Comment Re:All these Microsoft apologists... (Score 1) 181
I explained this to a friend today in this manner:
Microsoft's marketing says a lot of stuff that requires asterisks, then comes clean on those asterisks only in tech interviews. For example: MS says all 360 games support all HD output resolutions. The small print associated with that claim is that this is made possible by way of a dedicated scaler chip that decouples render resolution and output resolution. They've said this publicly, but most people not interested in the details of graphics rendering will not hear about it or care. What they're going to hear is that all 360 games support all resolutions.
At the end of the day, this is a net positive. People like your friend and I get to have a clean 1080p signal go to our TVs, and Developers get to optimize the resolution to whatever works best for them. In Epic's case, that's 720 horizontal scanlines. In Bungie's case, that's two framebuffers with 640 of them. When you get to consoles as opposed to PCs, the real benefit for developers is that they can optimize to the limits of the hardware in an absolute sense. Real tradeoffs make a huge amount of difference.
The unfortunate thing is that when MS sells things like this, whenever someone like you hears what they're doing behind the scenes it leaves a bad taste in your mouth because you feel misled. Really, what you've gotten is the layman summary of a fairly complicated technical message.
As a note: you point out that the Gears box and website advertise 1080. Notice that it says 1080i, not 1080p. This is precisely because when Gears was released the Xbox 360 scaler driver had not been updated to support 1080p. Now that it has, all games support 1080p and that's reflected on the boxes.
Microsoft's marketing says a lot of stuff that requires asterisks, then comes clean on those asterisks only in tech interviews. For example: MS says all 360 games support all HD output resolutions. The small print associated with that claim is that this is made possible by way of a dedicated scaler chip that decouples render resolution and output resolution. They've said this publicly, but most people not interested in the details of graphics rendering will not hear about it or care. What they're going to hear is that all 360 games support all resolutions.
At the end of the day, this is a net positive. People like your friend and I get to have a clean 1080p signal go to our TVs, and Developers get to optimize the resolution to whatever works best for them. In Epic's case, that's 720 horizontal scanlines. In Bungie's case, that's two framebuffers with 640 of them. When you get to consoles as opposed to PCs, the real benefit for developers is that they can optimize to the limits of the hardware in an absolute sense. Real tradeoffs make a huge amount of difference.
The unfortunate thing is that when MS sells things like this, whenever someone like you hears what they're doing behind the scenes it leaves a bad taste in your mouth because you feel misled. Really, what you've gotten is the layman summary of a fairly complicated technical message.
As a note: you point out that the Gears box and website advertise 1080. Notice that it says 1080i, not 1080p. This is precisely because when Gears was released the Xbox 360 scaler driver had not been updated to support 1080p. Now that it has, all games support 1080p and that's reflected on the boxes.
