• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

Xbox 360 720p / 480p comparison

Wunderchu

Member
GameSpot wrote an Xbox 360 "Video Cable Comparison" here: http://www.gamespot.com/features/6139690/index.html , in which they compare various video cables, and also have comparisons of the output, including a 480p vs. 720p comparison;

480p7pj.jpg


720p.jpg


... the difference is significant, IMO

Fixed am cry
 
Wunderchu said:
GameSpot wrote an Xbox 360 "Video Cable Comparison" here: http://www.gamespot.com/features/6139690/index.html , in which they compare various video cables, and also have comparisons of the output, including a 480p vs. 720p comparison;

n48***.jpg


720p.jpg


... the difference is significant, IMO

Brief summary:

The color difference is due to them taking pictures of the component output off of a TV, and the VGA output from a PC monitor.

The TV, which is a Sony LCD RPTV I believe, has a crap scaler in it, and it's being fed a 480p signal and upconverting to 720p. That's where the jaggies come from.
 
This comparison is horse shit, and the person who went through all that to prove nothing except that Sony TVs have shit for scalers is an idiot...
 
Shompola said:
ohh shit he used an LCD that upscans everything he throws at it?

YEah, that's a stupid way to do that kind of comparison. They should compare 480p on a standard TV vs 720p on an HDTV.
 
Double scaling is likely at play here 360 renders the game at 720p or 600p or whatever, then the system scales it down to 480i/p. Then feed it to an LCD that then scales it back up!

Double scaling will certainly cause even more noticeable artifacts.

Kameo and PDZ use 480p frame buffers for SDTV. Using those in this example may not look as bad.
 
The article does say this...

The key message to take away from these pictures - use the right settings. Many HDTVs only run well at one resolution, their attempts to convert to other resolutions result in poor image quality, as demonstrated in these pictures.

So it does make it known that it's the TV causing such poor image quality....

Anyhow, in a personal experience, one difference I've personally seen between the VGA and the Component is well...more than one. Color, and clarity.

Component (@ 720p): More vivid colors but there is shimmering around the edges of small objects (ie. graphical Xbox controller buttons), almost like the sharpness is overdone causing the shimmering.

VGA (@ 720p): Colors aren't as vivid. Output is brighter with less contrast. Not as sharp, but can be adjusted using TV settings.

Both cables have some issues but it seems that it's easier to adjust the VGA's output to something I like.

Note that this is based off of using multiple monitors (HDTVs) each having Component and VGA inputs and running with the same color settings. And also through a scan converter which captures material directly to tape and not affected by any color settings on a TV. So it's not just the HDTVs it was tested on.

In Gun, using component just causes everything to look too dark..while it looks fine using VGA (again, tested on multiple monitors and a scan converter). Think developers are going to have to work on adjust the games color settings internally based on what cable is being used (which the X360 autodetects, so it should be able for the games to know). Guess the X360's output of VGA vs. yPbPr isn't exactly matching up with each other.
 
Those comparison pics are terrible. There's a huge difference when playing between 480p and 720p but you can barely tell those two shots apart.

Wouldn't any easier comparison just be to tell people to play any PC game in the last five years and try going from 640x480 to 1024x~~ and say "that somewhat close to the difference"?
 
Bebpo said:
Wouldn't any easier comparison just be to tell people to play any PC game in the last five years and try going from 640x480 to 1024x~~ and say "that somewhat close to the difference"?
Yeah, just boot up Quake 4 and take a couple screen captures...
 
I think with this comparison, they are trying to show the quality of the scaler. The xbox360 scales an image down from 720p to 480p. Running a pc game on two different resolutions will not have the exact same effect.
 
Lil' Dice said:
MAybe next he'll compare a black&white television running through composite cables to an HDTV set running VGA.....
They'll do that when the Revolution comes out...

next_gen.jpg
 
Top Bottom