6 USB (Y)

Slightly offtopic, has anyone played WipeOutHD since the patch. I went to play it yesterday and it needed an update, downloaded that and it then killed the install coming up with corrupt data. Deleted that, downloaded the game again and now won't install at all......

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It was also not originally slated to have a GPU....

It was going to have 2 Cell BEs in unison but last minute they realised the Cell BE isn't practical for a GPU so they threw money at nVidia to fix their problem.

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I thought originally the PS3 was slated for...

It was originally slated to do pretty much everything. The whole thing was so unrealistic but they still managed to sell the final gimped version with an insane price tag. Then Kutaragi started talking about releasing a more expensive version...it's a good thing he was taken off as head of the division when he was :laugh:

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It was originally slated to do pretty much everything. The whole thing was so unrealistic but they still managed to sell the final gimped version with an insane price tag. Then Kutaragi started talking about releasing a more expensive version...it's a good thing he was taken off as head of the division when he was :laugh:

Good old Krazy Kutaragi, you just don't get the fun quotes these days.

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They said GT5 will have 3D support, I hope that this downgraded graphics talk doesn't apply there because thats the major selling point of that game! :blink:

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Nothing against Sony, but i honestly don't know how well this version of 3D will do, it gets disorientating enough watching a 2 hour movie in 3d; full on games in 3d using glasses and such will just be a pain.

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Nothing against Sony, but i honestly don't know how well this version of 3D will do, it gets disorientating enough watching a 2 hour movie in 3d; full on games in 3d using glasses and such will just be a pain.

Depends on the game... you won't see a lot of sandbox games that need sub-HD resolutions anyway, running @ 30fps as it is. Racing, sports, downloadable titles, that kind of stuff....

I've only personally seen SuperStardust HD and MLB 10, they both look really great. The MLB game actually makes a differnce while hitting, getting a sense of depth from the ball being pitched.

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im thinking that they will need a new engine paradigm to do higher performance 3d, to take advantage of the fact that your two 'eyes' in-game are always next to each other

i dont know, but maybe this can involve 'cheating' like how that Alice film does it, make everything look like cardboard cutouts, or maybe it could take advantage of something deeper like only doing the z-calculations once for both eyes and simply offset the filled polygons, so that you will get the correct seperation but the perspective is not 100% correct... or something

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im thinking that they will need a new engine paradigm to do higher performance 3d, to take advantage of the fact that your two 'eyes' in-game are always next to each other

i dont know, but maybe this can involve 'cheating' like how that Alice film does it, make everything look like cardboard cutouts, or maybe it could take advantage of something deeper like only doing the z-calculations once for both eyes and simply offset the filled polygons, so that you will get the correct seperation but the perspective is not 100% correct... or something

Doesn't work that way.

they can do that, using the zbuffer to kind of shift things. The problem is that the eye sees this, and there's the issue that when you move something without moving what's behind it, well then you're missing pieces of the picture. Not to mention it would work very poorly for a racing game that has a racaway that extends forward across the whole z depth.

Essentially one of two things will have to happen with GT5 for shutter glasses 3D

1: rendered at 60fps, but every second frame is rendered on the opposite eye. Will cause weird artifacting and probably induce headaches, as the two eyes never see the same frames ever.

2: render at 30 fps, but render each frame twice. once for each eye. no artifacting from jumping eyes between frames, and less headache and nausea inducing.

both of them suffer from overhead since they need to maintain 2 cameras with slightly different effects and such, so even so games that run anywhere near max of the console will need to be tuned down a bit.

If your set uses polarized glasses, it probably uses the interlace method in which case you're left with one alternative

render the game at 60 or 30 fps, but each eye only ever get half the vertical resolution. despite this the game may still need to be reduced to 30 fps, but can then avoid reducing graphics due to overhead somewhat since they save a few cycles on that. Also both eyes get the same frame at the same time. Despite the somewhat reduced quality from the interlacing this is probably least headache inducing. BUT it also suffers from a quality loss due to the interlacing. and TV sets that use the polarity mode need to be much brighter due to the reduction in light in the glasses. this can also reduce quality of colors and shades.

There is a problem with the last one though, while it theoretically is the best since it can display the same frame at the same time for both eyes. I'm not so sure the game engines and renderers in consoles are capable of actually doing that. and I suspect even in that case there will be a time difference between the left and right eye by one or rather .5 a frame. which can be very visible on fast moving things and games. Moreso the interlace method also suffers if you're close to the screen or it's a big screen and the game renders at 720 or less. objects that are close to the player/camera have a huge separation, and you will be able to actually see the interlacing.

What we need is a new generation of consoles, much more powerful, and a new type of 3D tv capable of displaying 2 full frames at once somehow sending each to a different eye without glasses or interlacing. kind of like what Philips was working on and had working prototypes of before they shut down the 3DTV department about one year ago after the economic crisis.

It'll actually be interesting to see how the 3DS does it, if it interlaces or actually shows 2 full frames at once. of course it's got a much easier job separating the frames since it's much closes to the eyes. so I suspect it might actually use full frames and a variant of the tech we saw on top gear to give a different picture on the GPS screen to the driver and passenger on that super luxury modified range rover.

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Doesn't work that way.

they can do that, using the zbuffer to kind of shift things. The problem is that the eye sees this, and there's the issue that when you move something without moving what's behind it, well then you're missing pieces of the picture. Not to mention it would work very poorly for a racing game that has a racaway that extends forward across the whole z depth.

it will have to work that way in order to give 60fps for both eyes using current gen consoles

rather than redrawing the scene completely twice, it draws it once but with lots of superflous z data which is normally erased and becomes these 'missing pieces of the picture' you talk about... then for each eye it just renders the textures from back to front, and the textures are merely shifted between eyes... this is for 'optimized' materials like foliage or other complex objects in the distance which we arent going to be able to make out the perspective anyway... plus the things which we can most definitely notice perspective in like roads and flat walls and stuff, they are usually the simplest to render so we can afford to render them twice to have a different perspective from each eye

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render the game at 60 or 30 fps, but each eye only ever get half the vertical resolution. despite this the game may still need to be reduced to 30 fps, but can then avoid reducing graphics due to overhead somewhat since they save a few cycles on that. Also both eyes get the same frame at the same time. Despite the somewhat reduced quality from the interlacing this is probably least headache inducing. BUT it also suffers from a quality loss due to the interlacing. and TV sets that use the polarity mode need to be much brighter due to the reduction in light in the glasses. this can also reduce quality of colors and shades.

There is a problem with the last one though, while it theoretically is the best since it can display the same frame at the same time for both eyes. I'm not so sure the game engines and renderers in consoles are capable of actually doing that. and I suspect even in that case there will be a time difference between the left and right eye by one or rather .5 a frame. which can be very visible on fast moving things and games. Moreso the interlace method also suffers if you're close to the screen or it's a big screen and the game renders at 720 or less. objects that are close to the player/camera have a huge separation, and you will be able to actually see the interlacing.

That's how it's done, essentially.

"We have a simple three-step implementation process for making games in 3D," says Ian Bickerstaff. "Step one is to create two images. The PS3 has two 1280x720 buffers, in a top/bottom arrangement, with a 30-pixel gap between them using for video timing purposes. It's the left eye image at the top and the right at the bottom."

"The images are automatically converted to HDMI 3D output at 59.94Hz but you can use any frame-rate you want as long as you synchronise to the vertical refresh. That's really important because frame-tearing looks really bad in 3D; the tear will be in one image and not the other, so it's much worse than normal frame tearing."

The current-generation consoles mostly operate at 30FPS already, often with v-sync disengaging when frame-rate drops below that in order to retain the most crisp response and the most fluid visual experience. The Sony team advocates that the game should be v-synced at all times - a stiff challenge bearing in mind that two images need to be created.

"Inevitably there are problems in achieving that performance, hardware upscaling is available and actually the good news is that upscaled 3D images look a lot better than upscaled 2D images," explains Bickerstaff.

"It's the way the brain perceives the world. But if you're going to do that, you need really good anti-aliasing. If in doubt, it's better to have low-resolution images with great anti-aliasing than higher-resolution images with a lot of scintillating pixels going on." With the setup in place for generating the two discrete images, it's time to begin the process of generating the stereoscopic 3D effect, and that begins with the introduction of depth to the scene.

"Step two is to apply the convergence to define the maximum depth of the image, the maximum positive parallax," Bickerstaff says. "It's a 2D X-axis translation in screen-space and we move the left image to the left and the right image to the right. For our games we've used a 1/30th screen width as the default parallax. You need to take care that all of this is applied to every element of your rendering pipeline. If you've got reflections in water - things like that - make sure the shift happens to all the elements. Reflections will need to be calculated for both eyes."

The final step is fairly straightforward.

"What we've got now is an image that is flat but has depth into the screen. Now we're ready for step three which is to apply the inter-axial, to move the cameras apart, to create the final 3D image."

This is a significant amount of additional computational work to add to a game. The impact on performance can be mitigated if the base engine itself is designed for 3D, but clearly all of the launch titles for the new range of displays are adapted from existed code. The question is, how did they do that? It's perhaps no mistake that two of the titles for the 3D launch originally ran with 1080p support, suggesting some pixel-processing overhead for the generation of two 720p images.

More: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-making-of-ps3-3d-article

Too bad I can't download the video from GDC, but that article sums everything up from the presentation.

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