Monday, June 11, 2007

Battle of the Upscalers - Playstation 3 VS Xbox 360

It seems like even upscaling is subject to qualitative differences, the Xbox 360 is clearly cleaning up images wherein the Playstation 3 seems to be bluring out the jagged edges.









Halo 2:





Final Fantasy 12:




Here they are 'stitched together',



Big thanks to Kamalot for this one (see comments).

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

It looks as if the upscaled picture of the ps3 is not a screenshot but a photo shot from the screen with a digital camera. I think maybe the camera was out of focus. Perhaps they didn't use the macro mode.

Ahmed said...

I've replaced the God of War 2 shot with an onscreen Final Fantasy 12 screenshot.

There are other examples, look here: http://www.ps3fanboy.com/2007/05/24/ps3-upscales-ps2-games-and-makes-them-look-fantastic-continued/

Anonymous said...

Can you make the PS3 shots be identical? The Xbox shots are easy to just toggle back and forth between them and pick out the differences. The PS3 shots are entirely different shots.

Also what is with the resolution on the PS3 shots? I'm pretty sure PS2 games manage better than 420x245 resolution...and it looks chunky even for that res--is that a detail of a higher-res shot? There's something funky with the Sony screenshots.

Unknown said...

Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 upscale older games. What does this mean? When a game from an older system is played on a newer system, the newer system's extra horsepower can be used to make the older game look better.

The Xbox 360 renders older games at a higher resolution, and then samples the edges of objects to make them look smoother. What you end up with is a High-definition version of your original Xbox game, looking clearer than before.

The PS3 plays PS2 games at their original resolution, and then stretches the image to fit on an HDTV. While stretching, it tries to soften the image. The result has fewer jaggy edges, yet loses a fair bit of detail creating a completely fuzzy version of the game. Since it isn't really rendered at a higher resolution, the final result is an image that is softer but less clear.

Unknown said...

Here is a closeup of your images, stitched together to make it easier to compare.

http://data.tumblr.com/3307192_500.jpg

maurice1705 said...

@kamalot:
completely true. the "upscaled" xbox games are probably better because of this approach but correct me if i am wrong but upscaling is not supported by all xbox games right?

Also: when you do BC on a 360 I heard it has to copy the whole game to the HDD of the 360 to be patched?

In the end these are just 2 different approaches. xbox probably has better upscalling but to be fair for sony: they upscale every game...

Anonymous said...

no, it doesn't copy the whole game at all.

Anonymous said...

The Xbox 360 does not copy the game to the hard drive and yes, it upscales all the backward compatible games...

Unknown said...

Xbox games always had better graphics than PS2 so they should look better. Better source better pic. also Ps3 approach is different because ps2 had no anti-aliasing so it would appear better for them to soften edges dont you think?

Ahmed said...

I don't see the lack of AA as an excuse, to me the end image quality is what matters.

Theres hardly an improvement in the upscaled ps2 image, some IGN editor noted that most people preferred to play their games on the native ps2 resolution rather than upscaling them.

Looking at the screenshots it isn't hard to understand.

I mean, we can say that the ps3 doesn't AA so it softens amongst other things but the simple fact is that the upscaled image isn't giving a marked improvement like the Xbox 360 does. Can this be blamed on the quality of ps2 games graphically? Perhaps it can, however regardless of that this is the end result.

maurice1705 said...

I seriously wonder how the 360 does BC. Does the game need to patched or something before it can run? Normally it's not really possible to alter things like AA on a final copy of the game...

@Ahmed: When you're sitting in frond of a HD screen and you use the ps3 upscaling + smoothing the image becomes a lot more "natural" to look at. It isn't as hard on the eyes as watching low res stuff on your monitor.

Ahmed said...

No, it doesn't need to be patched or anything, it runs on an emulator like all other compatible games. Just put the disk in and there you go.

The AA provided comes through a special chip on the Xbox 360, it adds 4x AA to the output image.

Perhaps it looks natural and all, but I'd hazzard to say the Xbox 360 does a better job of upscaling the image and making it much more natural.

maurice1705 said...

yeah off coarse 360 looks better but i am just saying that the upscalling the ps3 does is better then nothing and that it looks more natural then the original image...

Unknown said...

Owning both systems, and looking at them on my 1080P TV, The 360 games don't have more of an improvement over the PS3 games they both look fuzzy on an HDTV.