PlayStation 3 can scale after all
By Donald Melanson 
posted Jan 26th 2007 6:10PM
posted Jan 26th 2007 6:10PM
The PlayStation 3's hardware scaling capabilities (or lack thereof) have been a serious point of contention since word first got out of the console's potential shortcoming, which left owners of HDTVs of a certain resolution unable to use their sets to their fullest potential with the console in its current state and unsure they'd ever be able to do so. Well, it looks like Sony may have a few tricks up its sleeve, with Beyond3D reporting that the company's latest software development kit includes measures that game makers can take in order to implement "hardware accelerated horizontal scaling" in their titles, ensuring that they'll always look their best, even on 1080i sets. What's not so clear is what this means for all the current games that pump out less-than-desirable results when hooked up to the aforementioned HDTVs, with patches seemingly one option but no official word given on that possibility. Although you can bet that this won't be the last word we hear on the subject.[Via Joystiq]
Of course it can scale, who thought it couldn't?
I mean it was scaling from 720p down to 480p... so it can obviously go the other way. The problem is RAM, is there enough for both a 720p framebuffer (to render into) AND a 1080p framebuffer (to scale into, and output to the video HW from)?
The 360 avoids this problem by using an analog scaler chip ("Ana"). But it can get away with that because it doesn't have digital video output! The PS3 does, so it needs a digital solution.
Was it scaling from 720p to 480p or merely rendering at 480p? I suspect that every ps3 program has to render at certain baseline resolutions (Beyond3d hinted at it, iirc), and 720p and 480p are probably the only required ones at the moment.
I've been wondering what Sony was reserving the 7th cell spu for, and this is probably one of those things. Expect vertical scaling too after they've tweaked it some more.
wiki says that the 7th core is disabled to reduce failure rates. probabaly so they only have one defective die in a couple hundred thousand or so
you kno this is hillarious... PS3 can't even scale correctly and it doesn't have the proper ram for it... and the 7th chip will definately not be enough to scale it perfectly... if they don't have it right the first time then its not gonna be the best it could've been they should have made sure that it would work for all the popular HDTV resolutions... it just goes to show once again that Sony is ARROGANT... they do not listen to ppl and hurried their product so they could make money but not satisfy the general public
What I never understood is why the 360 and PS3 can't render games at the best possible resolution(720p with the 360 for example) and then downscale it to 480i or 480p if that is what the user selected. I'm 105% sure we'ld still see a huge increase in picture quality simply because the game is rendered at a higher resolution even though the display is only SD/ED