IGN: Do Gamers really need HDTV?
By Matt Burns 
posted May 15th 2006 9:21AM
posted May 15th 2006 9:21AM
This is a question that we are visiting a bit these days, well with E3 and all. High definition is great for video and television but is it a necessity for games? IGN has laid out 4 pages outlining their take on the matter. They follow the same line of thought that we have had for sometime and is a great read. Even Nintendo's CEO thinks high-def is good and all, but there are more important things then pretty graphics. (yes, we know the Wii doesn't do high-def so he would say something like that.) If you are even a causal gamer you might want to check this out.
While I agree with Gamespy on the matter of a wider field of view, and a greater "depth" of view I still wonder. By forcing companies to meet High Def standards have Microsoft and Sony limited or "bottle capped" there systems again?
Here with this new gen devs have been given more tools, power, and resources. Stuff they've always wanted. Only to find them swallowed up by enabling HD.
A simple example can be seen in the GPU processing. The Xbox 360 has a 3.5 times broader bandwidth than the original Xbox, 720p pixels require a 3 times broader memory bandwidth. It leaves only 0.5 times headroom which is insufficient for multiple texture lookups by complex shaders.
Another, since PS3 doesn't support FP10-32bit buffer, if FP16-64bit HDR is used it requires twice the bandwidth of Xbox 360 but PS3 doesn't have eDRAM like Xbox 360 to mitigate the impact.
So you see where Im coming from? WIth respect to new found power, much of it is going to waste. I like the good ole days, back when Mario 64 defined what a game should be, and when Final Fantasy was a good series.
But thats just my two cents.
IMHO in ourdays hardware can't provide high def games, due to it's limit. Maybe in future (2010 or later) there will be games with reall HDTV, but it's only fake now
Wii will indeed do hi-def (720p at least), they are just not aligning themselves with either HD-DVD nor BluRay (yet).
Armen Nintendo has been saying the opposite of that forever, do you have a source link?
If you had a PC that would play games at 1200p on a sub $1000 23" LCD display would you even dream of playing a console? 1 year from now most PC's will be able to play games at very high res with full eye candy and with the ease at which one can hook PC to a tv..... 720p on an xbox looks like crap on my 37" LCD compared to my HTPC pixel mapped.
I just hosted 4 Xbox Halo event last weekend. None of the guys who brought Xboxes had the high def cables (even the ones with HDTVs at home).
High def sure would have come in handy on all of our displays. When you only get one fourth of the screen (in multiplayer mode) and that screen is only 4:3 480i, every pixel counts. The higher pixels counts and wider aspect ratios make multiplayer gaming a lot more fun.